John offered the following critique of multiverse theories and he gave me permission to post it. I will give all of you time to think it over and comment if you wish. In a day or two I'll submit my response to him and his response to me and perhaps we can keep the conversation going.

Thesis: Multiverse theories do not explain the fine tuning of our universe.

Defense:

1)      Suppose at first that our universe, U₀, has only one finely tuned constant, κ. That is, the value of κ in U₀ lies in a small range of values, R, that permit intelligent life to exist in U₀.

2)      Suppose also that U₀ is only one of many extant universes, U_i, in which the values of κ_i can range over all real numbers. That is, a multiverse exists.

3)      Since the universes of the multiverse are countable, their cardinality is the countable infinity, א₀.

4)      The upper bound of κ_i values in any multiverse is no less than the cardinality of real numbers, א₁.

5)      As Cantor showed long ago, א₁ >> א₀.

6)      Therefore, a multiverse can never contain all possible values of κ_i.

Discussion:

Multiverse theories contain, as a standard feature, the implicit assumption that values of κ will be randomly selected from all possible real values and distributed among the universes. The U₀ value of κ “must” somehow appear in one of the universes. This is an unwarranted belief. The probability that a multiverse contains U₀ is not 1 but zero (א₀/א₁, with apologies to mathematical purists).

True enough, א₀ universes may contain as many as א₀ values of κ, but it is crucial to specify which values. The set of all integers is a countable infinity but it has א₀ gaps (ranges like 0 to 1, etc.) in it, each with א₁ missing values of κ. All multiverse theories necessarily have such gaps. Therefore, to explain the fine tuning of κ, a multiverse theory must be able to show that R is a likely range of values of κ in some universe (which will then be presumed to be U₀). Thus, even a countable infinity of universes cannot, by itself, explain the fine tuning of κ.

Additionally, there are many more than one “fine tuned” quantities in U₀. Consequently, it is incumbent on proponents of multiverse explanations to show that their choice of multiverse actually generates values of each κ in its proper R and that at least one of the universes of the multiverse has all κ values in the proper U₀ ranges. Although I do not know this cannot be done, I very much doubt it can. Anyone undertaking such a project is to be commended; advancing a serious multiverse theory will be a prodigious undertaking. In fact, multiverse theories need to be theories of everything.

Meyer justifies the linkage between functional information and intelligence by citing a wealth of examples where we know such information requires an intelligent agent. His inductive argument relies solely on examples of human-designed systems such as language and computer programs. He then assumes without justification that this necessary linkage between information and intelligence can be extended from the human design realm to the biological realm. Yet he offers no indication of how and why functional information is connected to intelligence and no rationale for the universality of such linkage. This is a critical missing step in Meyer’s logic that needs to be supplied before his conclusion can be credibly considered.

I would suggest that one possible linkage between functional information and intelligence is abstract reasoning. Whenever functionality of information is determined by abstract relationships, then intelligence is indeed necessarily involved. However, when functionality is determined by physical relationships instead of abstract relationships, then no conclusion can be made about intelligence. In the case of biological systems, functional information of DNA is determined by the survival and ability to reproduce of the organism. This is a physical and not an abstract relationship. Thus it would seem that the connection between functional information and intelligence cannot be extended to the biological realm.

Meyer justifies the linkage between functional information and intelligence by citing a wealth of examples where we know such information requires an intelligent agent. His inductive argument relies solely on examples of human-designed systems such as language and computer programs. He then assumes without justification that this necessary linkage between information and intelligence can be extended from the human design realm to the biological realm. Yet he offers no indication of how and why functional information is connected to intelligence and no rationale for the universality of such linkage. This is a critical missing step in Meyer’s logic that needs to be supplied before his conclusion can be credibly considered.

I would suggest that one possible linkage between functional information and intelligence is abstract reasoning. Whenever functionality of information is determined by abstract relationships, then intelligence is indeed necessarily involved. However, when functionality is determined by physical relationships instead of abstract relationships, then no conclusion can be made about intelligence. In the case of biological systems, functional information of DNA is determined by the survival and ability to reproduce of the organism. This is a physical and not an abstract relationship. Thus it would seem that the connection between functional information and intelligence cannot be extended to the biological realm.

As I have indicated in a previous post of this series, the primary, pervasive scientific critique of theistic evolution in this book is the dominant argument for ID from information. It says that evolution cannot be the cause of the generation of new information like that in the genetic code and that it has been shown that an intelligent mind can and must generate such information. The basis for this statement is the assertion frequently made in lectures, videos and books by Steve Meyer and other advocates of Intelligent Design that “all our experience shows that information can only be generated by an intelligent mind.” Applying this principle to biological systems means that the genetic code could only have been generated by an intelligent mind. Hence, evolution is not valid and ID is.

Let’s take a closer look at that assertion. First of all, it is an inductive argument which means that it could be falsified by any counterexample. Inductive arguments also need some rationale for extending the inference beyond the scope of the known examples. Secondly, it is important to understand the definition of the term “information” as used in this sentence. It is not the same as the term “information” used by scientists in information theory. It is not the same as “Shannon information” used by communications engineers. Rather it is known as “functional information” also referred to as “complex specified information” or “algorithmic specified complexity.” This specific type of information is meaningful information referring only to information that has the appropriate meaning.

As an example of functional information, consider the sentence in the assertion itself. It is composed of 63 letters and 13 spaces and a period. As printed above, this sentence has relevant meaning and is therefore functional. If these letters and spaces are randomly scrambled, the result would be gibberish and the information is no longer functional. What is the probability that continued attempts at random scrambling would eventually lead to a meaningful sentence, and this assertion in particular? Zero, or so close that it is essentially zero. In scientific terms, there is still information in the gibberish, it just doesn’t have meaning. In functional information, there is no information in gibberish, only in the desired sentence or any sequence that bears the same meaning. Only an intelligent mind with a knowledge of English could construct such a sequence in a practical timeframe.

Meyer then cites numerous examples from language, phone numbers, software, engineering designs, etc. to show that each of these requires an intelligent mind to achieve functional information. He then asserts through inductive logic that this requirement of an intelligent mind is a requisite for all types of functional information. Since the genetic code is clearly an example of functional information in a genome, then he says an intelligent mind must have been involved in establishing that code. However, he does not articulate the basis for a connection between intelligence and functional information.

My observation is that in the biological realm, there are ubiquitous examples of the generation of new functional information without the involvement of an intelligent mind. Every act of reproduction involves the rearrangement or modification, whether through sexual crossover or mutations, of the genetic base pairs in the genome. In all cases, this amounts to new functional information whether infinitesimally new or significantly different. The only intelligence that might be observed is that from mate selection in higher organisms but no direct modification, notwithstanding the current promise of such gene-editing ability in the future. Specific examples of new information in biology are provided in the informative series of 14 blog-posts by Dennis Venema. Every event of reproduction therefore seems to be a counterexample that falsifies the inductive logic of the assertion that all functional information requires an intelligent mind.

My proposal is that functional information is connected to intelligence through abstract relationships in the determination of functionality. One of the most important defining hallmarks of intelligence is the ability for abstract reasoning. Therefore, whenever the criterion for functionality involves an abstract relationship, intelligence is necessarily involved. This applies to all of the experiences to which Meyer and other advocates appeal. However, biological systems do not require any abstract relationship for determining what information is functional. The criterion for functionality of any organism is to survive and be successful in reproduction. This is an existential criterion and no abstract relationship is involved. It cannot therefore be inferred that intelligence is required for biological functional information.

To repeat this conclusion in different terms, it is the determination of functionality that indicates whether or not intelligence is required. If information is determined to be functional or not through an abstract relationship, then intelligence is required. If no abstract connection is needed to determine functionality, then it cannot be asserted that an intelligent mind must have been involved, though it might have been.

My conclusion is that the fundamental principle of the Intelligent Design paradigm is unpersuasive. No compelling evidence has been brought forward that nature cannot generate new functional information like the genetic code nor that intelligent minds were required to do so. The ID philosophy has not been shown to be a viable scientific perspective to be considered alongside the theory of evolution.

Much has been written to show the fallacies of this line of argument. The point I wish to emphasize in this post is the importance of feedback in thinking about probabilities. I have previously pointed out in a post on January 7, 2018 and in a letter to the editor in March 2012, the error in using combinations to derive probabilities. Evolution is a gradual process of change involving a high degree of parallelism and many steps, as I have shown in my review of the book Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. Perhaps the most important element is that of feedback. It is not just the existence of many steps in evolution, but the role of feedback at each step. Survival to procreate is the crucial feedback factor that distinguishes any population of organisms or molecules. That is a feedback mechanism that provides active real-time information about the direction for evolution.

The importance of feedback has been shown mathematically by Herbert S. Wilf and Warren J. Ewens in their article “There’s plenty of time for evolution” in PNAS, December 28, 2010, vol. 107, no. 52, pp 22454–22456. They conclude that while combination-based probabilities scale exponentially, if there is any feedback those probabilities scale logarithmically. That is, for N elements, each selected from x possible values, the number of combinations scales as 1 in x^N. However, with feedback at each step, the probability of success scales proportionally to 1 in x log(N). That is a very large difference. But their math isn’t easy to follow. A good way to illustrate the importance of feedback is to consider a familiar game.

The game of Mastermind, or any of the many variations of it, demonstrates the tremendous impact of feedback. In the game, two players each secretly select a short sequence of elements such as colors, numbers, letters, or words. Then the other player is challenged to guess that selection. For instance, one player may select the number 53882. The other player has a 1 in 100,000 chance of guessing it at random. This is equivalent to the scenarios that Yockey, Hoyle, and others would calculate. If this were the approach used in the game, both players would tire and starve long before the game was over. However, the game becomes interesting when some feedback is introduced. At each guess, the first player responds with some elementary feedback about the guess. Depending on the specific rules being used, it may be how many digits are correct, whether they are in the right position, or even which ones are correct, etc. With this feedback, the second player can usually guess the answer in about ten or fewer guesses. This makes the game challenging and interesting and possible. The probability drops from 1 in 100,000 to nearly 1 that the answer will be obtained.

In evolution, the feedback in each generation is the determination of which subset of the population will be the source of procreation for the subsequent generation. Unlike Mastermind, no intelligent being is required to make this determination. It includes all the individuals of that species that survive in the current environment and are able to reproduce. On average, this will tend to include a disproportionate number of those most likely to survive in a slowly changing environment. With a large amount of parallelism and continual feedback, the probability of attaining the combination of molecules necessary for life is very high.

At the turn of the century the tide began to change. The discovery of radioactivity opened the door to solving both major dilemmas. It provided the source of heat that Lord Kelvin needed to realize that the earth was indeed very old, in the billions of years. Radioactivity was also the key to determining the age of the fossils. Amazingly, the story told by the fossils fit dramatically into Darwin’s proposal. In addition, the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics gave credence to the crucial role of inherited traits. In another half-century, the discovery of DNA added a major corroboration to Darwin’s theory. In yet another half-century, the ability to sequence genomes provided the icing on the cake, permitting extraordinarily detailed confirmation of common ancestry. There could be no further doubt.

Or could there be? The authors of this book present two arguments that they believe nullify the firm conviction of nearly all biologists. They are so confident in the strength of their arguments that they claim evolution is not even sufficiently viable for anyone to consider integrating it with Christianity. The two arguments are

1.       There are observations that cannot be explained by common descent

2.       The alternative explanation of common design is a superior claim

I will discuss only two of the types of observations they present as being contradictory to common descent. The first is the inconsistent pattern of hybridization found in nature. They list page after page of details of families and genera in which some species hybridize and others don’t. Their point is simply that if common descent were true, then all species within a family or genus would either all hybridize or all not-hybridize. What they fail to recognize is that the ability for species to hybridize depends on more variables than the proximity of their common ancestor. Both environmental factors and the specific types of differences underlying their differentiation have a great bearing on the ability to hybridize. In other words, while it is true that a near common ancestor would increase the likelihood of the ability for two species to hybridize, other factors come into play that prevent these observations from nullifying common descent.

The second type of observation they present is the occasional lack of orthologous genes. Orthologous genes encode for the same function in different species and are almost identical. Consistent with common descent, there are only a few differences in the genetic sequence of these orthologous genes due to a slightly different history of mutations. I recall hearing Paul Nelson’s talk at the ASA 2012 meeting at Pt Loma, CA. He described genes in certain species that had no orthologous gene in an ancestral or closely-related species. His point was that if common descent were true, all genes should have orthologous forms in closely-related species. The frequency of these “orphan” genes without an orthologous gene in closely related species, however, was very low, less than 1%. I later learned from my biologist friends that even today’s highly sophisticated sequencing technology can only detect with ease about 90% of an arbitrary genome of a species. The remaining 10% or so are extremely difficult to find and are generally not worth the trouble or the cost. A missing gene in a species could well be part of the remaining 10%. Consequently, an inability to identify a small number of orthologous genes in closely-related species is not a fatal contradiction of common descent.

Other types of examples are offered but, like these two, are the result of a misinterpretation of the scientific data. Many of the issues relate to familiar claims of missing links, sudden appearance of species, rapid extinctions, or a too rapid pace of evolution. Not one of these issues represents a fundamental contradiction of evolution but rather is within the range of complexities being explored within the realm of evolution.

The second main argument presented in the book is that common design is an alternative and superior explanation for all the observations. Simply put, the theory of common design says that any similarity between species is the result of a common designer who uses a common building block to design various species. Any differences between those species is the result of that common designer recognizing the different functional needs that those species may have. Voila, all observations have been explained. Similarly, the large number of pseudogenes are predicted to have some residual value for their organism, thus explaining their existence by a yet-to-be discovered functionality. For example, the defective gene for vitamin C in primates is imagined to have some unknown function, presumably more necessary than making vitamin C.

In a later post we will explore one of the philosophical problems associated with the assertion of a common designer. Here we comment on the scientific description itself. First of all, the common designer concept is not falsifiable. A similarity and a difference between two organisms are equally “explained” by the proposed existence of a common designer, which has not been observed. No evidence could render the explanation to be false. Secondly, the hypothesis provides no basis for understanding under what conditions there are similarities and when there might be differences. The only vague rationalization is that the alleged “common designer” knew it was better to have a similarity or a difference. Finally, the assertion of a common designer is best called “creation with the appearance of common descent.” Like the concept of “creation with the appearance of age” in the young-earth claims, it cannot be scientifically or logically disproved definitively but is neither theologically nor pragmatically defensible.

The first claim is sometimes called the “Law of Conservation of Information” which can be simply summarized as “new information can only be created by an intelligent agent.” The ubiquitous increase in complexity and information observed in the biosphere is therefore evidence that evolution is an inadequate explanation of nature and that there must be an intelligent agent that we as Christians worship as our God.

Very simply, there is no such universal law. It is an invention of the ID community to extend the concept to biology and is repeated often enough to become familiar to many. In their book An Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, which I reviewed in the June 2017 issue of PSCF, Marks, et. al., trace the origin of this so-called law to Lady Asa Lovelace. She worked closely with Charles Babbage on mechanical computational machines and pondered the ability of machines to behave like humans. In the ensuing years, there have been many debates about whether artificial intelligence really exists and whether computer simulations can truly generate new information. Those who argue that computers cannot do so have coined the term “law of conservation of information” to lend credence to the argument. I do not wish to argue in this post whether or not computer simulations truly generate new information without it being inserted by intelligent agents. I believe it depends considerably on the precise definition of information being used. My main concern is to point out that whatever merit it may have in computer simulations or in artificial intelligence, it is not a universal law and there is no basis for extending it elsewhere, particularly to biology.

It must be pointed out that the definition of information used by the ID community is very different from that used in the scientific discipline of Information Theory. Marks, et. al., make this point very clearly. They reject the physical view of information as defined by Claude Shannon and Rolf Landauer and other pioneers of information theory, claiming it is of no interest to them. Rather they only want to focus on the meaning of information, which was explicitly excluded by Claude Shannon. This resonates with the general public who think of information more as who won the Super Bowl or what’s on sale at Walmart than the physical basis of information. The meaning of information is contextual and cannot be quantified. Therefore, it cannot be addressed scientifically in the same way as physical information..

An example of physical information would be the material shape of a letter of the alphabet, whether the distribution of ink on paper or a trace in the sand. Another example would be any sequence of letters or numbers. The number of ways in which letters of the alphabet can be arranged in, say, five letter words, can easily be quantified. In contrast, the meaning of the shape of a letter of the alphabet or of a sequence of five letters cannot be expressed as an equation or some universal criterion. It is not a physical entity but an abstract relationship.

Interestingly, meaning can also refer to a physical function as well as an abstract relationship. Specifically in biology, the meaning of a DNA sequence and the protein for which it encodes can be a specific necessary biochemical reaction. Even though the meaning is a physical process, it cannot be quantified since the need for a particular reaction is dependent on the environment, on the biochemical reactions leading from the DNA to the protein, and on the survival needs of the larger organism in which it exists.

Steve Meyer is well known for popularizing the law of conservation of information with a simple assertion. He often repeats some variation of this theme: “All our experience is that information is generated only by an intelligent source. Thus biological information can only come from an intelligent designer.” To illustrate his point, he cites in some depth a variety of examples such as language, computer software, telephone numbers, engineering marvels, etc.

This striking example of inductive reasoning would normally be rejected by the ubiquitous observation of information being generated without an intelligent agent, just as the 1697 discovery of a black swan falsified the inductive expectation that all swans were white. Dennis Venema has amply provided numerous such examples in his 14-part series at this BioLogos site, and we can all observe it in every reproductive event in the biosphere. But no, the position of Meyer and colleagues is that all these examples are not truly “new” or are inadequate to account for macroevolution or simply show that there must have been an intelligent designer to generate all this information. In my opinion, this is circular reasoning to the extreme.

To make a credible case, Meyer should have analyzed the examples he offered in an effort to understand just why the examples he cites require intelligent sources and whether those requirements exist in the realm of biology. I have personally asked him to do that but he has not done so. I would suggest that the reasons why his proffered examples require intelligent sources is that they are all instances of human-designed systems. All of them involve abstract relationships in some form for either the formation, operation, or verification of the system. Since abstract reasoning is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, it follows that each of those systems requires intelligence. In sharp contrast, no abstract relationship has been detected in the biosphere. All activity involves some kind of biochemical reactivity. Some would counter that the genetic code is an abstract relationship but it is only our human description of that code that is abstract. The actual nucleosomes, amino acids, ribosomes, etc. perform their physical activity without involving any abstraction in formation or operation. Even the verification, meaning the effectiveness of enabling survival of the organism, is physical. No abstract relationship is required. Hence, Meyer’s appeal to “all our experience” cannot be extended to biological information.

Virtually the entire book, from the supposed scientific critique to the philosophical and theological critiques based on it, depends on this fundamentally flawed claim that new information requires an intelligent agent. Without it, the critique of theistic evolution fails.

The Mennonites are named after Menno Simons, the Reformationist who in 1539 published the Dutch-language Dat Fundament des Christelyckens Leers. Those who followed him and other Anabaptist writers moved from Switzerland to Netherlands in the 16^th century but their uneasy relationships with the Dutch led to a migration to Prussia in the 17^th century. In the 18^th century, Catherine the Great lured a large number of these Prussian Mennonites to South Russia, now Ukraine, to develop agriculture there. The Mennonites flourished in Russia where they were granted official status as “foreign colonies” that exempted them from the Russian government system and its policies such as military conscription.

In 1812, Klaas Reimer founded a sub-group called the Kleine Gemeinde, which translates to “Small Congregation.” My heritage comes from this community. They developed an agrarian, religious and family based social structure that thrived in that region. There were several splinter groups that formed within that community and it endured a major schism in 1866. Then in the early 1870’s, Russia eliminated the “foreign colony” exception and forced the Mennonites to conform to Russian government. That radical shift, together with a shortage of farmland for growth, prompted the great emigration of the Kleine Gemeinde to North America in 1874. Over a thousand members of this community emigrated that year, part of the total of 16,000 Russian Mennonites who emigrated in that decade, diminishing the Mennonite population there by one third.

The approximately 166 families of the Kleine Gemeinde split into two groups in response to the conflicting recommendations of their advance scouts. The larger group of 110 families went to Manitoba and soon founded the city of Steinbach. The smaller group of about 56 families, including my ancestors, settled in Nebraska, near Fairbury. For thirty years, the Nebraskan community grew and prospered but eventually became landlocked. The critical heritage of giving each child an equal amount of land, coupled with a tradition of large families, inevitably led to a shortage of land. A group of about 36 families, approximately a fourth of the Nebraska colony, elected to move to Meade, Kansas, in 1906. My grandparents were part of that group and that is where I grew up.

The Meade Mennonite community endured droughts and severe winters and the Dust Bowl to become a well-established community. It exists today but not in its once-dominant agrarian economy. Much of the sod that was broken to become farmland has now returned to its prairie status. The absence of an underground aquifer for irrigation and the lack of oil or gas reserves underground disadvantaged its economic health. Today there are still scattered farms and the community exists with two Mennonite churches but the society is far more integrated into the broader Meade community and the global economy than it was throughout the first half of the 20^th century.

What struck me is the long history of ultimately futile efforts to preserve both social structures and religious cohesiveness. Economic realities and market forces inevitably forced changes in family and social structures. And faith commitments could not prevent the frequent splintering of groups based on differing emphases on matters such as baptism by immersion, acceptance of religious experience, and focus on pietism. Other branches of Mennonites such as the Amish and the Old Order Mennonites have been more successful in preserving historic social structures but the effort and the cost of doing so is evident to all. On the other hand, the Kleine Gemeinde in Meade essentially disintegrated in a schism in the early 1940’s, leaving a somewhat independent group of Mennonites that is gradually blending into the broader evangelical community.

For me, this story highlights one of my own personal conflicts between science and religion. Forget the issues of origins and evolution. The issue of epistemology is what strikes me as the core conflict. The history of my people illustrates the divergence that is seemingly inherent in religion. No matter how focused a group may be on preserving a community of faith, differences arise and lead to splinter groups. There seems to be no epistemology that leads to a convergence of ideas. All new groups seem to thrive or break into a series of subgroups. In contrast, science has a workable, though far from perfect, methodology for resolving differences. Though with some erratic directions, science tends to be convergent with most groups coming to agreement as the data mount. Occasionally, fringe groups hang on for a long time, but the mainstream scientific community moves to convergence. This makes it hard to integrate science and religion without also separating them from each other. It is futile to closely connect science to any one particular religious position. But the alternative is to distance science from all of those positions or at least integrating science with such a high level, general theology that conflict exists only where the religious position dictates a particular scientific claim. This, I submit, is for me the real conflict.

The term “front-end loading” is shorthand for the concept that all the influence God needs to carry out his creative intent is to establish the necessary conditions at the very beginning and let the laws of nature do the rest over time. Such a concept leads us to the precipice of deism in which God is no longer involved or necessary after the beginning. Meyer seeks to connect Lamoureux’s version of theistic evolution with deism and aims to discount theistic evolution by showing the failure of front-end loading.

In my opinion, the charge is misdirected. As I understand it, deism attributes autonomy to the laws of nature so that once created they exist and operate throughout time without God. Lamoureux never asserts anything of the sort. For him the laws of nature are our understanding of the consistency of God’s action as he sustains the universe at every moment. In other words, from a theological perspective, the laws of nature are descriptive and not prescriptive, describing how God acts rather than autonomously determining what happens. From a scientific perspective, the laws of nature appear prescriptive because they reflect a reliable cause and effect pattern so that given a known cause, the effect can be predicted.

Front-end loading does not demand deism but it is connected with our view of teleology. Our universe is not deterministic. Neither classical nor quantum mechanics compels us to a deterministic universe. This means that there is insufficient information at the Big Bang to specify the details of the universe nearly fourteen billion years later. The high degree of contingency in the evolution of planets, stars, and galaxies as well as in biological evolution ensures that no specific configuration can be mandated in advance. However, the possibility space explored by the expression of the laws of nature is vast and the existence of some life-friendly planets and some form of life may be highly probable, though we do not know for certain. A dilemma arises from the theological perspective that God from the beginning had us humans in mind in great specificity. Such a high level of detail cannot be specified in a front-end loaded system. This is the direction Meyer takes in rejecting front-end loading as well as theistic evolution.

However, front-end loading does set the stage for the evolution of a grand universe in which some form of sentient life is highly likely. Chris Barrigar, in Chapter 2 of his book, Freedom All The Way Up: God and the Meaning of Life in a Scientific Age (Victoria, BC: Friesen, 2017), takes this approach. He argues that God’s desire is to create a universe which would have a high probability of leading to beings capable of reciprocal agape love. One could also contend that God has infinite foreknowledge and knew what forms of life would be forthcoming from a front-end loaded universe.

In summary, the issue of front-end loading is not a deistic issue but deals with the way in which God carries out his purposes. This is the same issue I discussed in the previous post “Directed or Undirected.” Both theistic evolutionists and their critics in this book believe that God created the universe and that his purpose is to establish a loving, redemptive relationship with human beings. The difference seems to lie in the level of specificity of God’s intent and the manner in which God can carry out his purposes. Theistic evolutionists are convinced that God can carry out his purposes, whatever they may be, through actions consistent with the laws of nature. We may not fully understand or know the details of God’s purposes or how they are fulfilled but we have faith that they are. For the critic, God can only fulfill his purposes by acting in ways that are not consistent with the laws of nature. Such deviation need only be in skewing the probabilities of phenomena and we do not know just how God might take such action.

Ultimately, Meyer’s claims in this chapter fail on two counts, in my opinion. One is the erroneous charge that theistic evolutionists, or at least some of them, are deistic because of a front-end loaded emphasis. The other is the insistence that since sufficient information cannot exist at the beginning of the universe to determine the fulfillment of God’s intent over time, then God must intervene in the laws of nature to achieve his purposes.

I will return to Meyer’s claim in future posts but in this one I will focus only on the issue of computer models. Ewert discusses several simulations, including Dawkins’s Weasel, Ev, Steiner Trees, and Avida, with additional allusions to Tierra and Stylus. His main point is that each of these models involves teleological fine-tuning which requires intelligence and therefore none of them is a valid demonstration of the creation of information through evolution without intelligence. Therefore, he claims, the ID prediction that information cannot be generated without intelligence has not been falsified but has been confirmed.

Computer simulations are admittedly not the best or the easiest way to falsify Meyer’s claim. That has been done repeatedly and convincingly in biology, most notably by Dennis Venema in his series at this link. ID advocates retort that this simply demonstrates the ubiquitous influence of an intelligent designer. That, however, requires independent evidence of an intelligent designer which has not yet been done. All computer simulations require intelligence. By definition, they are a representation of nature and those representations are abstract models of nature. All abstract relationships require intelligence. The question then becomes one of just what aspects of the simulation involve intelligence. Ewert focuses on teleological fine-tuning and shows that each simulation involves that type of intelligence.

Teleological fine-tuning refers to the action or information that must be supplied to achieve a particular solution. This is a familiar problem in many activities. The most common analogy is that of dealing cards where a lack of a desired solution permits any arbitrary result. But if a particular target selection of cards is desired, success cannot be achieved without some information about the target influencing the process of dealing the cards, typically called cheating. The same is true of evolution which is inherently highly contingent. Any particular a priori target cannot be met with reasonable probability without information about that target affecting the contingencies. The essence of ID is that the current biosphere, particularly H sapiens, is a teleological goal and evolution cannot meet that goal without information about that goal influencing the mutation events. Such influence could only be done by an intelligent agent. On the other hand, evolutionists say that nature knows no such goal and that any solution that leads to survival will be selected at each generation. Any arbitrary solution will work and the need for intelligence is thus averted.

In summary, the real issue is whether the teleological fine-tuning in the computer simulations is a reflection of real evolution in nature or an artifact required for simulation. Ewert claims the former and I would suggest it is the latter. Furthermore, the ID prediction is amply falsified from biological observations. The issue of teleology in evolution is an important one that will be discussed in a number of future posts, such as the next one.

In his introduction to the book, Stephen Meyer includes this note:

We should make clear, in introducing his chapter, that Tour does not regard himself as a partisan to the debate over theistic evolution, one way or another. He has, nevertheless, kindly given us permission to publish an abridged version of a previously published essay in order to make more widely known the scientific problems associated with chemical evolutionary theory—in particular, its lack of any demonstrated mechanism for generating the molecular machinery necessary to the first life. (p. 51)

In my opinion, this disclaimer should have been repeated in the chapter itself and not just buried in the general introduction. In any case, Tour has allowed his essay to be used as an argument in this book. His view that there is no known mechanism for the origin of life is well known and, as far as I know, has universal agreement in the scientific community.

The quest to understand the origin of life, aka chemical evolution, is an unrelenting search for knowledge which most scientists agree may never be fully satisfied. At most, say active researchers in the field of origin of life, we might be able to discern a possible way in which life could have arisen.

The lack of a scientific explanation for chemical evolution is often raised in debates about biological evolution. Many times during a discussion of biological evolution, a critic will cry out “But where did the first organism come from?” And since there is no scientific answer, the scientific part of the debate is over. I would suggest that the lack of a scientific solution to the problem of chemical evolution has no bearing on the validity of the theory of evolution. Darwin’s concluding sentence in The Origin of Species clarifies his starting point:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

In editions 2 through 6 he inserted the words “by the Creator” after “breathed” though later he expressed regret at having used the term Creator. Nevertheless, his starting point is clear. His theory starts with the existence of one or a few initial life forms, and presumably a large population of that form. That is, the theory of evolution is independent of how those initial life forms came to be. Biological evolution is independent of chemical evolution. Theistic evolution deals with the biological theory of evolution and the presence of Chapter 4 in this book is somewhat of an anomaly.

The question of the origin of life does raise an important metaphysical issue. The key issue is the implication of the lack of a scientific explanation. There are generally three possibilities for the absence of a scientific explanation:

1.       More time and research is necessary to obtain the solution

2.       The solution cannot be attained because the necessary information is forever lost

3.       The solution does not exist because there was a unique cause and effect which cannot be repeated (e.g., a miracle)

It is not unusual for people to quickly assume a miracle when no scientific solution is at hand. Unfortunately, one cannot distinguish among the above three possibilities scientifically until a solution is found which affirms that the answer had been the first one. No scientific information can be obtained to distinguish between #2 or #3. For this reason, the current lack of a scientific explanation for the origin of life does not enable us to determine which of these three possibilities is correct. A discussion of chemical evolution is of little value in a debate on biological evolution. Debates may flourish about whether or not a scientific solution is possible but they cannot be settled scientifically unless and until such a solution is found.

To assess the creative power of evolution, the authors ask, in effect, “What is the probability that random mutations, as proposed by the theory of evolution, could account for the existence of all the biomolecules, such as proteins, that are necessary for life?” In chapter 3, Matti Leisola writes: “Twenty amino acids are the building blocks of the proteins present in all living organisms, from bacteria to humans. The average protein is about 300 amino acids in length, more precisely, 267 for bacterial and 361 for eukaryotic proteins. These 300 amino acids can be ordered in 20³⁰⁰ (10³⁹⁰) different ways.” (p. 150-151) Using a multitude of detailed examples, the various authors calculate the enormous number of combinations of amino acids that are possible. They show that the fraction of those combinations that are functional is a vanishingly small number. To illustrate the argument, they offer examples such as bike locks, Shakespeare, and language. Hence, the probability that random mutations, even those starting from a known functioning biomolecule, could result in a complete set of the necessary biomolecules is effectively zero.

This argument is repeated in many different ways but the underlying principle is always the same. A probability of life based on the number of possible combinations of the building blocks of life is zero. Therefore, the theory of evolution has inadequate creative power to explain life.

I would suggest that the authors are considering the wrong question. It is well known that a posteriori probabilities are notoriously tricky. In evolution, we only know the a posteriori result and any probability must be treated with care. Dealing with this issue involves teleology which will be discussed in future posts.

The most important reason why this is the wrong question is that valid probabilities cannot be calculated, particularly using combinations, if the possible combinations aren’t all equally probable, or nearly so. In dealing a deck of cards, this is accomplished with a reshuffle before dealing each hand. In evolution, there is no reshuffle. Instead, there is active feedback at every generation that influences which combinations will continue to be pursued. With this feedback, probabilities can only be assessed if all known feedback processes can be identified and evaluated in detail. This cannot be done for evolution. The mutation processes we observe in nature are not just simple nucleotide or amino acid changes but large-scale changes such as chromosomal crossover in gamete formation, horizontal gene transfer, transposons, retroviruses, and many more, and most likely some we have yet to identify. Survival provides feedback at each generation about which combination will be sustained. As a result, probabilities are very weak arguments for or against the theory of evolution. 

Combination approaches to probability are known to scale exponentially with the number of components. This means, as in the quote above, that even average sized proteins involve an extremely large number of possible combinations. It can be shown mathematically that when feedback exists, probabilities scale much more slowly, perhaps as a power law or even logarithmically, depending on the type of feedback. This changes the outlook from impossible to the realm of possibility. This is the case for evolution. When the feedback from natural selection at each generation is taken into account, the probabilities no longer scale exponentially. The claim that evolution does not have the requisite creative power is not compelling.l.

It is nevertheless a mind-boggling claim to think that today’s diversity of life could ever have come from a simple population of primitive life. The right question to ask is not about the probabilities of evolution but to ask about evidence of what actually did happen. This is the topic of other claims in the book that we will discuss in future posts.

Meyer goes on to say “…depending on how this particular understanding of theistic evolution is articulated, it generates either (1) logical contradictions, (2) a theologically heterodox view of divine action, or (3) a convoluted and scientifically vacuous explanation.” (p. 43) He explains those three problems in the subsequent six pages. In essence, he says that no matter what answer is given, the implication is unacceptable. Hence, theistic evolution is not a tenable position.

All too often I have heard an evolutionary creationist attempting to respond to this question in public. It seldom ends well. In my view, it is the wrong question, a trick question that cannot be answered simply. It reminds me of several occasions recorded in the Gospels in which the Pharisees try to trap Jesus, or vice versa, such as in Matt. 22:15-22. What makes the directed/undirected evolution question a trap question? If the response is “directed,” then there must be an intelligent designer and theistic evolution is invalidated. If the response is “undirected” then you are a deist or agnostic because God is not involved.

Why is the question the wrong question? One way to see the inappropriateness of the question is to try to apply it to other fields of science. Is gravity directed or undirected? Is the weather directed or undirected? Why is it clear that these questions are meaningless but we ask whether evolution is directed or undirected? Similarly, the terms “theistic gravity” or “theistic weather” seem inappropriate but we focus on the term “theistic evolution.”

Another reason is that the question is ambiguous. The terms “directed/undirected” have more than one connotation. One is the theist/deist contrast in which “directed” refers to the view that God creates/sustains everything and every action to carry out his will while “undirected” indicates the deist or agnostic/atheist view that God is not involved in moment to moment phenomena. Another connotation is that “direct” refers to God’s intervention beyond the laws of nature. Here “undirected” implies that God acts in a manner consistent with the cause and effect relationships that we codify as laws of nature.

I would suggest that the theistic evolutionist would respond to the directed/undirected question with “Both! Evolution is directed because of God’s intimate involvement at each moment and it is undirected because it does not violate the cause and effect relationships by which God consistently acts.” Meyer claims that it is a logical contradiction for evolution to be both directed and undirected. But when those terms refer to two different connotations, then the contradiction disappears. The same answer would apply to gravity or weather.

Evolution differs from gravity or weather in one major way that we may cite as the reason for our different treatment. Gravity and weather are thought of as stand-alone happenings. In contrast, evolution is seen as directional, leading to a goal. The real question then is a teleological one. Do you believe evolution has a teleological goal? More to the point, do you believe that evolution can attain its teleological objectives, if any, without an agent superseding normal laws of nature? Here the distinction becomes clear. Theistic evolution says yes while the opponents in this book say no. This is not a deist vs theist issue but a question of how we believe God carries out his purposes in nature.

Ultimately, I would suggest that the primary concern about “theistic evolution” is how can a theistic, teleological perspective be reconciled with a scientific theory that is inherently contingent, depending on a vast number of random events? The Bible records several events where God’s will is carried out through random processes so we cannot claim it is a “logical contradiction.” Neither are we likely to detect a method by which God carries out his will.

Virtually all the skirmishes about scientific data and all the debates about fine points of philosophy and hermeneutics that comprise the rest of the book pale before this primary issue, in my opinion. Atheists and agnostics are in full agreement with Meyer that God’s active teleological involvement in nature is in direct conflict with a contingent evolutionary process. The former use scientific support for evolution as evidence for a meaningless, purposeless universe without God or perhaps a deistic God. The latter uses doubts about scientific data to claim that evolution is not an adequate description of nature. Theistic evolution disagrees with both and claims that God can and does carry out his will through consistent laws of nature that include random processes.

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.

J. P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, and Wayne Grudem, eds. Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017.

Two of the editors, Steve Meyer and Wayne Grudem, helpfully provide a “General Introductions” section at the beginning of the book. In 45 pages, they offer a synopsis of all thousand pages. It is a good way to understand the essence of the message before looking at the details in the remaining pages.

On pages 64 and 65 of the book, Wayne Grudem offers this summary of the goals of the book:

“Our goal in this book is to say to our friends who support theistic evolution, and to many others who have not made up their minds about this issue,

1. that recent scientific evidence presents such significant challenges to key tenets of evolutionary theory that no biblical interpreter should think that an evolutionary interpretation of Genesis is “scientifically necessary”;

2. that theistic evolution depends on a strictly materialistic definition of science that is philosophically problematic; and

3. that the Bible repeatedly presents as actual historical events many specific aspects of the origin of human beings and other living creatures that cannot be reconciled with theistic evolution, and that a denial of those historical specifics seriously undermines several crucial Christian doctrines.”

My response is as follows:

1.       A. All scientific challenges of evolutionary theory concern the details of mechanisms and specific applications and none has yet arisen concerning the basic overarching theory. To the contrary, a tremendous amount of evidence for the basic theory of evolution has been amassed and its foundation is stronger than ever. B. I do not know of anyone advocating an “evolutionary interpretations of Genesis.” All that is sought is an accurate biblical hermeneutic that reflects the truth. While the truth of evolution may be helpful in some way, there is no evolutionary interpretation per se.

2.       No theistic evolutionist I know thinks that it depends on a strictly materialistic definition of science. The scientific data are vast and compelling independent of a strictly materialistic definition of science. A proper theistic definition of science does just fine.

3.       Grudem’s presupposition here is fundamental concordism, in which the Biblical message must correspond to modern science. I do not know of any biblical passage that teaches such concordism. The basis for concordism is no more than human imagination of how biblical inspiration might have occurred. A more proper presupposition is that the Bible is the inerrant revelation of God to us and that its theological message is inerrant, using phenomenological language understandable by all people of all ages, and specifically the cosmology accepted in the era in which it was written. No contradiction to evolution is evident.

Clearly, I have made many assertions that I will need to explain and justify in future posts as we address various specific chapters in the book. Stay tuned.

This concludes the series of comments and excerpts I gathered while reading the book. I would be most grateful if some of the few of you who actually read some of these posts might submit comments on what you see as most valuable—or not—in the book as you perceive it here. I will base my review on these notes. In deference to the priority of the publisher (PSCF) who commissioned this review, I will not post my review until it is published. Suffice it to say that I found the book very helpful. While not presenting any major new ideas, it collected a superb comprehensive view of several centuries of complex interactions between the science and faith communities. I will highly recommend it.

Ruse continues with a six page concise summary of global warming. He is scientifically accurate and precise with a clear and understandable articulation of the historical and present-day knowledge of climate change. (p. 247-252)

Lynn White Jr.’s 1967 article in Science was a major milestone in viewing Christianity’s historical effect on the earth’s environment. But by now the flaws of his analysis have brought most of modern thinking to be closer to that of Pope Francis. The issues, pro and con, of how to understand and to cope with climate change are no longer science vs religion but pit religious and secular advocates vs religious and secular skeptics.

Ruse also discusses other religions, spending a significant amount of time on neo-Paganism, notably Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, and James Lovelock’s introduction of the Gaia hypothesis. “…Zell-Ravenheart’s spiritual roots are as deep as those of conventional Christians; indeed they are as deep as those of any religious belief system. Moreover, Gaia promotes as strong a call for environmental action as anything to emerge from more conventional religions…The Gaia hypothesis hovers in the borderland between science and religion, standing in stark contrast with modern developments in science.” (p. 268-269)

The book concludes with the following sentences: “The inhabitants of this earth face serious physical and social issues. Standing still and doing nothing is not an option. Hard thinking about the science and technology combined with deep moral seriousness and the religious conviction of believers are absolute requirements. Together with the realization that others, no less learned and no less serious, will come from other directions. No one should feel threatened by differences, nor should anyone quake and yield because there are differences. But if humans are in this together, sympathy and understanding are essential. Then perhaps we can move forward together.” (p. 276)

“In fact, what Galton proposed was little more than plant or livestock breeding applied to people, which European royal families had practiced for years, but he made it sound scientific. It is amazing what an Oxford degree and a self-assured, upper-class manner can do to make utter claptrap seem true, especially to those who are inclined to believe it anyway.” (p. 214)

“Based on its spiritual commitment to the sanctity of all human life regardless of biological fitness, the Roman Catholic Church emerged as the first major organization to challenge eugenics doctrines.” (p. 218)

“Protestant opponents of eugenics generally did not articulate their position as clearly as Catholics, but it still had an impact…Taken as a whole, these objections reflected a view that God controls human reproduction, and neither science nor the state should interfere.” (p. 219)

“In response, eugenicists actively courted the favor of liberal clerics…God wouldn’t have given humans the power to enhance nature if it wasn’t for us to use, many maintained.” (P. 219)

“More than any issue at the time in Europe and America, eugenics rekindled perceptions of conflict between science and religion.” (p. 221)

“Eugenicists thought that they could easily identify hereditary disabilities…In fact, beginning in the 1930s, the scientific case for eugenics fell apart almost as fast as it had come together three decades earlier. First, social scientists reestablished the role of environmental factors in many of the conditions being subjected to eugenics. Then geneticists increasingly realized that…most genetic traits being targeted by eugenics involve multiple genes and thus could not be effectively propagated or prevented by eugenic selection. Finally, the specter of Nazi abuses discredited compulsory eugenic practices. By the 1950s, eugenics had seemingly been relegated to the dustbin of history or become the refuge of racists and mountebanks. Respectable geneticists no longer publically endorsed it, and its religious critics appeared vindicated. Indeed, may cited eugenics as an example for the ongoing value of religion to regulate science, with science establishing what could be done and religion guiding what should be done.” (p. 227)

“Biology may create a physical or mental condition, but only societies or individuals can interpret it as normal or abnormal, ability or disability. However much the modern Western mind favors “objective” scientific definitions of disability, cultural subjectivism inevitably intrudes.” (p. 228-229)

Larson then references Lutheran theologian Ted Peters, quoting his statement in the PBS series Faith and Reason, “So I hesitate to think of [DNA] as sacred, holy, special…If we have the power to alter it in such a way as to make human health better, to relieve human suffering, I think we have a moral responsibility to do that.” (p. 243-244)

“Under a theology such as Peters’s, genetic engineering, even of people, becomes a gift from God through science. Many geneticists embrace this view as well, but as a gift of a purely human scientific enterprise…Yet on this, at least for now, most scientists agree. It does not mark a conflict between science and religion as much as show common ground.” (p. 244)

Although I’m somewhat late in completing a couple of committed book reviews, I’ll take the liberty of interrupting that process to share some musings on another book. November 30 was the publication date of this book:

J. P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, and Wayne Grudem, eds. Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017.

It is over a thousand pages long, of which 939 comprise the text with footnotes. I knew the book was coming and had already realized that I did not want to spend the time reading, let alone reviewing, this massive book. There are many other people more capable than I who will be doing that. But yesterday, a friend of mine gave me his free copy which he said he knew he would never read. As I flipped through the tome and read excerpts, I felt I wanted to share some thoughts and feelings. I would not ask any publisher to publish this but in this forum I feel free to say what I think. I hasten to add that all my comments are solely my personal opinions and do not in any way reflect the opinions of the ASA or anyone else. I also want to encourage any of you with differing views to share your comments. I learn much more from those of you who disagree with me than from those who share my opinions.

I will post some thoughts in the future about the content of the book. In this post I merely want to express my emotions at the existence of the book itself and what it says to me. In a tangible way, the book symbolizes a sharp repudiation of the effort for which I and many others have devoted so much time. We have urged that the core issues of the relationship between science and Christian faith be discussed freely with each other in a Christian spirit of civility and respect for one another. We have also held that science and Christian faith are inherently in harmony and we seek to understand that harmony in more depth. This book dispenses with all such attitudes and comes out swinging. It is an uncompromising attack on evolutionary creation, which I believe is now held by a majority of scientists who are Christians, though not by the broader non-scientific Christian community. The authors yield no slack for any other views and leave no door ajar for discussion. There is little evidence that effort was made to ensure that opposing views were included or were correctly articulated and addressed if they were. Even the title conveys a subtle message of antagonism. They authors are well aware that the term “evolutionary creation” has supplanted “theistic evolution” for more than a decade. Yet, they chose to continue with the older term, probably because it is more widely recognized but perhaps also because “theistic evolution” has been around long enough to attract an antagonistic reputation in the Christian community.

It didn’t have to be this way. The recently published book by BioLogos and Reasons to Believe is an excellent example:

Old Earth or Evolutionary Creation?: Discussing Origins with Reasons to Believe and BioLogos by Kenneth Keathley  (Editor),‎ J. B. Stump  (Editor),‎ Joe Aguirre (Editor)

Rather than simply publishing a book opposing the other viewpoints, these organizations, to their great credit, spent a great deal of time in personal discussion and in jointly writing their respect views. This is a demonstration of Christian love and respect that is a model for all of us. The ASA has always had a policy of not taking a stand on an issue for which there is honest disagreement among Christians. Its aim has been to encourage diversity of opinions among its members and to foster open discussion of differing views in spirit of love and civility. While not every interaction has measured up to its ideal, the organization continues to aim for constructive dialog. It is fair for those who oppose theistic evolution to publish their ideas. It is paramount that such attacks include an openness to respect other views and, preferably, to give voice to their response. No such attitude is apparent in a cursory look through the book. I hope to find some on a closer reading but the message is clear.

Personally, I find the book to be the final straw in showing the failure of what I worked hard to achieve in the ASA. When I became executive director in 2005, one of my high hopes and expectations was to find a way to bring the ID and anti-ID communities together in fruitful dialog with, at the very least, a measure of respect and continuing communication with each other. I worked hard, mainly in private with individuals but also in group settings, toward this end. But the task was daunting and positions hardened. Respect was in rare supply. We did manage to have some degree of ID participation in most of our annual meetings but the extent of personal mingling and follow-up discussion was generally meager.

This book will fuel the flames of the conflict model of science and Christian faith. Harmony is not to be found except on their own terms, redefining both science and the Bible. It sets back years of progress in understanding both science and the Bible. I am deeply saddened and I grieve at its publication. In some future posts, I will address the content of the book from selected portions but the tone of the book sets a major challenge before us all.

Much of the human condition is portrayed in the first two chapters of Genesis. “First, humans come in two different kinds, male and female, and this is a fundamental distinction or difference…Second, the Bible is quite unambiguous about females’ and males’ relative statuses. Females and males are humans, and they are distinguished from the rest of creation in both being equally made in the image of God…Third, it is difficult to escape entirely the impression that some are more equal than others. The second version of the story has God creating Adam first and then almost as an afterthought creating Eve to keep Adam company.” (p. 186-187)

“In short, Judaism and Christianity are far more complex on the nature and status of women than one might suspect from a quick simplistic reading.” (p. 189)

Islam and Eastern religions also have a complex view on cultural issues such as gender relationships.

“Historically…the sciences serve to reinforce religion more than to challenge it.”(p. 193)

“…Darwin takes his Christian thinking, reads it into biology, and then happily reads it out again as confirmation of what he believed all along.” (p. 203)

“Does religion demand male and female? It’s hard to say, because it’s never really a question that comes up---“He created male and female.” Does biology demand male and female? Certainly not, because most organisms do not have sex. They are asexual and reproduce by budding or division and the like. Whatever the cause, it does seem that sex is a powerful tool of evolutionary change, however, and it is hard to imagine higher organisms having gathered together all of the genes that they need without sex.” (p. 203)

“…in the science and religion context, gender differences and sexual orientation raise overlapping issues and concerns. Both science and religion came to these topics with traditions in place, preferences set, and already formulated, culturally laden answers to intensely personal questions. New empirical findings emerged, once-established facts were reinterpreted or discounted, technologies and politics evolved, and new cultural norms and social practices emerged.” (p. 211)

“…even as mild-mannered an evangelical as Oxbridge scholar C. S. Lewis agreed that, while he accepted the theory of evolution, he too drew the line when Darwin began monkeying with man.” (p. 161)

“[Darwin’s letter to Asa Gray] passed quickly from observations of what seems evil in nature (such as cruel animal behavior) to their implications for what seems well-designed good in it (such as the human eye), and then moved on to ponder the origin of what seems positively good (such as human morality and mentality). Few Christians want to blame God for the first; many could go either way on God’s role in the second; but all want to attribute the third to their God.” (p. 165)

Larson proceeds to articulate concisely the sequence of discoveries of hominid fossils that documented what Darwin suggested. Throughout this history, the lines of demarcation were clear between those who were excited by and those who were frightened by “the prospect that humans evolved from beasts by a naturalistic process that goes back in some material cause-and-effect chain to earliest forms of life.” (p. 183)

“Today, Darwin’s sketchy social theories have matured by way of E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology and modern evolutionary psychology to become foundational for understanding in the social sciences. Through it, human behavior is reduced to the physical, and people become merely matter in motion with evolved self-consciousness.” (p. 183-184)

1.      “Where did everything come from?” Ancient Greek philosophers didn’t ask that. Matter just is and there’s no point in asking about origins. “The ancient Hebrew people did think in terms of origins and beginnings, and Christians followed them in doing so. This is what Genesis is all about. God made the world and set it in motion. That is the answer to where things came from ‘in the beginning.’ Believers needed to know that is true. It is central to their theology.”

2.      “What kind of world do people live in?” This is not a question that everyone asks but most people have some degree of curiosity about the world we live in. “…ancient Babylonians typically saw it as a dreadful place dominated by gods who were at best indifferent to humans and at worst malicious.” (p. 139) Others see a wonderful world, cleverly put together. “It was Plato who drew the inference that such a beautifully functioning world could not be pure chance, there must be an intelligence (aka God) that lies behind it. Aristotle was more biologically minded than Plato. It was he who saw that it is in the living world of plants and animals than one really finds this intricate functioning, this designlike nature, which seems to be more than just random chance…And it is here that Christian theologian-philosophers, from Thomas Aquinas to William Paley, stepped in to make sense of it all. To them, the world does seem like it is designed, because it is designed---by an all-powerful, all-loving being---the God of Christianity.”(p. 140)

3.      “Where do humans fit into the scheme of things?” Though it is humans themselves who do the judging, it seems clear that “…humans are way ahead of all other organisms…a consciousness of their own existence and of a sense of morality and mortality far beyond that of any other kind of animal. They are not gods, but…made in the image of God and are given ‘dominion’ over the earth and all its nonhuman inhabitants.”(p. 140-141)

How did this pave the way for evolutionary perspectives? The scientific notions that came from astronomy and geology and paleontology changed the prevailing view of a static universe to one of directional change. As more evidence was obtained, there seemed to be progressive change over time, an idea that was tentatively extended to a new philosophy of progress. “Humans unaided except by their natural or endowed reason can make things better.” (p. 143) The vague idea of evolutionary change began to be more appropriate than stasis.

Evolutionary ideas, capped by Darwin’s seminal 1859 book, provided answers to all three questions, though the similarities were overshadowed by some key differences from the prevailing Christian views. The provocative answers continue to inflame discussions even today.

While the main focus is on the relationship between the major Western theistic religions and evolutionary thought, the question arises about other religions such as Buddhism. Similar to Hinduism and some other Eastern religions, Buddhism has little interest in the three big questions noted above. “Existence is eternal---always was and always will be.” (p. 151). Things just are, with no thing or no one responsible for anything or everything. The Buddhist will explore the nature of the world but that exploration is not about God. The world simply exists as it is. Humans are not the end result of progress but in the middle, above the vilest of beings but below the gods.

The problem of evil is one of the key dilemmas facing Christianity and Darwinism. For a Christian perspective, an all-powerful, all-good Creator is hard to reconcile with the existence of evil. Various scenarios abound but Darwinism exacerbates the issue by making natural evil (i.e. the predator/prey conflict and the struggle for existence in a Malthusian contest) the very engine of progress. Christians generally find some way of reconciling the existence of evil as a necessary aspect of the world that God created, enabling free will and humans capable of loving God.

Similarly, the clash between Providence and progress looms as a gulf between Darwinism and Christianity. The two are not easily reconciled. Yet, it is not an insurmountable difference.

“[I]nstead of being inevitable foes, Darwinism and Christianity might in some respects be compatible---or at least that was what the Christian Darwinist Asa Gray thought and said in his theory of theistic evolution…” (p. 158)

“Before Cuvier, European naturalists typically held that no species---perfect in original creation---ever die out…Overturning this view, Curvier ultimately concluded that all fossilized animals differed in kind from modern ones and that no modern species existed in truly fossil form.”(p. 110)

Cuvier amassed evidence that fossils were of species that were not similar to any alive today. “To some, such evidence suggested evolution. Cuvier had already rejected this explanation based on his study of comparative anatomy by concluding that each type is too irreducibly complex to change, and the apparent absence of transitional forms in the fossil record confirmed this conclusion. In his extensive study of fossils, Cuvier saw only distinct species that persisted without change until they went extinct altogether at some remote time in the earth’s unimaginably long history.” (p. 113)

“Cuvier’s equation of the biblical deluge with the final catastrophe lost its principal scientific proponents in the 1830’s, when British geologists Adam Sedgwick and William Buckland, both evangelical Christian Oxbridge dons, concluded that a single flood of the type described in Genesis could not produce the complex deposits attributed to the last catastrophe and should have left human fossils, which were never found among its debris. Yet they drained the biblical deluge of geologic significance without drying up their Christian faith: the ages of creation simply moved back in time, more in line with the biblical account that places the days of creation before Noah’s time.” (p. 116)

“In his concept of steady-state volcanism…[James] Hutton proposed a cyclical process of igneous-rock mountains gradually rising from the earth’s molten core and then slowly weathering to create inhabitable land….[S]teady-state volcanism survived as a minority view that tempered the prevailing catastrophist, directional tone of early-nineteenth century geologic thought. Then in 1830, the English lawyer and gentleman geologist Charles Lyell gave it wings.” (p. 118-119)

“…Lyell refashioned Hutton’s cyclic outline of geologic history into a coherent scientific theory…Lyell saw long-term environmental change as gradual rather than abrupt and therefore posited that new species were created continuously rather than in spurts.” (p. 120-121)

William Buckland, an ordained Anglican cleric who obtained an Oxford readership in geology, flamboyantly described new fossils finds and built on Cuvier’s idea of directionality in the geological record. “Buckland’s God used systematic processes to guide terrestrial events with a designer’s touch; his God did not intervene irrationally…[T]he succession of species in the fossil record reflected God’s direction for life on earth. It had a beginning and human beings are its end…[H]e offered no specifics of how ‘the divinely endowed laws of creation’ might work except to affirm that they could not involve evolution.”(p. 128)

“In the half century since Cuvier and Werner came on the scene in the late 1700s, geology and paleontology had utterly transformed Western conceptions of the earth’s past and probable future…If ever there was a golden age of science and religion in Western Christendom, this was it. Neither side dominated or suppressed the other; both sides found inspiration from the relationship. For Christians, it required reinterpreting scripture to fit the advances of science. For scientists, it involved accepting the idea of divine design in nature.” (p. 131)

“The golden age ended abruptly…[T]he revival of evolutionism during the mid-1800s complicated the relationship between science and religion. The theory of human evolution became a flashpoint that could not be reconciled with the Genesis account as easily as Cuvier’s concepts of an ancient earth and geologic ages could.” (p. 132)

“…[N]ineteenth-century paleontology and geology offer a glimpse of what once was and again could be in the ongoing relationship between science and religion.” (p. 134)

“…this is a problem without a solution, or at least without a solution open to human intelligence….In respects, because of advances in science, especially advances in the physical sciences teaching that some questions simply cannot be asked because there are no possible answers available, this is perhaps a more attractive option in recent years than it was back at the time of Descartes….Perhaps the body-mind problem is like this. It goes almost without saying that this position –known today as "new mysterianism" - has its attractions for theists…Today, elements of such thinking can be found far and wide, including in the writings of that runaway favorite of the modern-day evangelical Christians, C. S. Lewis.”(p. 96-97)

“Some have suggested that invoking a hardware—software distinction avoids this problem. The brain is the hardware; the mind is the software. But the analogy doesn’t really work. A computer program and the stored files aren’t really conscious.”(p. 99)

“One thing that modern physics has taught is that the idea that the world is made up of inert chunks of basic substance, matter, is simply not true. Whatever may be the case down at the quantum level, there certainly are not simply minichunks of rock there. Matter is energized-dare one even say "alive" -in a way not dreamed of even in the nineteenth century. This certainly doesn't prove dualism; but it does mean that mind and matter may not be quite as far apart as they might have seemed to Descartes.”(p. 100)

In essence Ruse says that we have not made much progress since Plato except that we know vastly more than Plato about consciousness and how it is connected to the brain. But the hard problem of consciousness has not been solved.

“During the 17th century... the heavens were no longer seen as some perfect abode for God and angels but a material place subject to the same physical laws as on the earth. Yet while this tended to bring astronomy down to earth, it lifted physics up to the heavens.” (P. 51)

Physics and the enlightenment

“Whatever Kant might think or hope about his age, rational, critical enlightenment remained a minority position. In fact, the 18th century was also an age of intense religious ferment, with a Pietistic revival in Germany, the Wesleyan movement in Britain, in the evangelical Great Awakening in English North America.” (P 56)

The theology of electricity

“ Franklin, Wesley, and Priestly offer three different examples of how science related to religion during the Enlightenment in England and America: Diest, Christian, and Unitarian. Science may have been on the incline, and religion on the decline at that time in those places, but neither could be likely dismissed. Both loomed large in the minds of people attuned to the latest intellectual currents, and many devised their own personal reconciliation of the two types of thought.” (P 61)

19th century developments

"With Kelvin...we have come full circle from Enlightenment-age French encyclopedists who used physics to promote atheism. “If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the believe in God,“ Kelvin affirmed in a widely reprinted 1903 response to a popular lecture by Christian apologist George Henslow. “You will find science not antagonistic but helpful to religion.“ (p 68)

Relativity, quantum mechanics, and beyond

"During the early 20th century, relativity and quantum theory launched the universe of modern physics that still rules the roost today...They threw theological speculation about the religious meaning of physics for a loop and...opened new ways of thinking about how God might work in the universe...Three main points should suffice here: indeterminacy, complementarity, and holism.” (P 69)

“Classical physics envisioned an utterly deterministic and totally reductionist universe that was objectively knowable through science. Newton had left room for God in this system by observing non-reductionist instability in planetary orbits that would require ongoing divine intervention and by pointing to the solar system’s unnatural orderliness as evidence of a designer. By 1800, however, Pierre – Simon Laplace had accounted for these matters and proclaimed the theoretical ability to wind the entire system forward or backward with perfect precision, in a matter that not only dispensed with the need for but disproved the possibility of ongoing supernatural Intervention in nature. God may or may not exist – and people might still claim the ability to feel God’s presence spiritually, and that feeling might be true – but God was banished by classical physics from the ongoing operation of nature, although not necessarily from its origin in time and space. Human free will fared no better under determinism.” (P 69)

“Holism had many implications for religion. It challenged the reductionism of classical physics, with saw the behavior of the whole as reducible to the behavior of its material parts, by showing that those parts only behave as they do as part of the whole. Further, it offered a physical parallel for how God might have an active presence everywhere at once. Finally, by stressing the impact that observers have on observations, it suggested that individual choices can make a difference. All that happens need not be pre-determined. The object, subject, and even God may grow out of the process.“

Larson's summary is that the interaction between science and faith was a mixture of conflict, complementarity, and complexity. All of these with many variations were in play.

“The ancient Greeks were not so much interested in origins. This is more a Jewish and, later, Christian and Muslim way of thinking. For the Greeks, the great ideal was mathematics, and no one asked when 2+2=4 started to become true.”(p. 26).

“One of the most interesting things about science…is the extent to which it is metaphorical.”(p. 28)

“Plato was quite explicit in thinking of the earth---the whole universe, indeed---as an organism. Aristotle was a little more circumspect, but certainly he thought of the physical as well as the biological world organically.” (p. 30) He goes on to show how this perspective leads to “final causes” since reproducing organisms have the capability of reproducing which is a future event. In this way, effects can precede causes. These are “final causes” instead of “efficient causes.”

“At this fundamental level—perhaps the most fundamental of all in the Scientific Revolution—the root metaphor changed from the organism toward the machine. What was happening was that people were no longer thinking of the world in terms of vegetables or animals but beginning to think of it in terms of contrivances, of human-made systems designed to perform certain functions perpetually..” (p. 41)

“It was not atheism or deism that drove the Scientific Revolution. Virtually all of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution were Catholic or Protestant Christians who saw their work as glorifying God and defending the faith. This is not to say Christianity necessarily leads to science…” (p. 43)

“But before long, and despite Newton’s protests to the contrary, increasingly God was being pushed out of science, and naturalistic explanations became the sole object of those doing science. There was a stampede to atheism, deism, or agnosticism but no further compulsion to keep thinking about spiritual (or even final) causation in nature. In the words of the historian of science D. J. Dijksterhuis, increasingly God became a ‘retired engineer.’” (p. 44)

“…the machine metaphor dominated in physics generally, and in astronomy and its causal discussions, cosmology, specifically. The world works according to unbroken law and, for most modern astronomers and physicists, God stays out of it. All is efficient cause.”(p. 45)

Ruse goes on to point out how the mechanistic universe crumbled under the weight of relativity, quantum physics, and the Big Bang theory, with its inflationary theory and possible multiverses. For some, these new concepts keep the door open to a spiritual, divine presence.

Introduction: What’s the Fuss?

Two of the most distinguished, well-known historians and philosophers in the field of science and faith collaborate in another recounting of the historical encounter between science and faith. Much has been written on this topic and one might wonder what new insights could there possibly be. Yet, these skilled authors shed more light on the interface between these two paradigms.

Ed Larson is University Professor of history and Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. His most acclaimed work is the book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998. He has written 9 other books, half of which deal with evolution and creation and has made frequent appearances in public forums to discuss faith and science.

Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor and director of the history and philosophy of science program at Florida State University. He taught at the University of Guelph in Ontario for 35 years and has been at Florida State since 2000. Though a self-described atheist not subscribing to Christian faith, Ruse argues that Christianity and evolution are compatible and he disagrees sharply with the harsh arguments of the so-called “new atheists.” He has published numerous books and articles and appeared in countless public occasions to make his case.

Larson and Ruse set the stage for their discussion by reprising Salman Rushdie’s account of the 12^th-century philosopher, physician, and jurist Ibn Rushd. In essence, 800 years ago, Rushd suffered banishment for his defense of divinely created natural law as opposed to the prevailing view that God “…could easily intervene to make causes ineffectual and later effects if He so chose.” This Islamic version of the Western world’s Galileo affair demonstrates the universality of the notion of conflict between science and faith. Yet, historians not just in the 20^th century but in the last few centuries have duly noted that the relationship between science and faith is neither merely conflict or compatibility, but a complex interaction.

The authors “favor what might be called a “coexistence” approach, which views religion and science as two big messy and sometimes internally inconsistent categories of human perception and understanding that coexist in the same place and time, sometimes in a complementary or conflicting relationship but most often in a complex one, with both categories currently growing in influence and authority in many regions.” (p. 12) The conflict model exists and thrives as well as the complementary approach with a wide range of complex interactions in between. The persistence of these extremes and the diversity of interaction prompted this historian and philosopher to join together to take a fresh look at a well-worn topic.

The approach taken by the authors is to devote nine chapters to various fields of discipline, alternating authorship for each one. To them, “it is a story of science and religion, not science or religion.” (p. 16) They intend to encourage readers to join in the dialogue and make it into a conversation.

You may have seen that my review of Lucas Mix's book, Thinking Fair, was published in the September 2017 issue of PSCF. I hope it generates some sales for him but more importantly a broader awareness and practice of the concepts he espouses.

I have finished my review of the Zondervan Dictionary of Christianity and Science. It will be published in Science and Christian Belief, the publication of the organization Christians in Science.

Now for my next project. I just received my review copy of the new book On Faith and Science, by Ed Larson and Michael Ruse. It promises to be an insightful book on the history and philosophy of the encounter between science and faith and I look forward to reading it. I intend to post my notes on this blog as I go for anyone who might be interested so stay tuned.

In a nutshell: The lack, no matter how fundamental, of a scientific causal explanation of a phenomenon, no matter how awesome or precise, is never evidence for the existence of God. Conversely, the faith-based presupposition that God the Creator exists renders the existence of the universe, whether understood scientifically or not, comprehensible.

The fine-tuning argument is the clearest example of the genre of arguments for the existence of God known as “God of the Gaps.” The gap is our utter lack of knowledge of how the cosmological constants came to have their unique values, which in many cases have an incredibly high precision. It seems possible that this gap may even be fundamental so that we may never be able to understand the source of these values. The premise that God is the agent who chose and assigned those values seems eminently plausible since God is omniscient and omnipotent and the Creator of all things. The selection of these values is in a sense the very essence of creation. But the gap of our knowledge is not in any way evidence for God’s existence or role in establishing those values.

I personally believe that God does exist and is the creator of all things and that he fixed these values. But I do not believe that the finely tuned values constitute any shred of evidence for the existence of God. Rather, the existence of God is a faith-based presupposition which makes the values of the constants comprehensible. The difference is profound.

At this time, no one has any idea of how these values came to be, how they might be related, or even whether they could possibly have any other value. Nor do we have any independent evidence that an intelligent agent exists or could in any way influence these values. The claim that God could do so is a logical possibility but one for which there is no evidence.

The claim that there is no other known cause of fine-tuning does not offer any support for the claim that therefore it must be God. It is far more likely that we simply do not know and may never know.

Stephen Meyer points out in his book Signature in the Cell (page 161) that philosopher of science Michael Scriven has discussed the method of reasoning called “retrospective causal analysis.” The central point is that “to establish the cause of a past event, historical scientists must first show that any candidate cause ‘has on other occasions clearly demonstrated its capacity to produce an effect of the sort here under study’” In this case, there is no independent indication that the cosmological constants can be established by anyone or anything, let alone by a God. The only rationale is a logical construct that a God should be able to accomplish it. This does not constitute evidence. (and no, no one is talking about ‘proof.’)

Finally, the apostle Paul is not referring in Romans to scientific methodology of which he has no knowledge. The passage in Romans 1 cannot rightly be used to argue that evidence for the existence of God can be deduced from scientific observations. Rather, he refers to the universal sense of awe that elicits the faith-based sense of God’s creative power and grace. A close literal reading of the text also seems to indicate that God’s existence is a presupposition and, given that God exists, what is clearly perceived from nature is his power and his divine nature, not specifically his existence. One cannot deduce from this verse that scientific observations like the cosmological constants clearly reveal God’s existence.

As for Duns Scotus, it was Mark Noll who traced a common fallacy back to John Duns Scotus and William of Ockam. This is the fallacy that there is only one essence of being such that only one causal explanation can be correct. Therefore, we have the fallacy that scientific explanations are mutually exclusive to theistic ones. Hence, if there is no scientific explanation, then the theistic explanation must be true. Conversely, if there is a scientific explanation, then the theistic explanation must be false. The fine-tuning argument falls into the former category with its claim that since there is no scientific explanation, the theistic source must be correct.

Note added on 9/23/2017 by RDI:

The talk that Walter Bradley gave at the ASA meeting on July 30, 2017 can be heard here and the slides at this link.

Have any of you seen the book? Any insights or comments you have would be greatly appreciated. I'll try to post a few notes as I go through it.

Randy

I would like to thank many of you for your most excellent assistance in commenting and questioning my notes and the drafts of the review. It was all most helpful.

The same issue of PSCF contains my review of An Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics by Marks, Dembski, and Ewert. The September issue will contain my review of Thinking Fair by Lucas Mix. I’ll post more on that later.

Meanwhile, I’ve enjoyed reading a few books that I do not need to review. Like American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. And Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. And The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams, by Benjamin Bradlee, Jr.

Meanwhile, spring has sprung and I enjoy getting my hands dirty in God’s creation, my favorite hobby of growing roses. This is what retirement is all about!

One of the highlights of my holiday was visiting the Morgan Library Museum in New York City. They are featuring an exhibit on Martin Luther until January 22, 2017. It is a small exhibit but worth seeing if you are near NYC.

To prepare for our visit, we listened again to the two-hour PBS Documentary on Martin Luther, narrated by Liam Neeson and starring Timothy West as Martin Luther. This helped us put the items on exhibit into perspective. After seeing the exhibition we listened to the documentary again to clarify details we had missed the first time.

The main elements of the story are well-known: the background of harsh discipline by Martin Luther’s parents; the effect of the plague on the society during his youth; his encounter with God in a thunderstorm leading to his becoming a monk; his insatiable quest for justification from God; and his fierce opposition to abuses of indulgences that triggered the 95 theses he put up for discussion. What was not as well known to us was the critical role played by Luther’s neighbor, friend and artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. The exhibit displayed fascinating sculptures and paintings by Cranach that had a significant impact on portraying the ideas and concepts advocated by Luther. The PBS documentary had relatively little to say about this artist. The exhibit also featured many original and period artifacts that brought that era to life.

The account of Martin Luther’s stand at the Diet of Worms is also well known and often publicized. What was of more interest here was the development of ideas by Luther as he progressed in his ideology. He wrote the Augsburg Confession, still dominant in the Lutheran church, and translated the Bible into German from the Hebrew and Greek. He got married and had six children. He died of a massive heart attack at age 62. During that time he also seemed to advocate paradoxical views. On one hand, he wrote strongly against using violence to promote the gospel. On the other, he urged in harsh terms that the civil leaders should use violent means to quench the peasant rebellion. On one hand, he strongly defended the rights of Jews but on the other, he wrote some troubling anti-Semitic articles.

Luther was a dynamo, driven to work excessively and producing many hymns and orders of worship in addition to all his books and his teachings. Without a doubt, he ignited a movement that went far beyond what he intended and imagined. The past 500 years are worth contemplating in the light of his remarkable life. Because of him and the remarkable role of Frederick the Wise, the prince of Saxony, that region of Germany played the starring role in the beginning of the Reformation.

In contrast to the Ellis book, I will not bore you with notes and comments along the way. I would, however, be greatly interested in any perspective that any of you may have on this subject. If you have any knowledge of or interest in this topic, I would love to hear from you. It would help me.

Randy

Thank you!

I have written the draft below. It's a first pass and I'm willing to edit it significantly. I would greatly appreciate suggestions and comments from all of you. It is due before the end of November but I'd like to get it off my to-do list.

Thank you!

“What Are Human Beings That You Are Mindful of Them?”

Psalm 8:4, NRSV

Randy Isaac

The effort to formally designate our current age as the Anthropocene Epoch can be seen as either a paean to humanity or as an expression of self-exaltation. The latter view considers each extant species to be a successful culmination of billions of years of evolution with no species having superiority. The former view sees our species as a distinctive species worthy of praise for its accomplishments.

The psalmist looks at the grandeur of the heavens, notes the moon and the stars, and exclaims how remarkable it is that God would be mindful of human beings, by comparison hardly worthy of note. Yet the psalmist continues with amazement that God “…made [human beings] a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet…” (Ps 8:5-6, NRSV)

The biblical perspective resonates with the Anthropocene Epoch designation in several ways. Three of those ways to be considered here are the uniqueness of humans, the human capability of understanding other species, and the responsibility given to humans for stewardship.

The biblical perspective emphasizes the uniqueness of humankind. Humans are the final act of creation and are the only species to whom God gives his own image. The Son of God became a human, signifying a special relationship between God and humans who have God-given responsibilities and are accountable to God. Scientifically, the unique evolutionary achievement of humans is manifold. Humans have an unparalleled adaptability enabling survival through significant environmental changes. Humans have an enhanced level of consciousness, communication skills, and ability for abstract reasoning. No other species comes close to human ability in these areas.

While most species interact with other species as needed for survival, only humans seem capable of studying and understanding any other species, independent of need. The biblical perspective stresses this capability in the account of Adam naming the animals. In Genesis 2:18-20 God forms animals and birds as helpers to Adam and they are brought to him for naming. The ancient practice of naming was not an arbitrary task of finding a pleasing word but an in-depth study of the characteristics of the one being named, assigning a name reflecting their nature. This is an indication that humans have evolved the ability and the mission of studying and understanding the nature of all species.

God explicitly gives humans the assignment of having dominion over the earth and all that is in it. This is a mandate for stewardship and loving care. Our scientific recognition that humans have a global impact, whether for good or for bad, shows how we cannot escape this assignment. The designation of an epoch reflecting our impact on the earth is a powerful reminder that we are responsible for sustaining all life on earth. May we all do our part to nurture and care for our world.

“The conclusion arising from the arguments given in this book is that there are other forms of causation than those encompassed by physics and physical chemistry alone, or even in genetics and neuroscience. Higher levels of structure have causal powers, based on strong emergence of higher level structure and function that can shape what happens in the world.”

“So from where do higher level ideas, theories, and behavior arise, given that they cannot be uniquely determined by physics data in the early universe? The obvious explanation is that they arise from the autonomous behavior of the human mind acting in an intelligent way, supervenient on but not causally determined by the underlying physics.”

“…emergence of higher level causal powers is possible because of randomness at lower levels that allows for selection of functionality on the basis of higher level selection criteria. And that is a form of top-down causation, adapting emergent life to its environment. There are essentially three ways that emergent properties come into being:

·       Self-assembly: emergence in the natural world

·       Natural selection: emergence in the biological world

·       Design and construction in the man-made world.”

“…while purely bottom-up effects can produce key ingredients needed for the existence of life, and while they can produce many interesting structures and patterns, what they can achieve is nevertheless strictly limited: it cannot lead to the existence of life. This needs the initiation of the top-down causal transfer of information that is required for adaptive selection to take place.”

“Chance, necessity, and purpose intertwine in the real world around us. Jacques Monod famously claimed that all that matters in biology is chance and necessity. But this misses the key element of purpose or goal-seeking, which is crucial to life.”

“That random processes are a core feature of biological functioning is indicated by many kinds of evidence…At the micro-level, biological systems do not live in a carefully controlled environment: they face rampant randomness all the time. It turns out that they take advantage of the storm of randomness encountered at the molecular level: there is much evidence that molecular machinery in biology is designed to use that randomness to attain its desired results…Randomness is harnessed through the process of adaptive selection, which allows higher levels of order and meaning to emerge. It is then a virtue, not a vice. It allows purpose to be an active agent by selecting desired outcomes from a range of possibilities.”

“[Physiological systems] came into being through natural selection, because they promoted survival. Once in existence, passed from generation to generation by genes and developed in each body by developmental processes, they have specific functions or purposes that are allowed by and indeed implemented through the underlying physics. But that physics knows nothing of these purposes.”

“Chance, necessity, and purpose all occur in living systems. It is the relation between them that is at issue, and this is where information comes in…And how does purpose fit in? An element of randomness at the bottom does not mean that all that happens is just pure chance. Rather it is one of the foundations that, together with necessity, opens up the possibilities of purposeful function and meaningful mental life, realized through physical existence. It does not have to have the connotation of meaningless so often ascribed to it. It is the gateway to variety and possibility.”

“Lower level random processes allow adaptive selection to work, creating purposeful order, on the basis of physical and chemical laws, embodying necessity. Physics provides the possibility space for what happens, but does not determine the outcome. Top-down causation allows higher level causes be what they appear to be: real effective causes that select lower level outcomes. Adaptive selection creates new classes of information and new instances of those classes, e.g., the genetic code and DNA that uses that code. Random fluctuations plus quantum uncertainty provide the freedom at the bottom needed to allow this to happen.”

“It is the existence of random processes at lower levels that enables purposeful actions at higher levels to take place through selection of preferred outcomes according to some higher level selection criterion. This enables processes of adaptation and learning in accordance with the logic of some higher level purpose.”

“Some aspects of complex systems are emergent from the interaction between the underlying particles and forces, but others are not emergent: rather they arise from the nature of the external environment. A crucial point then is that this environment includes abstract Platonic entities, such as mathematical forms and the laws of logic, which are not reducible to or emergent from any physical entities. They do, however, have causal power. They are transcendent entities in that they are timeless and universal, but not of a physical nature.”

“The issue is whether there is real emergence of higher levels, with genuine causal powers in their own right (‘strong emergence’) or whether the higher levels are epiphenomena, with no real power of their own: they are dancing to the tune of the lower levels.”

“The point then is that physics as it currently stands is causally incomplete. It is not able to describe all the causes and effects shaping what happens in the world…Physics at the micro-level has an irreducible random element. This allows higher level selection processes to select lower level outcomes to suit higher level function or purpose.”

“The view put forward in this book has substantial social implications. The bottom-up view of causation has pervaded much scientific thought in general, and so for example has been a major factor in medicine and psychiatry. In each of these areas there has in effect been a long-standing tension between bottom-up and top-down views with major implications for medical practice and effectiveness. The view implied by this book is that it is crucial that top-down effects be taken into account as a major influence, as well as bottom-up (molecular and gene-based) effects.”

One of the last sections in the book is written jointly with Ellis’s wife, Carole Bloch. It explores the implications of the views of this book on “Learning to Read and Write.” It elucidates the nature of bottom-up and top-down causality in field of oral and written language. Essentially, they argue the reading should not be taught bottom-up by first learning syllables and grammar but top-down by seeing the elements of written words in their meaningful context. The details can come later.

Ellis closes the book with this final paragraph: “The daily world in which we live came about by imaginative investigation of possibilities, discarding those that don’t work: the adaptive process that is a central theme of this book, enabled by a modicum of randomness at the macro- and micro-levels, interacting with necessary physical processes. And it is these processes that also allow the emergence of the ordinariness of everyday life: which actually is quite extraordinary. Bottom-up effects are crucial to emergence. Physics underlies all. Nevertheless, the vitality of life, which arises from physics, transcends it.”

His view of the organization of the brain is summarized in this table:

Ellis emphasizes the role that symbolism and language, purpose and meaning, and our system of values and ethics plays in affecting our brain which in turns affects our higher level decision process and actions. He also notes that “The mind can discover unchanging eternal relationships and possibilities that were always there and exist independently of the human mind: that is, they can reasonably be called Platonic entities.”

Ellis embarks on a detailed description of the biology of the brain. A key point that he makes is illustrated by his quote of Alwyn Scott discussing the Hodgkin-Hawley equations that describe action potential in neurons: “One cannot derive these laws from physics and chemistry because they depend upon the detailed organization of the intrinsic proteins that mediate sodium and potassium current across the membrane and upon the geometric structure of the nerve fibres.”

In other words, this is genuine emergence. The physics and chemistry of the atoms and molecules within the neuron is constrained or bounded by higher level parameters from the environment. This is a true top-down causality with the emergence of new features that require new equations to describe.

“A key question, of course, is how the brain gets to be what it is…The primary point is that the brain is not developed in a predetermined way through genetic influences: rather it adapts to the environment in which it finds itself. Brain plasticity at the micro-level allows adaptation at the macro-level. This development is guided by experience, evaluated on the basis of the primary emotional systems.”

“Minds cannot be understood on their own: we have a distributed cognition that is not contained solely within the head of the individual…The human mind is unlike any other on this planet, not because of its biology, which is not qualitatively unique, but because of its ability to generate and assimilate culture, which provides us with symbolic tools such as language that then shape the way we see reality.”

“David Sloan Wilson remarks that the transition from bottom-up to top-down dominated causation in the relation of mind to the society in which it is imbedded is a major evolutionary transition in the historical development of humanity, resulting in the emergence of the social order as a higher level entity in its own right, and a consequent change in the nature of the evolutionary processes at work.”

“Interlevel causation, both bottom-up and top-down, is key to brain function. Evolution has selected for it to occur. The underlying physics is channeled and constrained to enable this to happen.”

“…this process faces a problem of infinite recursion: where does the next higher level of selection criteria come from? At some point we have to draw a line and say, this is where I stand: these are my founding principles, this is the purpose in my life. That is where one makes value choices based on one’s view of meaning…These are abstract ideas that shape what one does, and thereby act down to muscles, neurons, and genes, and on to electrons and atoms as we try to fulfil these goals and purposes.”

“[Consciousness] is an emergent property of a dynamic core of neurons. It is a higher level process enabled by the properties of the underlying neurons and genes, in turn enabled by the properties of the underlying molecules and physics, but it is not reducible to them, among other things because it is deeply meshed into ongoing interactions with the physical, ecological, social, and intellectual environment.”

The above selected quotes are just a small portion of the many that are worth reading and pondering. Ellis emphatically demonstrates the many ways in which top-down causation works in concert with bottom-up causation to create the mind. This is how physics underlies the mind. It is the bottom level that causes the higher levels to exist and to function. But that physics is constrained and guided by the top-down causation of the higher levels. He shows how the highest levels involve large-scale interaction with our environment—our peers, our culture, and even Platonic entities. In this way, the mind emerges from the brain, an awesome interaction both vertically and horizontally.

At the bottom level we find quantum dynamics. In sharp contrast to classical dynamics, we find inherent unpredictability. The state of a system evolves dynamically and collapses into an eigenstate only when a measurement is made or there is an interaction with another physical entity.

“Because the electronic band structures and the resultant lower level entities such as phonons are based on the higher level crystal structure rather than simply being based solely on properties of the lower level constituent, they are both emergent phenomena. They simply would not exist if the macro-structure did not exist.” Ellis goes on to use my favorite examples of emergence from my own fields of expertise, superconductors and semiconductors. Both materials exhibit unique particles such as Cooper pairs and holes and excitons that could exist only through the structural nature of a large ensemble of lower level particles, namely the ions and electrons that comprise the material. The top-down causation is the structural crystal lattice and the way in which the ions vibrate and respond to the electron cloud. None of these effects could be predicted on the basis of the independent particles alone. It is their interaction that enables the new particles and new behavior.

“…the higher levels of the hierarchy of complexity and causation provide the context within which the lower level actions take place. By setting the context in terms of initial conditions, boundary conditions, and structural relations, the higher levels determine the way the lower level actions occur.”

“The lower levels do the work, but the higher levels decide what is to be done.”

Ellis includes an interesting discussion of Olber’s Paradox which ponders why the night sky is dark. Integrating over an infinite universe would imply that the night sky should be dark. The fundamental reason for a dark night sky is that the universe is not infinite and the visual horizon is such that it is dominated by the cosmic background radiation. In other words, our universe is essentially a thermal bath at a temperature of 2.73K. The thermal gradient from the sun’s radiation to this bath temperature enables the energy driving force for evolution on the earth. Hence, he says “…the reason we observe the night sky to be dark is that if that were not true, we would not be here to see it.”

He also addresses the fascinating question of the arrow of time. Since all of the basic equations of physics are time invariant, being the same forward in time as backward, why should there be an arrow of time? Ellis says “The direction of time must be derived by a top-down process from cosmological to local scales.” In other words, the initial conditions and special boundary conditions at the big bang set up the entropy of the universe to be very small initially so that entropy always increases as the universe evolves.

This issue specifically arises when discussing the mind. “The claim can be made that physics does not just constrain what happens, it uniquely determines what happens in the brain. If basic physics determines all, the situation is causally closed and there is no room for higher level influences.” Ellis responds to this concern in this chapter, arguing that “…the underlying physics establishes the set of possibilities that can happen, but not the specific events that actually happen.”

Ellis offers five ways, which are not mutually exclusive, in which top-down effects can work:

1.       Contextual constraints

2.       Constraining structures

3.       Changing the nature of lower level elements

4.       Existence of lower level elements

5.       Deleting lower level elements

This was a delightful chapter to read, both for being shorter and also for having more interesting examples. In essence, Ellis cites numerous examples in which high-level entities set a context in which the lower-level entities interact. In this way, the causality from above influences the outcomes of the lower-level causal forces. Reductionism cannot explain the high-level constraints. The simultaneous bottom-up and top-down causality is truly a beautiful interplay between the many different levels of existence.

In this chapter, Ellis works through seven different types of top-down causation:

1.       Deterministic top-down causation

2.       Non-adaptive feedback control

3.       Adaptive selection of outcomes

4.       Adaptive selection of goals

5.       Adaptive selection of selection criteria

6.       Complex adaptive systems

7.       Intelligent top-down causation

These seven types show a progression of very simple deterministic control to a far more dynamic and interactive type.

·       The deterministic type is the easiest to understand and sets the example. He discusses machines, physical systems, living systems, logical systems, mathematical models and randomness and noise. Machines are the archetypal examples of deterministic causation. Even for living systems, there is a basic deterministic level. Ellis describes it this way “…biology is based on molecular machines at the lower level, which behave in a deterministic way and affect higher levels in a bottom-up manner. This happens through physics processes at the lower levels in the context of systems structured so as to have specific functions. The outcomes depend crucially on context. Again it happens by:

o   Setting boundary conditions for differential equations.

o   Setting values for contextual variables.

o   Passing signals via messenger molecules.

o   Constraining lower level causation through structural conditions.”

·       Feedback control systems are familiar to all of us. The simplest is the thermostat which we use frequently. Our world is filled with control systems from the simple thermostat to complex engineering control systems to biological systems where there are many homeostatic systems. “Feedback control systems depend essentially on information flows from system sensors to the controller.” Feedback control, Ellis says, is top-down causation because of two factors:

o   Effectiveness of goals which are at a higher level than the controlled system

o   The system acts as a whole.

·       Adaptive systems. Ellis discusses four different types of adaptive selection processes:

o   Adaptive selection of outcomes

o   Adaptive selection of goals

o   Adaptive selection of selection criteria

o   Complex adaptive systems

In many ways, this is the heart of the book. Essentially adaptation is a feedback control system in which the feedback system changes or adapts by changing outcomes, goals, criteria or a combination of them. He notes that “adaptive processes…take place when there is

·       Variation of Interacting Entities

·       Selection of Preferred Entities”

At lower levels of the hierarchy, entities such as protons and neutrons have virtually no variation. They are each the interactions of three component quarks but there is no variation. Atoms in molecules have very limited quantized variations possible but no significant variation. More complex entities, like snowflakes, come in a large variety of shapes but they do not change and their differences in configuration have little impact on their properties. But at higher levels of complexity, entities can differ from each other and can change in response to external stimuli.

Ellis eloquently charts the set of adaptive processes and shows its power, for example, in generating new information. “The key process is deletion of what is not wanted, leaving what is meaningful. It is also for this reason that it can innovate. The process generates new information that was not there before, or rather, finds information that was hidden in noise.”

In the section on adaptive selection of selection criteria, Ellis delves deeper into learning theory and into the mind itself.

“Between them, ethics, aesthetics, and meaning form the topmost level of the hierarchy of adaptive selection criteria…They are the highest level abstract principles that are causally effective in the real physical world, crucially guiding what happens in choosing goals at all levels.”

Ellis collects all these different levels of selection into the category of “Complex Adaptive Processes”. He explains that “Adaptive processes take place when many entities interact, for example, the cells in a body or the individuals in a population, and variation takes place in the properties of these entities, followed by selection of preferred entities that are better suited to their environment or context.”

Finally, Ellis comes to intelligent top-down causation. This occurs when symbolic representation guides what happens. “A symbolic system is a set of structured patterns, realized in time or space, that is arbitrarily chosen by an individual or group to represent objects, states, and relationships.”

This chapter is one of the longest and difficult to read. It is really the heart of the book whose purpose is to show that top-down causality exists and is ubiquitous. Part of it is catalog style which makes for choppy reading but it does demonstrate the incredible range of top-down causal processes. In this chapter, and so far in this book, Ellis hasn’t attempted to show how these systems came into being. Rather he is describing what systems are like and showing that these causal factors play a key role in virtually all the systems we build and observe.

First and foremost, I was delighted to be able to attend the ASA 2016 annual meeting, enjoying it without the responsibility of being the executive director for the first time since 2004. Azusa Pacific University was a great site for the meeting. The lodging, meals, and meeting rooms were in close proximity and served as a great locale. Above all, the plenary talks were excellent. All recordings are available here. My favorite was Bill Newsome’s talk on neuroscience. He brought ideas very similar to what George Ellis is talking about. He credits Nancey Murphy and colleagues just like Ellis does. It’s worth a listen.

There’s also a great summary of the meeting by Scott Buchanan in his blog. It’s well worth reading.

I’ve also had to interrupt my reading of Ellis to review and endorse Denis Lamoureux’s forthcoming book. Hope to discuss it in the future on this blog.

And a second interruption was to read Kenton Spark’s “Sacred Words, Broken Words” for our Grace Chapel book discussion group. Also an excellent read.

So all this explains my hiatus on Ellis. I hope to be back at it soon.

Ellis provides a diagram of how one might describe the hierarchical levels in both inanimate and biological entities:

Ellis notes that it is unclear what the topmost and bottommost levels of the hierarchy are.  To find bottom, one might need to go to quantum gravity or something and that may not be the lowest either. The top appears to be a metaphysical level and who knows if there is more to the story. But the concepts are nevertheless effective without knowing the limits of the levels.

At each level, the dominant entities form modular structures that comprise the entities of the next higher level in the hierarchy. The elementary physics level is comprised of quarks that combine into a modular form of protons and neutrons which comprise the entities of the nuclear physics level, etc. Working at the nuclear physics level, one can ignore the structure of quarks and study the nucleons as a module. Ellis describes this as “information-hiding” in the sense that a higher level can hide the detailed information in the next lower level. The high levels of macroscopic materials need little or no specific information of the individual atoms and molecules. That information is conveniently hidden.

Abstraction occurs whenever a module can be treated as a single unit and referred to by some appropriate label. In the simplest case above, the label “proton” refers to the module of three specific quarks. Encapsulation is whenever the internal workings of an abstract module are completely hidden. No characteristic of the module depends on the details of the components.

Bottom-up causation is well-known and is generally considered unique and sufficient in a reductionist perspective. The atoms and molecules behave according to well-known laws of nature and that action comprises the characteristic of the cell and so on up the hierarchy. Strong reductionism would claim that all behavior could be explained by such bottom-up causation. Such explanations are limited only by the complexity of expressing the equations.

Ellis claims “the phenomenon of emergent order is when higher levels display new properties not evident at the lower levels…higher level structures are created out of lower level entities and then exist as entities in their own right. They are described by suitable higher level variables.”

Variables that describe traits are “structural if they are basically of a static nature—they give the higher level its identity; and they are dynamic if they are essential to its behavior—they are time dependent in crucial ways.

Definitions:

Bottom-up causation “is the ability of lower levels of reality to have a causal effect on the higher levels which emerge from them, sometimes uniquely determining what happens at the higher levels.

Top-down causation “is the ability of higher levels of reality to have a causal power over lower levels.

“Emergence of complexity takes place where quite different laws of behavior hold at the higher levels than at the lower levels.” In my field of condensed matter physics, I understand this as phenomena like semiconductivity or superconductivity of macroscopic solids represent fundamentally different laws of behavior than those at the level of individual atoms. Yet the higher level is entirely determined by the behavior of the lower level. The key is that there is also top-down causation in the sense that that higher level behavior is context-dependent. External constraints limit the action of the elements of the lower level.

Multiple representation occurs when many different microstates of one level all correspond to the same higher level state. For example, many different combinations of individual molecular positions and velocities correspond to the same volume and pressure of a gas. The number of different lower level representations determines the entropy of that state.

“…emergence is when phenomena arise from and depends on more basic phenomena yet are simultaneously autonomous from that base…A phenomenon is emergent if it cannot be reduced to, explained, or predicted from its constituent parts.”

Ellis argues that top-down causation can occur if and only if there are equivalence classes of lower-level states. Consider a state in some level that can result from many different lower-level states, as in the case of multiple representation. This state “must lead to the same top level outcome, independent of which lower level states instantiates the high level state.” He calls this the Principle of Equivalence Classes. In other words, changing a high level variable will lead to a change in the lower-level equivalence class for that variable but this change cannot depend on which member of the equivalence class exists at the time of the change. Only in this way can there be consistency and reproducibility of the effect of changing a high level variable. Only then can top-down causation work and in that case, top-down causation does happen.

Ellis discusses four ways in which top-down causation can be demonstrated.

1.       Altering context. Changing a high-level variable reliably induces change in the system.

2.       Identifying equivalence classes. One can show directly that equivalence classes exist.

3.       Identifying dynamics. One can show specific mechanisms that effect top-down control or specific feedback control systems.

4.       Computer Modelling. One can model hierarchies and demonstrate the top-down causation.

Finally, he points out that the lower levels set constraints on the properties that higher levels can realize. For example, matter and energy conservation laws at the low levels put limits on the higher level possibilities.

This chapter is more theoretical than chapter two. He introduces and defines many core concepts of emergence. There seems to be a lot of overlap with chapter one, largely due to the independence of each chapter. Here he expands in detail the concepts of emergence and complexity mentioned in chapter one. It’s not easy reading but I’ve almost deluded myself into thinking that I might actually be starting to understand it.

Anyone who has written software programs or done circuit design for chips or any microprocessor architecture work will find this chapter easy to understand. Anyone who hasn’t done anything in this field is well advised to simply skip it. Ellis shows how a digital computer system exhibits top-down causation by emergent entities. With well-known concepts, he clarifies the concepts of emergence.

He describes computer systems as having two primary hierarchies. One is an implementational (vertical) hierarchy and the other is a logical (horizontal) hierarchy. Each hierarchy involves many levels of modular structures. For example, in the implementational hierarchy, one of the lowest levels is the atoms and molecules level. A higher level is the transistor and wiring level that form the physical layout. Above that, the transistors are combined into logic and memory circuits while above that, the circuits are combined into modules such as the arithmetic control unit, the central processing unit, etc. The highest level is the physical interface with humans. On the software side, the lowest level is the binary code that runs on the hardware. Next is assembly language and sequentially higher-order compilers and sophisticated programming languages. Modular units like subroutines are closed entities comprised of lower level commands.

Ellis explains “Each higher level behavior emerges from the lower level ones. But what ultimately determines what happens? The higher levels drive the lower levels.” This, he claims, is the essence of top-down causation. It is intrinsically coupled with bottom-up causation since the behavior of the lower levels causes the desired action at the higher levels. The higher levels are characterized by what can be considered abstract entities that interact and cause the appropriate desired action at the lower levels.

Then Ellis uses a term which I believe is potentially confusing and needs some discussion. He emphasizes that the entities in the higher level logical hierarchy are non-physical. He states that “Software is not a physical thing, neither is data. They are realized, or instantiated, as energetic states in computer memory. The essence of software does not reside in their physical nature: it is the patterns of states, instantiated by electrons being in particular places at a particular time, that matters.” What does it mean to be “non-physical?” As Christians we are very comfortable with non-physical beings and we quickly associate non-physical entities with spiritual ones. But I do not believe Ellis is using the term this way. By non-physical, I believe he means an entity that is not uniquely associated with a physical state. It may be the result of any number of physical states but its existence does not depend on any specific one.

While Rolf Landauer reported to me at IBM Research in the late 90’s, he told me in our personal discussions that “Information is physical, but independent of its embodiment.” I’m still struggling to understand this more fully. Information can be transferred from one physical embodiment to another without any necessary energy dissipation but deleting one bit of information necessarily dissipates kt ln 2 of energy. I’m also trying to figure out whether Landauer would agree with Ellis about software being non-physical because it is independent of its physical embodiment. I suppose being independent of physical embodiment may not be sufficient to warrant the term “non-physical.” In any case, we cannot assume that either Landauer or Ellis are thinking of spiritual-like entities when they talk about “non-physical” entities.

Finally, Ellis closes this chapter with this gem: “At a higher level, the existence of computers is an outcome of the human drive for meaning and purpose: it is an expression of the possibility space of meanings, the higher levels whereby we guide what actions take place.” As is true of so many sentences in this book, I have to read it many times to think it through. And maybe it wouldn’t make sense without reading the whole chapter. But I was in the business of designing and building computers all my career and never thought of it this way.

What he seems to be saying is that as we go up the physical and logical hierarchies, entities emerge from the lower levels with increasing abstraction. Finally, we get to the top levels where meaning and purpose reside. The closely linked relationships of bottom-up and top-down causation lead to the possibility of meaning and purpose, aspects that do not exist at the lower levels. We often say that science cannot address meaning and purpose but in Ellis’ view, emergence allows us to recognize meaning and purpose at the top levels even though it is absent at the lower levels. This I must contemplate for a while.

Ellis is in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking. He has long interacted with scholars such as ASA Fellow Robert Russell, Nancey Murphy, Tim O’Connor as well as Phil Clayton and other advocates of emergence. I have been interested in and persuaded by the ideas of emergence for many years and am eager to learn about some of the more detailed issues connected with it.

He writes that his aim in the book is to “…support the view that, even though physical laws underlie all material entities, there exist higher level causal relations that allow the brain to act as a means of creating theories, searching for meaning, expressing tenderness, and doing all the other myriad things that make us human, without contradicting or overwriting those lower level physical laws. Consequently, physics does not control the mind, it enables the mind. The same is true for genetics and neurobiology: they both to some degree shape what the mind does, but neither by itself determines the outcome, because the mind has a logic of its own…We are genuinely fully human, even though we emerge through the interactions of fundamental particles.”

The book has eight chapters:

1.       Complexity and Emergence

2.       Digital Computer Systems

3.       The Basis of Complexity

4.       Kinds of Top-Down Causation

5.       Room at the Bottom?

6.       The Foundation: Physics and Top-Down Causation

7.       The Mind and the Brain

8.       The Broader View

Springer asked Ellis to write the book in such a way that each chapter could stand alone and be sold separately as well as a complete book. This results in a significant amount of repetition, especially of references, but that repetition is very helpful in gaining familiarity with complex ideas.

So with that as a background, I’ll start to dig in and occasionally share with you his ideas.

Their ancestry remains a mystery. For many years, there was a viable proposal that the bones were simply those of a human with some disease like micro encephalitis. The latest news is the discovery of more human fossils dated to about 700,000 years ago. These were also smallish humans, about the size of Hobbit, and are highly likely to be the ancestors of Hobbit. But while it solves some mysteries, it generates others.

A couple of possible explanations remain to be examined. One is that a little over a million years ago, a community of Homo Erectus migrated to Indonesia. Members of this species ranged up to six feet tall. In this case, the population could have undergone what is known as “island dwarfism” in which species that are isolated on a small island evolve into smaller versions of their species, sometimes as much as six times smaller. While many species have been found to exhibit such dwarfism, it has never been seen in humans. If this happened, then H. Floresiensis is likely a descendant of the branch of H. Erectus that underwent dwarfism rather rapidly. The 700,000 year old fossils are about the same size as the 50,000 year old one, but much smaller than H. Erectus.

An alternative theory is that it was a much earlier migration out of Africa rather than H. Erectus that led to a population in Indonesia at that time. These individuals would have been smaller to begin with and less rapid dwarfism needed to have occurred. More data will be needed to distinguish between these two ideas. In either case, it seems the argument for a diseased human explanation for the “Hobbit” is vanishingly weak.

What do we make of all this? Paleoanthropology continues to be a fascinating field. New technology is providing more specialized tools to tease more data from both old and new fossil discoveries. What we do know is that human ancestry is rich with diversity and far from a simple story of a single species.

Is there anything we can learn about God from the book of God's works that we do not first learn from his book of words? Should we be able to?

What do you make of Neal deGrasse Tyson's comments in the attached 88 second video clip? If I didn't attach it correctly, you can find it here: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-neil-degrasse-tyson-thinks-about-god-2015-12

Essentially, he says he is agnostic about the existence of God but seems to say that he does not see benevolence in nature, implying that if there is a Creator, that Creator might not be benevolent either. What do you make of it? I would think that we can see any attribute in nature that we want, simply by choosing what phenomena we wish to study. In other words, we only find what we want to find. Maybe we can't learn anything about God from nature unless we already know it.

I recorded the first two episodes but haven't seen either one. Though I suspect I'll have some disagreements with Hawking, the topics look very interesting and perhaps we can have a good discussion through comments to this post.

Randy

The difficulties soon begin when it becomes obvious that the model doesn’t provide any insight on how to resolve perceived conflicts. Which interpretation needs to be changed if there is a difference of opinion? In several of my talks, I have taken the time to explore different variations of the two-book model which lead to different schools of thought.

The first chart in the attached file (downloadable from the link below this post) shows my personal version of the two-book model. I like to refer to the author as “Logos” in light of my favorite passage of creation in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Science and theology are the study of the books of God’s works and words, respectively. The remaining pages reflect a somewhat playful modification of the model in ways that lead to various types of errors.

Consider the one-book model which reflects the view that the material world is evil or at least irrelevant and not worthy of consideration. Where is theology, however, when it cannot relate to the world in which we live? This version has little survival value.

Alternatively, a one-book variation might consider only the book of God’s works and not admit to God’s words. In that scenario, theology would seek to find God solely through the study of nature. This was a popular form of study a few centuries and we refer to it as natural theology. However, there is no calibration of the conclusions to be drawn about God from nature. Is he full of beauty and grace as the sunset over the calm ocean? Or is he full of rage and fury as the wind and waves in a hurricane?

Without the book of God’s words, would scientific study of God’s works lead us to God? This is essentially the basis of much of scientific apologetics. Many people feel that science, by itself, reveals the existence of God, another variation of natural theology. But who is this God? How is he related to the one revealed in the book of God’s words?

Another approach is to study the book of God’s words through scientific methodology. We refer to this as higher criticism. It presupposes primarily a human authorship of the Bible. While it can bring great insight into understanding the Bible, it can also be taken to extreme to minimize divine inspiration.

It is also possible to study the book of God’s works through the book of God’s words. In the early 18^th century this approach was sometimes called “Scripture geology.” This leads us to the concept of concordism. The two-book model seems to me to be inherently non-concordistic in the sense that it makes no claims about the content and teachings of God’s word, particularly whether or not God’s word describes nature inerrantly. Concordism assumes that the Bible does teach science accurately and presages modern science and not ancient cosmology. This sets up a potentially inherent conflict model in which the study of God’s works through science is pitted against that study through God’s word. A non-concordistic approach assumes that the teachings in the two books are not of the same kind and therefore not inherently in conflict.

A true two-book model therefore can help us avoid many variations that lead to conflict and disagreement. Perhaps by seeing these conflicts as originating in a deviation from the two-book model, we can help diffuse the disagreements.

Every study of the Bible needs to address at some point the issue of what does the Bible teach about history and science and how does it relate to our modern science? The natural assumption of Christians seems to begin with a direct correlation. Countless questions about the Bible deal with how to understand a biblical passage in light of current science. Examples abound, often as legends that refuse to die.

One well-known example is that of the missing day. Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and it did until the Israelites won the battle. Bewildered at the implications of such a miracle, concordists have offered all sorts of explanations. On one side, skeptics note that the inertial forces due to the earth halting its rotation would have ripped apart the entire globe. On the other side, a myth continues to propagate that NASA astronomers have determined that there is a missing day in the history of the path of stars. The legend goes that as computer calculations have been done of the path of stars over history, that observations could not be understood unless a missing day was assumed in approximately the year of Joshua’s battle. No such observation or calculation has ever been nor could it be made. No stellar observations in those days were anywhere near precise enough for such a determination. Yet the story persists.

The stakes are high. If there isn’t a missing day, concordists have a hard time rationalizing the sun standing still. Fortunately, theories abound with alternative interpretations and ancient ideas. But it doesn’t stop skeptics from scoffing at a Bible with errors in it and mythical stories. What all of these have in common is the assumption of concordism, the basic idea that there is a correlation of biblical teaching and modern science. So a biblical teaching of the sun standing still must correlate with some scientific observations.

Some theologians will draw the line after Genesis 11, asserting that concordance is important only after Genesis 11 while the earlier passages have no claim to being historical. Others feel that no concordance is necessary in the entire Bible.

The sheer volume of articles and books on attempts to correlate biblical teaching with scientific observations indicates the strength of the assumption of concordism. But is it really true? Must it be true? If it isn’t all true and it isn’t all false, how do we decide what is and what isn’t historical? Let’s ponder these questions in the next few posts.

The speaker, Gonzalo Giribet, showed a slide of the age of the ocean floor. Very little was between 200 and 400 million years old and virtually nothing older than that. Almost all of it is younger than 180 million years. In contrast, continental surfaces feature rocks ranging all the way close to the 4.65By age of the earth. That’s amazing.

The islands he was discussing were those that had formed by breaking away from the big continents during the split up of Gondwana into the current continents. For example, New Zealand, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, and many parts of Southeast Asia have been identified as having once been part of Gondwana and then were isolated. By tracing the evolutionary history of species on these islands, information can be inferred of the time and history of that isolation.

One controversy, I learned, is whether or not New Zealand was entirely submerged under water after its isolation. Indications are that it may have been submerged about 25 million years ago. The author showed evidence that he thinks is increasing in the last few years that the island was not entirely submerged after all. This stems from the diversity of species of invertebrates. He really loves those daddy long-legs.

Giribet has also spent a good deal of time in Antarctica, deep sea diving in those icy waters to retrieve countless specimens of invertebrates. I learned that part of what influenced Antarctica to have a very cold climate after a relatively warm climate was that its isolation from Gondwana opened up a circumpolar ocean current that in effect isolated the island and became a refrigerator. What an amazing history.

One of the unexpected effects so far has been the impact of a change in routine. For 60 years my life has been governed by someone else’s schedule. School hours for 21 years and office hours for 40. Little did I realize the extent to which it governed my life. From meal times to when and where to go grocery shopping to dietary habits, everything revolved around the infrastructure of a schedule imposed on me by circumstances. The first reaction in retirement is to keep the same schedule. Pretend that important tasks need to be done on the same timetable and keep those hours. But that seems pointless. What’s the use of being retired then? So a new routine needs to be invented. And coordinated with my wife’s whose life has now been rudely interrupted. I suspect it will take a good deal of trial and error to work it out. The freedom is enjoyable—at least for now.

I was most grateful for the outpouring of expressions of love and appreciation by so many ASA members through email and at the retirement events earlier this month. The book of memories I was given was extraordinary and an incredible treasure. Many people saw the live streaming of the event and others can see it in the recording at http://network.asa3.org/mpage/ASAmeetED. My comments at that meeting include some thoughts that I’d like to pursue in these musings to come. But for now, my brain just needs a little relaxation.

• God for raising up and sustaining this organization for 75 years
• All of you as members of the ASA for your support and encouragement
• The 16 council members with whom I have had the privilege of working
• The dedicated and talented staff who do all the work, including Jack, Lyn, Marty, Vicki, Emily, Carol, Jim, Terry, Craig, and many others
• All of you who have generously and sacrificially donated to ASA, enabling our operation
  

Leslie has graciously agreed to have me continue as a part-time volunteer IT consultant and to keep my email address at randy@asa3.org. I would like to keep in touch with all of you via a newly established blog that I've called "Musings of the ASA Director Emeritus." I do not know what topics I'll cover or how often I'll write something or if anyone will be interested. The URL is:
http://network.asa3.org/blogpost/1355195/
If you wish, you may click on "subscribe" on that page to be notified of any posts.

May God continue to sustain the ASA for his honor and glory,