Science and Religion Part II

(For Part 1 see here)

Did Lawrence Krauss really say that? Is Deism the thin end of the theist wedge?  Deism has been an exit point for faith, so perhaps it can also be an entry point? However, the second part of that statement looks as though it's there to keep the atheist gallery happy by signaling that Krauss  still has a gung-ho anti-religious stance. But I think he needs to brush up on just what theistic evolutionists are saying.

In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins tells us:

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

 (The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” p. 6)

This view, I submit, is evidence of the Western Dualist paradigm which sees so-called natural forces and God's creative action as two very distinct and mutually exclusive modes of creation: For Richard it was an exclusive-OR between the "natural forces" of Darwinian processes and the supernatural power of God. But since Richard is an atheist he therefore votes for the natural forces party.

Western Dualism was historically expressed as deism; this is the view that God is to his created world as the skilled human artisan is to the automata of the 18th century. In both cases the created object is thought to have an animus of it's own, an animus by which it is able to function autonomously: Sci-fi stories where the created object runs out of the control of its creator tap into this paradigm. When pushed too hard deism leads to a creation cut adrift from its Creator and eventually death of God secularism: Somehow it is supposed that the cosmos is sufficiently self-provisioned to create and run itself. But as I've pointed out before the material of the cosmos has no property of aseity: The simple logic of the mathematical elementa of physics can't be the source of aseity: That logic necessarily starts with brute-fact contingencies, not aseity. In contrast, God being infinitely complex, could hide aseity in that complexity although we would be hard put to it to understand the infinite logic of aseity. Hence it is written: And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. (Hebrews 11:6). That verse is the axiomatic cornerstone of a successful epistemology in that it provides the template for its natural analogue: Viz: anyone who comes to the cosmos must believe that it is organised, coherent and rational and that it rewards those who earnestly seek that rationality. Without this epistemic assumption we move dangerously close to the nihilist abyss. But axiomatic belief that nature conforms to intelligible and ordered patterns of behavior doesn't necessarily entail a belief in the autonomous animus of nature or the connected idea that  if "natural forces did it God didn't do it!". 

Is the axiomatic & metaphysical belief in the independent animus of nature right?  It seems that evangelical atheist PZ Myers thinks so; see the following comment which Myers posted in 2014. In this comment Myers is criticizing those evolutionists who seek common ground with "creationists" through theistic evolution, an approach Myers most definitely rejects...... 

Coyne also has some ire for the theistic evolutionist perspective, as well. So do I. I think it distorts the science in an ugly way. It’s effective with some soft creationists in the same way the approach I mentioned in the last paragraph works. You find common ground: “I believe in God, too!” Then, unfortunately, to bring them around to your side, what you then do is produce a mangled, false version of evolution — “It’s guided by a higher power!” — in order to get them to accept “evolution”. A gutless, mechanistically compromised version of evolution.

No thanks. Darwin’s great insight was that you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution — that local responses to the environment will produce efficient responses that will yield a pattern of descent and diversity and complexity. To replace “intent was unnecessary” with “God provided intent” does deep violence to the whole theory, and completely misses the point. (My emphases) 

And the point? The metaphysical idea of the animus of natural forces is clear here: Viz: you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution. The general notion here is that the physical laws are a kind of proactive guiding hand rather than a passive description of patterns of behavior sustained by God himself. 

But evolution as it is currently understood would not work without some kind of a priori information reservoir. See chapter 8 of this document where I discuss this question. It follows then that evolution isn't in fact a purely random process (something PZ Myers agrees with - see here). As such it displays a very constrained pattern of behavior; forget those claims about evolution being nothing but "randomness" because if standard evolution is to be viable any such randomness can only generate life if it is constrained within a very tight envelope defined by the natural physical regime - if this constraint didn't exist there would be no evolution. 

But for Myers the existence of those highly constrained patterns of behavior must mean that evolution has all it needs in terms of physical resources and therefore doesn't need any further input from deity.  Viz: Darwin’s great insight was that you don’t need an overseer guiding evolution.  For Myers somehow those very constrained patterns sustain themselves and have an intrinsic animus to do so. Well, that's understandable given his atheism; he's actually following in the footsteps of those deists who conceived that God was to nature's mechanisms as man was to his automata and therefore God can at least stand back if not take leave of absence altogether while nature performs according to its own inner drives. 

But for (non-deist) theists like myself, the origin and sustenance of those strange and very contingent laws of behavior can not be either self-created or self-sustaining; they require deity in constant attendance and therefore in that sense for Christian evolutionists God must be the ever-present and immanent "why" behind the "how". What justification does Myers have for claiming that theistic evolutionists have produced a mangled, false version of evolution..... a gutless, mechanistically compromised version of evolution.....To replace “intent was unnecessary” with “God provided intent” does deep violence to the whole theory, and completely misses the point? Just what violence is being done to the theory and what point is being missed?  Yes, to imagine that there is a God behind the scenes constantly creating, sustaining & managing natural patterns, patterns which have no aseity of their own will no doubt seem to Myers eccentric to the point of crankiness. But if he could humor the theistic evolutionists for a while he might then realize that their cranky extra-evolutionary obsession does no violence to the theory itself since it doesn't change the patterns of behavior or add anything observationally to them; they remain the same.  This also voids Krauss' criticism: There is no necessary internal inconsistency in theistic evolution because it doesn't necessarily change the observable evolutionary patterns of behavior. 

Theistic evolution is in fact a interpretation layered on top of the science and what does change is the intuitive opinion about the meaning of those patterns: Viz: For Myers his intuition is that we need look no further for explanation than in a very contingent natural pattern; for him those patterns are just brute facts and that is the end of the matter (See Bertrand Russell's opinion here which is analogous). But for theists like myself this leaves us with an empty and meaningless absurdity: In my opinion that absurdity can only be dispelled by the intuition that those patterns have an intentionality about them..... so it's all down to a difference in intuition. Although I have no strong commitment to affirming standard evolutionary mechanisms I find nothing absurd about theistic evolutionist's notion that God is the creative force in a standard evolutionary scenario. 

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In a post on Panda's Thumb, mathematician Jason Rosenhouse tells us about his book entitled "The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism".  In his book he challenges anti-evolutionist's misuse of mathematical results such as the second law of thermodynamics, a law which fundamentalists and de-facto IDists never seem understand (Perhaps with one notable exception). But for reasons other than  his useful critique of anti-evolutionism the following paragraph by Rosenhouse is notable (In particular see the two sentences I've emboldened):

Sometimes the anti-evolutionists invoke a mathematical principle rather than carry out a calculation. They go on at length about the “No Free Lunch” (NFL) theorems, for example. These are legitimate mathematical results that establish the non-existence of a universally successful search algorithm. Dembski, sometimes with various coauthors, has argued that since evolution is in some way analogous to a combinatorial search, these theorems imply that any success that it has can only result from intelligent tailoring of nature’s fitness landscapes to the “algorithm” of natural selection. But once again the theorem plays only a rhetorical role in the argument. Since nature’s fitness landscapes arise ultimately from the laws of physics, Dembski and his collaborators are really just asking why the universe has just the properties it does. It’s a reasonable question, but it’s not one biologists need to worry about, and it’s not one to which the NFL theorems make any contribution toward answering.

(Note: What Rosenhouse refers to as the Fitness Landscape I refer to as  The Spongeam). 

Rosenhouse's comment at the end here is comparable to one made by mathematical biologist Joe Felsenstein (See below); namely, that the a priori information content demanded by standard model evolutionary mechanisms is found in the fitness landscape and this information in turn must be implicit in the physical regime. ID guru William Dembski drew attention to the fact that this a priori information must be present somewhere. But what Dembski did not show was that this information wasn't present in someway in the physical regime. He more or less admitted as such in this lecture.  De facto IDists misused NFL theory in that it was assumed by many of them with dualist habits of mind to imply that natural forces in the form of evolutionary mechanisms had been eliminated from the inquiry - in fact those proposed mechanisms were still very much part of the inquiry.  As Felsenstein said in a comment on this blog post of mine: 

If the laws of physics are what is responsible for fitness surfaces having "a huge amount of information" and being "very rare object[s]" then Dembski has not proven a need for Intelligent Design to be involved. I have not of course proven that ordinary physics and chemistry is responsible for the details of life -- the point is that Dembski has not proven that they aren't.

The question of direct Intelligent Design thus shifts from ad-hoc paranormal interventions to the origins of the contingent information implicit in the cosmic physical regime; it is this, according to Felsenstein, which has made standard evolutionary mechanisms  possible. As Felsenstein went on to say:

Biologists want to know whether normal evolutionary processes account for the adaptations we see in life. If they are told that our universe's laws of physics are special, biologists will probably decide to leave that debate to cosmologists, or maybe to theologians.

Now there's a challenge for the theologians! As with the quote from Lawrence Krauss we see a crack in the wall of atheism through which light is streaming!

So, the conclusion is that whether or not life has arisen via standard evolutionary mechanisms, either way we talking about Hard Creationism in so far as a huge reservoir of a priori contingent information is required to resource creation and in particular evolutionary mechanisms.  But the hardened atheist response is unlikely to concur even with Krauss's admission that because the universe is an amazing place then deism isn't an implausible postulate. To neutralize any amazement about cosmic contingency some kind of multiverse is often resorted to. Multiverse postulates are intended to reduce the surprisal value of our information rich universe to the level of trivial expectation by placing it in an all but infinite sea of pure randomness.

The Western deist response, which at least gives a starting role to God (but thence forth God is retired from the scene), partly has its origins in a reaction to the automata of the enlightenment. But for myself I think it likely that the information input from deity is on-going and not a once-for-all act.