Thinking Christianly about Biological Complexity

Ard Louis

www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/postgrad/

Department of Physics

University of Oxford

Cross-cultural, broad-brush talk

• evangelical culture(s)• Many scientific sub-cultures• culture is often “caught” not “taught”

cultural iceberg

Biological self-assembly

http://www.npn.jst.go.jp/

• Biological systems self-assemble (they make themselves)• Can we understand?• Can we emulate? (Nanotechnology)

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are needed to see this picture.

Virus self-assembly

• Some viruses can be put in a test tube and made to form/dissolve• (first shown by Fraenkel-Contrat&Williams 1955- for TMV)

• Much simpler problem than the flagellum

Design of viruses for self assembly on computer

Monte-Carlo simulations: stochastic optimisationhttp://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/user/IainJohnson/

C.M. Dobson, Nature 426, 884 (2003)

Protein folding: design of final state and pathway

Levinthal Paradox:150 amino acids~10 angles between them ~10150 different states.How does protein find its folded native structure?

we used same design principles to make viruses self-assemble

Biological self-assembly

•is amazing!!!•If we didn’t observe it, no one would believe that it is possible (think Levinthal)•We still know very little•We are still very far from “a predictive biology”

Thinking Christianly about biological complexity ....

• Wonder and Worship• Fearfully and wonderfully made ...

• Other conclusions are controversial• Many “cultural” barriers to constructive Christian

engagement.• Origins: does where we come from determine who we

are and how we should then live?• hijacked by many ideologies

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?

• Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues and do many things well, but built-in barriers to careful and constructive thinking remain substantial.

• These barriers include an immediatism that insists on action, decision, and even perfection right now, a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations, an anti-traditionalism that privileges one’s own current judgments on biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard won and carefully stated), and a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to spiritualize all manner of bodily, terrestrial, physical, and material realities (despite the origin and providential maintenance of these realities in God). In addition, we evangelicals as a rule still prefer to put our money into programs offering immediate results, whether evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into institutions promoting intellectual development over the long term.

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?

• a Scandal because "If evangelicals are the ones who insist most aggressively that

they believe in sola scriptura, and if evangelicals are the ones who assert most vigorously the transforming work of Jesus Christ, then it is reasonable to hope that what the Scriptures teach about the origin of creation in Christ, the sustaining of all things in Christ, and the dignity of all creation in Christ-about, in other words, the subjects of learning -- will be a spur for evangelicals to a deeper and richer intellectual life: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:15-17)."

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?

• What about the UK? or Europe? or Africa/Asia/South America?• “Scandal” is really a description of popular thinking ....• Barriers to thinking Christianly about science

• Immediatism• Anti-traditionalism • Populism• Gnostic dualism

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?

• What about the UK? or Europe? or Africa/Asia/South America?• “Scandal” is really a description of popular thinking ....• Barriers to thinking Christianly about science

• Immediatism • Anti-traditionalism• Populism

Immediatism: Newton and the planets

• “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent being.”

• Sir Isaac Newton

Immediatism: Newton and the planets

18th century Orrery from a London coffee house, used to show the perfection of the orbits, which reflect God’s perfection

Immediatism: Leibnitz objects

“For, as Leibnitz objected, if God had to remedy the defects of his creation, this was surely to demean his craftmanship”

•John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion, CUP 1991, p147

Immediatism: Leibnitz objects

•“And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God”

Immediatism:Laplace and Napoleon

• Mécanique Céleste (1799-1825)

• Napoleon: Why have you not mentioned the creator?

• Laplace: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

Immediatism: Chaos and the planets

• Our understanding of the Solar System has been revolutionized over the past decade by the finding that the orbits of the planets are inherently chaotic. In extreme cases, chaotic motions can change the relative positions of the planets around stars, and even eject a planet from a system.

• The role of chaotic resonances in the Solar System, N. Murray and M. Holman, Nature 410, 773-779 (12 April 2001)

Barriers to Christian thinking about science?• immediatism

• anti-traditionalism

• populism

Roots of Science

• Science has deeply Christian roots. • Uniformity• Rationality• Intelligibility • See e.g. books by Stanley Jaki; R. Hooykaas etc..

• Royal Society, the word’s first scientific society. Founded in London July 15, 1662, many were devout protestants

Calvin, and the “Humility Principle”

“what we find people like Boyle advocating is that we manipulate the natural world, that under special conditions we observe what’s going on, and it’s only under these contrived conditions that we actually see, or get insight into, the various processes. This involves communal observation, it involves accumulation of all sorts of observations under different conditions. Eventually, we come to some conditional conclusions on the basis of this long complicated experimental process. This is a radically new approach to observation.”

“... there is a fundamental difference between the Aristotelian assumption that our sensory and cognitive apparatus are designed in such a way that they’ll give us a veridical account of nature, and a Calvinist view that says our cognitive apparatus and our faculties of observation are fallen, imperfect, that they give us the wrong knowledge, they persistently mislead us, ...Peter Harrison (Cambridge 2005) http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/Harrison/Peter%20Harrison%20-%20index.htm

We see through a glass darkly (I Cor 13)

Tokyo Aug 06 23

Humility Principle?• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--

and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. -- R.P. Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science” (1974)• http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html

• Humility Principle is methodological not personal

• We are fallen and easily “fool ourselves”• Scientific method(s) contain mechanisms to

minimise this • Many of these mechanisms are communal

• Peer review• Traditions• Often “caught” not “taught”

Humility Principle?

Critiques of communal nature by sociologists of science

• -- science is not essentially self-correcting, but is instead controlled by elites and what is “true” is largely determined on sociological grounds.

• There is some truth to this on the short term, but on the long term?

• e.g. the “Science Wars”

Golemizations

Case study 2: Relativity

+Schrödinger equation (Quantum Mechanics)

Energy-Momentum (Special Relativity)

= Dirac Equation (1928)

Electrons

Positrons (antimatter) discovered 1932

Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve (E. Wigner (1960)

Quantum Mechanics + Relativity = antimatter

Michaelson-Morley and Aether

Michaelson-Morley and Aether

• published 1887• Einstein 1905• Dayton Miller and others

did measure aether wind see 1933 review

why did the community largely ignore Miller?

Michaelson-Morley and Aether

• published 1887• Einstein 1905• Dayton Miller and others

did measure aether wind later 1933 review

The meaning of an experimental result does not, then, depend on the care with which it is designed and carried out, it depends upon what people are ready to believe.The Golem: what you should know about science

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (CUP 1993)

The Golemization and Tapestries

The Golemization of Relativity, David Mermin, Physics Today 49, p11 April 1996

Collins and Pinch took their understanding of the field from textbooks which often misrepresent for pedagogical purposes.

Science is a tapestry

-- you can pick at a few strings, but that doesn’t break the whole clothIn this case: e.g. Dirac equation, fine-splitting in atomic spectra, anti-matter etc.....

.

Tapestry arguments

• May differ from field to field• Physics

• Dirac, Wigner, unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

• Observation still key

• Biology?

Tapesty arguments in biology

Case study 3: Is the earth old?

Science is a tapestry -- you can pick at a few strings, but that doesn’t break the whole cloth

•Radiometric dating (many overlapping isotopes) •ice cores:up to 8000 years -- volcanoes like Vesuviusup to 740,000 years•Milankovitch cycles•Tree rings•All these methods (when used properly) agree. There is no scientific controversyhttp://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html

Case study 3: Is the earth old?

Milankovitch Cycles: here seen in 420,000 years of ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica research station.

Divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages occurred about 6 million years ago; the times of lineage divergence are not to scale

News & Views: The chimpanzee and us, Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders, Nature 437, 50-51 (1September 2005) .

Case study 4: common descent of human & chimp?

tapestry arguments in biology: chromosomal banding:

The origin of man: a chromosomal pictorial legacy. J.J Yunis and O. Prakash, Science 215, 1525 (1982)

Humans have 46 (2 X 23) chromosomes

Apes have 48 (2 X 24) chromosomes

chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan

tapestry arguments in biology: fusion of chromosome 2?

chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan

tapestry arguments in biology: evidence from the human genome

Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located in 2q13−2q14.1 (ref. 2; hg16:114455823−114455838), where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A). During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric structure quickly deterioriated [42].

Generation and annotation of the DNA sequences of human chromosomes 2 and 4, L.W. Hillier et al., Nature 434, 724 (2005).

endogenous retroviruses

In humans endogenous retrovirus sequences make up about 1% of the genome. Lebedev, Y. B., et al. (2000) "Differences in HERV-K LTR insertions in orthologous loci of

humans and great apes." Gene 247: 265-277.

HERV-K insertions

tapestry arguments in biology: more threads of evidence

•Genetic threads•SINEs (Alu )•LINEs•Retroviral insertions•pseudo genes (e.g. olefaction)•chromosomal inversions

•Phenotypal similarities•Fossils•The tapestry for: do humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor? seems to most biologists almost unbreakably strong

for physicists, mathematicians and engineers -- these arguments may still seem foreign and vague; where is the “proof”?, how do you know? -- so communities talk past each other

tapestry arguments in biology

“But others [biologists], I soon came to realize, regarded logical arguments as suspect. To them, experimental evidence, fallible as it might be, provided a far surer avenue to truth than did mathematical reasoning. .... Their implicit assumption seemed to be: How could one know one’s assumptions were correct? Where, in a purely deductive argument, was there room for the surprises that nature might offer, for mechanisms that might depart altogether from those imagined in our initial assumptions? Indeed for some biologists, the gap between empirical and logical necessity loomed so large as to make the latter seem effectively irrelevant.

•Evelyn Fox Keller, in “Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines, HUP, (2002)

You can’t ask those kinds of questions!!!!(Biologist to AAL at “Protein-Protein Interaction Conf”, June 2004)

“Where are the equations” -- a physicist might ask

Tapestry arguments• Basic scientific principles are shared across fields• But what is considered “necessary” or “sufficient” for a

(self-organised) tapestry varies from field to field (often unwritten) • cultural iceberg, above and below waterline• evidence: grant or paper review• demarkation problems

• mathematics->physics->chemistry->biology->medicine->engineering

• Differences --in spite of apparent epistemic laxity ... it still works!

• Christian evaluation needs communities of scholars

Barriers to Christian thinking about science?

• immediatism• scientific progress can be slow, surprising,

unexpected

• anti-traditionalism• understanding the strength of a tapestry

requires communal effort

• populism

Populism and Paley

• that couldn’t have happened by “natural means”

Populism and Paley

• God only present through interventions?

• God present in the whole thing? - (providence - sustains all things ... Col 1:15)

History of life on earth

earth forms fromaccretion disk

Grandeur of God?•humans -- last 2 seconds of 24 hr day•not unlike astronomy: the heavens declare the Glory of God - Psalm 19•What is man that you are mindful of him? Psalm 8

Aside:Emergence of Humans?

Advice from C.S. Lewis

When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)

See also: Can we believe Genesis today,IVP (UK) Ernest Lucashttp://www.ivpbooks.com/product/1844741206.htmsee also www.cis.org.uk/resources/books/books.shtml

In the Beginning : The Opening Chapters of Genesis, Henri Blocher, Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, (1984).

e.g. at what age is a child spiritually responsible to God?John Stott on “Homos Divinus”

Advice from Billy Graham "I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the

Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God.”

• - Billy Graham quoted by David Frost

• Source: Book - Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (1997, p. 72-74)

Aside: Defining Evolution• Evolution as Natural History

•the earth is old (+/- 4.5 Billion years)•more complex life forms followed from simpler life forms

• Evolution as a mechanism for the emergence of biological complexity•generated by mutations and natural selection(note: most Christians agree that God created this mechanism)

• Evolution as a “big picture” worldview (scientism)George Gaylord Simpson: "Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have

him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material."

or Richard Dawkins:"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Language: Random or stochastic?

• Random mutations and natural selection...

• Stochastic optimisation• e.g. used to price your stock portfolio .....

Lego blocks or play-doh?

• Evo-Devo Lego Blocks:• pax6• sonic-hedgehog• shaven-baby• tinman

• Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the

Animal Kingdom. S.B. Carroll (Blackwell Science 2005)

Gene language

Why are there so few genes?

complexity comes from the interactions

gene networks

systems biology

transcriptional network for yeast: Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Gene language[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

Richard Dawkins --

The Selfish Gene (1976)

[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.

Denis Noble -- The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome (OUP 2006)

Contingency v.s.``deep structures’’

• Rerun the tape of evolution again...

• S.J. Gould: “Wonderful Life”; (W.W. Norton 1989)

• Simon Conway Morris “Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe”; (CUP, 2003)

“Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.” In evolution, there is no direction, no progression. Humanity is dethroned from its exalted view of its own importance

When you examine the tapestry of evolution you see the same patterns emerging over and over again. Gould's idea of rerunning the tape of life is not hypothetical; it's happening all around us. And the result is well known to biologists — evolutionary convergence. When convergence is the rule, you can rerun the tape of life as often as you like and the outcome will be much the same. Convergence means that life is not only predictable at a basic level; it also has a direction.

Convergent Evolution?

Convergent evolution in mechanical design of lamnid sharks and tunasJeanine M. Donley, et al. Nature 429, 61-65 (6 May 2004)

"For the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty." (On Growth and Form, 1917.)

Convergent Evolution?

• Enormous number of examples ... from proteins to vision up to societies to intelligence.

• Are rational conscious beings an inevitable outcome? “

The principal aim of this book has been to show that the constraints of evolution and the ubiquity of convergence make the emergence of something like ourselves a near-inevitability. SCM, “Life’s Solution”, (CUP 2005) pp328

Thinking about science

• Cultural barriers to Christian thought about science• Scandal:

• Immediatism, anti-traditionalism populism

• Scientific practice• humility principle• tapestry argments

• Language is important• self-assembly and bio-complexity• evolution: random chance or stochastic optimisation ?• convergence and inevitable humans?

Fine Tuning and the Anthropic Principle

• “The universe is the way it is, because we are here” – Prof. Stephen Hawking, Cambridge U

• If the [fine structure constant] were changed by 1%, the sun would immediately explode Prof. Max Tegmark, U. Penn

• “Just Six Numbers” by Sir Martin Rees

We are made of Stardust He C via a resonance

• Sir Fred Hoyle, Cambridge U

• “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics .. and biology”

• His atheism was “deeply shaken”

Fine Tuning and the Anthropic Principle

• Fine tuning is not a proof of God, but seems more consistent with theism than atheism

• Note the difference with “God of the gaps”• We seem to have three choices'... We can dismiss it as

happenstance, we can acclaim it as the workings of providence, or (my preference) we can conjecture that our universe is a specially favoured domain in a still vaster multiverse.’ If this multiverse contained every possible set of laws and conditions, then the existence of our own world with its particular characteristics would be inevitable.”• Sir Martin Rees (just 6 numbers) --

• John Leslie firing squad argument

Thinking Christianly about Intelligent Design

Ard Louis

www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/postgrad/

Department of Physics

University of Oxford

Christian responses to natural history

1. Young Earth Creation Science (YECS)

2. Progressive (old age) Creationism

3. Theistic Evolution

Intelligent Design (ID - caps) is heterogeneous w.r.t. 1,2,3

Young Earth Creation Science

• Denies much of mainstream science, especially natural history• key issue is really age of earth; death before the fall (atonement and

theodicy)• evolution -- baraminerology

• Driven by interpretation of Scripture• Upholding the Bible from the first verse of Genesis)

• Excellent understanding of how elite science and its popularisations affect Christian confidence

• but cut off from vast majority of active academic scientists, sometimes misses tapestry arguments

• polemic styles• Avaroism?

Progressive creationism

• Day-age theory (old earth)• harmonising Genesis sequence with

natural history• many different schemes

• e.g. Hugh Ross and “Reasons to Believe” in USA• vicious fights w/ YECS

• Theological overlaps w/ positive ID

Theistic Evolution

• God used a stochastic mechanism to create biological complexity

• Majority view among evangelical academic scientists and theologians; doesn’t trickle down

• Sometimes a poor understanding of how elite science and its popularisations affect Christian confidence

Intelligent Design (capitalised)

some key publications and people•The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984)

•Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, Roger L. Olsen•Evolution, a Theory in Crisis (1986)

•Michael Denton•Darwin on Trial (1991)

•Philip Johnson•Darwin’s Black Box (1996)

•Michael Behe (CT book of the year)•Icons of evolution (2000)

•Jonathan Wells•No Free Lunch (2001)

•William Dembski

heterogeneous movement -- will focus on ID centred at Discovery Institute

Dutch ID debate

• Schitterend ongeluk of sporen van ontwerp? (2005)• En God beschikte een worm? (2006)

Cees Dekker, Ronald Meester en Rene’ van Woudenberg (ed)

What is ID

• Intelligent agency, as an aspect of scientific theory making, has more explanatory power in accounting for the specified, and sometimes irreducible complexity of some physical systems, including biological entities, and/or the existence of the universe as a whole, than the blind forces of. . . matter.’[1] That is, intelligent design is a better explanation for entities exhibiting complex specified information (CSI) than are appeals to the inherent capacities of nature (i.e. chance and/or physical necessity). ID suggests that the world contains objects that exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected natural causes, and can only be adequately explained by recourse to intelligent causation.

• (definition from Peter S. Williams)

Intelligent Design

• In principle the claim is that one doesn’t need to specify who the “designer” is.

• For Christians, it is God of course.• So ID asks: can we use methods borrowed from

scientific practice to find evidence that God used supernatural means to bring about the emergence of biological complexity?

Intelligent design

• Most popular science issues:• Origin of life• Cambrian Explosion• Irreducibly Complex biological elements

e.g. the bacterial flagellum• Origin of biological information

Origin of life?

• God (or the designer) did it:• Stephen Meyer:

• Chance?• Necessity?• IBE -> Designer did it

• If the simplest life owes its origin to an intelligent Creator, then perhaps man is not the "cosmic orphan" that twentieth century scientific materialism has taught. Perhaps then, during the twenty first century, the traditional moral and spiritual foundations of the West will find support from the very sciences that once seemed to undermine them.

• Meyer (1996)

Origin of Life

• The problem of the origin of life has much in common with a well-constructed detective story. There is no shortage of clues pointing to the way in which the crime, the contamination of the pristine environment of the early earth, was committed. On the contrary, there are far too many clues and far too many suspects. It would be hard to find two investigators who agree on even the broad outline of events.• Leslie Orgel (1998)

Origin of life

• Chemical space (Nature • Chemical space — which encompasses all possible

small organic molecules, including those present in biological systems — is vast. So vast, in fact, that so far only a tiny fraction of it has been explored.

• Chris Dobson (Nature 432, 824 (2004))

• Counterfactual space is too vast?• Maybe we will never know -- probably not a very

fruitful place to look for signs of intervention

Irreducible Complexity

This result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science ... The discovery [of intelligent design] rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schroedinger, Pasteur and Darwin.”

•Bacterial flagellum, immune system, etc... are too complex to have evolved

Michael Behe (1996)

Complex Specified Information

• CSI -- information that could not have come there by chance alone?

• e.g. when we see a statue v.s. weathered rock• “Law of the conservation of information”

William Dembski

ID and Science

• There are genuine scientific issues e.g. we don’t understand exactly how the bacterial flagellum evolves

• The question of information might be particularly subtle.

Intelligent Design

• Philosophical issues:• Definition of science (demarcation) ?• Problems, but why not follow the evidence?

• Theological issues:• when/why does God intervene?• miracles?• Newman/Barth critique

ID and Christians

• Major issues is -- why these miracles?

“And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God” Leibnitz

e.g. what is the Biblical rationale for supernatural action aiding the creation of the flagellum?

•Miracles occur to serve God’s redemptive purpose•Origin, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin etc...

ID and Christians

• Most vexing problems for Christians come from Natural History:• death before fall• most species have gone extinct

• It is not clear how ID solves these problems

ID and Christians

• If one wants to make an apologetic argument from design, then cosmological ones (fine tuning) are much safer:• Science is not nearly as controversial• counterfactuals much easier to explore

• We seem to have three choices'... We can dismiss it as happenstance, we can acclaim it as the workings of providence, or (my preference) we can conjecture that our universe is a specially favoured domain in a still vaster multiverse.’ If this multiverse contained every possible set of laws and conditions, then the existence of our own world with its particular characteristics would be inevitable.

• Sir Martin Rees (just 6 numbers) --

ID and Christians

• Major issue: the sirens of populism.• US state school system (deep feelings)• example of Scandal?

(a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations)

Populism and ID

• Discovery Institute and co: fantastically good popularisers• websites, blogs, interviews, books: a prodigious output

• Sometimes fail on• immediatism

• anti-traditionalism (insufficient community of scholars)

• populism leads to habits that lose touch with the “humility principle”• fast and lose with arguments, hype, and quotations etc...• For scientists this is enough to discount the argument outright

William Dembski and populism

•www.uncommondescent.com (blog)•www.designinference.com (main site)

from his own biosketch:As interest in intelligent design has grown in the wider culture, Dr. Dembski has assumed the role of public intellectual.

William Dembski and populism

• Intelligent Design:The Bridge Between Science & Theology, IVP (1999)• William Dembski is the Isaac Newton of information theory,

and since this is the Age of Information, that makes Dembski one of the most important thinkers of our time. His "law of conservation of information" represents a revolutionary breakthrough. Rob Koons

• For most scientists such statements are red flags

William Dembski: Technical books

• The Design Inference, CUP (1998)• endorsed by William Wimsatt: “Dembski has written a sparklingly

original book ...”

• No Free Lunch, Roman & Littlefield (2001)• Anyone who could have succeeded in showing that natural

selection is incapable of generating biological structures according to standards from mathematics or logic would have constructed a mathematical proof that would have dwarfed Godel’s famous Undecideability theorem in importance. ... I can categorically say that Dembski has surely done no such thing, and I call upon him as a mathematician to deny and clarify the implications of his advertising copy. ... William Wimsatt April 4, 2002

Jonathan Wells: Icons of Evolution

• Jonathan Wells (PhD Yale, PhD Berkeley)• Father's [Rev. Moon] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me

that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle. http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm

• “During my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed almost everything I read in my textbooks. I knew that the books contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought that most of what I was taught was substantially true”

• (preface to “Icons of Evolution, Regeny (2000))

Jonathan Wells: quotations out of context

• Henry Gee, Chief Scence Writer for Nature, is even more pessimistic. “No fossil is buried with its birth certificate”, he wrote in 1999, and “the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent”

• Gee (who is a theist) responds: (2001) 1. The Discovery Institute has used unauthorized, selective quotations from my

book IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME to support their outdated, mistaken views. 2. Darwinian evolution by natural selection is taken as a given in IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME, and this is made clear several times e.g. on p5 (paperback edition) I write that "if it is fair to assume that all life on Earth shares a common evolutionary origin..." and then go on to make clear that this is the assumption I am making throughout the book. For the Discovery Institute to quote from my book without reference to this is mischievous.

http://www.natcenscied.org/resources/articles/3167_pr90_10152001__gee_responds_10_15_2001.asp

In spite of this, Wells still regularly quotes Gee out of context

Jonathan Wells and quotations out of context

• "When I first encountered his [Jonathan Wells] attempts at journalism, I thought he might be a woefully deficient scholar because his critiques about peppered moth research were full of errors, but soon it became clear that he was intentionally distorting the literature in my field. He lavishly dresses his essays in quotations from experts (including some from me) which are generally taken out of context, and he systematically omits relevant details to make our conclusions seem ill founded, flawed, or fraudulent.” Bruce Grant

• On Monday, 11 March 2002, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute submitted the following Bibliography of Supplementary Resources to the Ohio State Board of Education. These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution. Discovery Institute has made every effort to ensure that the annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the publications

• NSCE sent copies to many of the authors

Jonathan Wells and quotations out of context

• "When I first encountered his [Jonathan Wells] attempts at journalism, I thought he might be a woefully deficient scholar because his critiques about peppered moth research were full of errors, but soon it became clear that he was intentionally distorting the literature in my field. He lavishly dresses his essays in quotations from experts (including some from me) which are generally taken out of context, and he systematically omits relevant details to make our conclusions seem ill founded, flawed, or fraudulent.” Bruce Grant

• On Monday, 11 March 2002, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute submitted the following Bibliography of Supplementary Resources to the Ohio State Board of Education. These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution. The publications are not presented either as support for the theory of intelligent design, or as indicating that the authors cited doubt evolution. Discovery Institute has made every effort to ensure that the annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the publications (red words added on website later)

Jonathan Wells and quotations out of context

• "When I first encountered his [Jonathan Wells] attempts at journalism, I thought he might be a woefully deficient scholar because his critiques about peppered moth research were full of errors, but soon it became clear that he was intentionally distorting the literature in my field. He lavishly dresses his essays in quotations from experts (including some from me) which are generally taken out of context, and he systematically omits relevant details to make our conclusions seem ill founded, flawed, or fraudulent.” Bruce Grant

• On Monday, 11 March 2002, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute submitted the following Bibliography of Supplementary Resources to the Ohio State Board of Education. These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution. The publications are not presented either as support for the theory of intelligent design, or as indicating that the authors cited doubt evolution. Discovery Institute has made every effort to ensure that the annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the publications. (red words added on website later)

• Eugene V. Koonin (coauthor of [12]): “...the conclusion that this is ‘a hypothesis quite unexpected on neo-Darwinian (common ancestry) assumptions’ is (i) not taken from our paper and (ii) not at all compatible with the data or ideas presented in the paper.”etc, etc.. ...

• Unfortunately, all the evidence suggests that these misquotes do not rest on ignorance

ID and the sirens of populism• a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering

actually existing situations -- Noll

• Effect among Christians:• Many preliminary arguments presented as if well established

• this leads to false confidence• Ard at ... “What about the information?”

• For lay people it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff• Use of polemic language and new definitions for words like naturalism

• books like The Case for the Creator by Lee Strobel

• Temptation to “ends justifies means” (Dover, of Pandas & People)• Energy used to fight public battles instead of investing in careful

research

ID and the sirens of populism• a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually

existing situations -- Noll

• Effect among scientists• most scientists will see these violations of the humility principle, and throw

out the baby with the bathwater• Even if they do listen, many examples (flagellum, information, etc..., chosen

for populism?) are seen as weak problems by biologists because of tapestry arguments (e.g. Golemization).

ID and the sirens of populism• a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually

existing situations -- Noll

• What might have been a stimulating new approach, to be evaluated carefully over time in Christian community, has been hijacked by polemicists and, ironically, lost touch with the very Christian principles it was thought to uphold. This tragedy was facilitated by the scandal of the evangelical mind

biological complexity?

• Basic problems are still unresolved, and will remain so for a long time.

the key: look carefully at the Bible, e.g.

Oliver Barclay, Science & Christian Belief 18, 49-61 (2006)

-- thanks for listening• some recent books that I found helpful: Most are available from

www.cis.org.uk/resources/books/books.shtml• Francis Collins, The language of God, Free Press (2006)• Darrel Falk, Coming to Peace With Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and Biology

(IVP, 2004) --Collins and Falk are biologists who write clearly about how their evangelical faith and their science interact.

• Graeme Finlay, God’s books: Genetics & Genesis TELOS (NZ) (2004) -- Finlay discusses genetic evidence for evolution

• Ernest Lucas. Can we believe Genesis today? (IVP, 2006) -- an introduction to interpretation of Genesis and creation.

• Denis Alexander, Rebuilding the Matrix (Lion, 2001) -- a tour de force covering much of the science/faith debate

• Neil A. Manson (ed.) God and Design: The Teleological Argument and. Modern Science. (Routledge, 2003).--a good overview of philosophical arguments around design

• Alister McGrathDawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell 2004) --- an example of a robust response to common anti-Christian arguments used by popularisers of science -- the focus is on the key theological/philosophical issues

• William Dembski and Michael Ruse (eds), From Darwin to DNA (CUP, 2004) -- a good overview of the US based ID debate.

• Ronald L. Numbers The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Harvard, 2006) -- the best historical overview of the creationist movement.

--------------------------------

Design in Nature

• Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

Of Pandas and People

Supreme Court’s 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision ruled that creationism was not science

Advice from Augustine

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in the Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines our position, we too fall with it. We should not battle for our own interpretation but for the teaching of Holy Scripture. We should not wish to conform the meaning of Holy Scripture to our interpretation, but our interpretation to the meaning of Holy Scripture.

Calvin

• 1534: The whole point of scripture is to bring us a knowledge of Jesus Christ -- and having come to know him (and all this implies), we should come to a halt and not expect to learn more. Scripture provides us with spectacles through which we may view the world as God’s creation and self-expression; it does not, and was never intended, to provide us with an infallible repository of astronomical and medical information. The natural sciences are thus effectively emancipated for theological restrictions.

Advice from C.S. Lewis

When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)

Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal radically different beliefs under an identical form of worlds? Certainly not. For what they agree on is the substance, and what they differ about is the shadow.

Advice from Schaefer

• We must take ample time, and sometimes this will mean a long time, to consider whether the apparent clash between science and revelation means that the theory set forth by science is wrong or whether we must reconsider what we thought the Bible says.

• Francis Schaefer

Advice from Westminster Theological Seminary

The Westminster Confession's doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (1:7) goes hand in hand with its inspiration, infallibility, and authority. Yet it implies that not all parts of the Scriptures are equally clear or full. Here we must follow Calvin's great motto that where God makes an end of teaching, we should make an end of trying to be wise.(11) With Augustine and E. J. Young, the revered teacher of our senior faculty members, we recognize that the exegetical question of the length of the days of Genesis 1 may be an issue which cannot be, and therefore is not intended by God to be, answered in dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes dangerously close to demanding from God revelation which he has not been pleased to bestow upon us, and responding to a threat to the biblical world view with weapons that are not crafted from the words which have proceeded out of the mouth of God..

http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html

Advice from Billy Graham "I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the

Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God.”

• - Billy Graham quoted by David Frost

• Source: Book - Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (1997, p. 72-74)

YECS

•easiest to rationalise with Genesis•Motivated by desire to uphold scripture

• Either the Bible is true, or evolution is true (HM Morris: Science

and the Bible)• This can lead to heated rhetoric

But can't we be Christian evolutionists, they say. Yes, no doubt it is possible to be a Christian and an evolutionist. Likewise, one can be a Christian thief, or a Christian adulterer, or a Christian liar! Christians can be inconsistent and illogical about many things, but that doesn't make them right.

-- HM Morris, 1980, King of Creation, pp.83-84

•Conflict metaphor

Church fathers

• "Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day … existed without the sun and moon and stars?”

• Origen 185 - 254

Calvin on using science• As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that Galileo had any direct knowledge of Calvin's writings.

Nevertheless his understanding of the nature of the language used by the Bible when referring to the natural world is the same as Calvin's as the following quotations from the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina show.

• B1. These propositions set down by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. (p. 181)

• B2. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. (p. 182)

• B3. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. (p. 182f)

• B4. ...having arrived at any certainties in physics, we ought to utilize these as the most appropriate aids in the true exposition of the Bible and in the investigation of those meanings which are necessarily contained therein, for these must be concordant with demonstrated truths. (p. 183)

• The first two quotations express the same 'accommodation' understanding of biblical language as Calvin adopted. The third recognises that, as a result of this, the literal sense of the biblical text may sometimes be at variance with the scientific understanding of the natural phenomenon described. In the final quotation Galileo makes the point made by Prof. McKay that one reason why biblical interpreters should take scientific knowledge into account is that it will help them to recognise when the biblical writers are using the language of appearance or cultural idioms, and so help them avoid the kind of misinterpretation made by those who condemned Galileo.

lehttp://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/lucas/lecture.html

• 1: Isis. 2000 Jun;91(2):283-304. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921). A biblical inerrantist as evolutionist.• Livingstone DN, Noll MA.• School of Geosciences, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.• The theological doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the intellectual basis for modern creation

science. Yet Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, the theologian who more than any other defined modern biblical inerrancy, was throughout his life open to the possibility of evolution and at some points an advocate of the theory. Throughout a long career Warfield published a number of major papers on these subjects, including studies of Darwin's religious life, on the theological importance of the age of humanity (none) and the unity of the human species (much), and on Calvin's understanding of creation as proto-evolutionary. He also was an engaged reviewer of many of his era's important books by scientists, theologians, and historians who wrote on scientific research in relation to traditional Christianity. Exploration of Warfield's writing on science generally and evolution in particular retrieves for historical consideration an important defender of mediating positions in the supposed war between science and religion.

James Orr

• One of the original “Fundamentalists”• There is not a word in the Bible to indicate that in its view death

entered the animal world as a consequence of the Sin of man.• When you say there is the “six days” and the question whether

those days are meant to be measured by the twenty-four hours of the sun’s revolution around the earth -- I speak of these things popularly. It is difficult to see how they should be so measured when the sun that is to measure them is not introduced until the fourth day. Do not think that this larger reading of the days is a new speculation. You find Augustine in early times declaring that it is hard or altogether impossible to say what fashion these days are, and Thomas Aquinas, in the middle ages, leaving the matter an open question.

C.S. Lewis

When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality.......

Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal radically different beliefs under an identical form of worlds? Certainly not. For waht they agree on is the substance, and what they differ about is the shadow. When one imagines his God seated in a local heaven above a flat earth, where another sees God and creation in terms of Professor [Albert North] Whitehead’s philosoph[loosely, process theology], this difference touches precisely what does not matter.

(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)

The Westminster Confession's doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (1:7) goes hand in hand with its inspiration, infallibility, and authority. Yet it implies that not all parts of the Scriptures are equally clear or full. Here we must

follow Calvin's great motto that where God makes an end of teaching, we should make an end of trying to be wise.(11) With Augustine and E. J.

Young, the revered teacher of our senior faculty members, we recognize that the exegetical question of the length of the days of Genesis 1 may be

an issue which cannot be, and therefore is not intended by God to be, answered in dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes dangerously

close to demanding from God revelation which he has not been pleased to bestow upon us, and responding to a threat to the biblical world view with weapons that are not crafted from the words which have proceeded out of

the mouth of God.

http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html

Westminster Theological Seminary

• www.discovery.org (Discovery Institute)

• www.arn.org (Access Research Network)

• http://www.iscid.org/ (International society of complexity information and design)