Classic Dualism

Courtesy of the Faraday Institute

I'm part of a Facebook group called Evangelicals for Evolutionary Creation. This is not to say that I've committed myself to standard Evolutionary thinking, but I feel that this group are worthy thinkers to keep an eye on. However, somebody put the following comment on their FB feed....

So I’m getting toward the end of Origins by the Haarsmas. A question arises, if abiogenesis is true, how does this not prove that life can happen without God? This kind of concerns me and it seems to be an open question in evolutionary creationism.

I believe that "Haarsmas" is a reference to Deborah Haarsma, the current president of Biologos, the Christian evolutionary creation organisation. I didn't comment on this statement as the Evolutionary Creation people are more than capable of critiquing such a breathtakingly naive perspective, a perspective with widespread appeal among both Christians and atheists. On this view it's a binary choice: "Either God did it or evolution did it"

I've no doubt said something like the following many times before: Since the enlightenment Western science has merely shown us that the cosmos is sufficiently organized for us to form succinct mathematical statements describing its dynamics. As many Christians fully understand, those descriptions in and of themselves only tell us about the "how?" of the cosmos and not the "why?" - but the "why?" is only a meaningful question if one first accepts that sentience, intelligence and purpose are a priori features of existence.

 If  anything this strange mathematical descriptive elegance only compounds the enigma of the cosmos and tells us little about absolute origins; that is, the ultimate gap, a gap that descriptive science is logically incapable of filling and if pressed simply leaves us with an elegant-descriptions-all-the-way-down regress. In fact, since we have no logically obliging reason for the continued existence of the contingencies of our cosmic reality that ultimate gap is everywhere and everywhen. 

And yet the dualistic view expressed by the above quote is the common default: That is "either God did it or cosmic processes did it"; the underlying assumption of this perspective is that somehow the enigma of cosmic organization has a logical self sufficiency which at best only leaves room for the God of deism or at worst no God at all. Such a perspective might have its origins in the early enlightenment/industrial era when it started to become much clearer that mechanisms (such as a steam regulator & automata) could be developed which meant that machines looked after their own running. The popularist conclusion was that the cosmos must be that kind of mechanism. The realization that such mechanisms were so startingly sophisticated enough to beg the question of their design seems to have been lost on many people: One such person in our modern era is (atheist?) theologian Don Cupitt of the Sea of Faith movement. Also, blowhard atheist Richard Carrier is of this ilk. Carrier is so convinced by the sophistry of his flawed view of probability and randomness that he believes probability to be logically sufficient to fill in the God-gap.  And yet Carrier succeeded in identifying that our cosmic context lacks some logically self-sufficient kernel, although Carrier's erroneous concept of probability doesn't provide that kernel. 

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It is surely ironic that the self same virtuoso cosmic organization which for some fills in the God-gap actually intensifies the nagging enigma of the absolute origins question; the contingent particularity of that organization is amazing. In fact as I have shown, evolution itself (if it has occurred) is effectively creationism on steroids.  And yet it is the underlying dualism of God vs evolution that much of the North America Intelligent Design movement (NAID) trades on. They will deny it of course, but whenever they open their mouths it is easy to see that they are exploiting the popularist God-of-the-gaps "Intelligence vs blind natural forces" dichotomy. To attack standard evolution on the scientific basis that the evidence is insufficient is one thing but to attack it on the basis of a half-cocked dualist philosophy is quite another - and I put it to the NAID community that although they affect to claim theirs is a scientific dispute their ulterior reasoning is in fact based on the popular appeal of their philosophical dualism, whatever they might claim. That appeal, however, is understandable I suppose because the above quote from a Facebook page is in fact the tip of a huge market iceberg of popularist thinking which the NAID's dichotomized explanations address and by which they make their money, trade and continue in mutual backslapping. For more on NAID see here, here and here.