No, Virginia, Science hasn't debunked Adam

 

No, Virginia, Science hasn't debunked Adam

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

Disclaimer: I write this post as a layman in the area of biology. If possible, I want to make some of the debate over the alleged impossibility of an historical Adam available at the level of laymen. The scientific issues involved are, of course, highly controversial. If I make cut-and-dried errors of factual statement or terminology, I welcome correction.

I have recently found the book Science and Human Origins to be extremely helpful as a starting place for examining some of these issues. Even more interesting is the Internet debate about the contents of the book. Paul McBride, who at least was at the time an evolutionary biology PhD student in New Zealand, wrote a 2012 series of posts criticizing the book. That series appears in six parts here. (That is part 5. It includes links to parts 1-4.) The authors of the book and other ID advocates have written many responses. Casey Luskin posts a link round-up here. See also here. I will be discussing several of Ann Gauger's responses in this post in more detail. Anyone who is interested in the issue of the alleged overwhelming evidence for undesigned human evolution from ape-like ancestors has no lack of material to study; nor have the advocates of intelligent design theory made a one-sided statement of their case without responding to critics. So if you want to read up, this is the Internet age; go for it.

This post will be about Ann Gauger's work concerning population genetics. Population genetics has become a major Darwinian argument of choice, allegedly putting a nail in the coffin of the historical Adam, and it was chiefly for Gauger's essay that I originally got the book. Now, to business:

Gauger's chapter and Ayala's 1990's argument

For a foil in her book chapter, Ann Gauger chooses an argument made by a scientist named Francisco Ayala from gene called HLA-DRB1. Ayala obtained samples of chimp, human, and macaque DNA from a specific region of HLA-DRB1 and constructed conjectural phylogenetic "trees" using alleles (i.e. variants) of this gene. In essence, one takes alleles of the genes, notes similarities and differences among present-day sequences, and then one constructs a "tree" which is supposed to show how these alleles are related. By using estimated mutation rates and various algorithms of population genetics, one calculates far back into time as to how many alleles are supposed to have existed at some period of interest--say, at an estimated time when, according to evolutionary theory, humans and chimps last shared a common ancestor. This procedure is supposed to give an idea as to how big the initial population of humans must have been.

Ayala went back to a particular estimated time when humans and chips allegedly last shared a common ancestor (Ann Gauger points out that estimates on this vary a good deal, but his was that it was four to six million years ago) and stated that, by his calculations, there must have been a minimum of 4,000 individuals alive at that time in the human ancestry. He also argued that the actual population must have been much larger still.

The idea is that this estimated population size shows the impossibility of an historical Adam and Eve, because our ancestors would have had to carry more genetic diversity than would be found in the genome of merely two people.

I cannot summarize Gauger's whole article. (This post is going to be long enough as it is.) But I will summarize a few of her points which seem to me utterly devastating to Ayala's argument regarding that particular portion of the genome: First, Ayala focused on the exon 2 region of the HLA-DRB1 gene, which was a poor choice. When one uses a different region (introns 1-4) of the gene, one gets a tree that sorts out, sensibly enough, by species. Macaque alleles look like other macaque alleles, human alleles like human alleles, and chimp alleles like chimp alleles. When one uses the exon 2 region one instead gets an incompatible tree in which the alleles are all mixed up. Sometimes human alleles are more similar to macaque alleles or chimp alleles than to other human alleles, macaque alleles are sometimes more like human alleles than like other macaque alleles, and so forth. In other words, using the exon 2 region to make a phylogenetic tree creates, to use technical scientific terminology, an unholy mess.

Let me emphasize that the variants of the exon 2 region do not sort by species right now, meaning that something very weird is going on in exon 2. Presumably there is some cause of hyper-variability in that region. In fact, it appears that exon 2 has a much higher mutation rate than do other parts of the gene. A tree based on exon 2 using a mutation rate that is too low will, understandably enough, give a false picture of the number of variants present in a population millions of years ago.

Ayala did attempt to correct for the fact that natural selection will tend to inflate genetic diversity for exon 2, since people with different versions of exon 2 in their genome will tend to have more surviving offspring. Whether his fudge factor sufficiently corrected for this effect of natural selection or not, he disregarded the apparently much higher mutation rate in exon 2 leading to the failure of sorting by species.

Gauger also notes that a different late 90s population genetics argument based on neighboring DNA sequences (not exon 2) came to a very different conclusion from Ayala's, concluding seven versions of the HLA-DRB1 gene existed four to six million years ago, whereas Ayala had concluded that thirty-two existed. (This was the basis for his population estimate.) Let me be clear: I am not saying, and I'm sure Gauger is not saying, that this study was simply right while Ayala's was wrong. As I shall discuss later, Gauger is questioning the reliability of population genetics altogether for estimates about population sizes long ago. The point I would make here is simply that, when we get conflicting trees from these methods, we are justified in asking why we should accept the reliability of the underlying methodology.

Gauger also points out that Ayala's calculations included other assumptions that would have also led to an overestimate of the number of ancestors needed to carry the relevant information. The larger HLA-DRB1 region does not do a lot of recombining when the DNA is reproduced. This is kind of unusual. Different versions of sections of DNA that tend to be inherited as a unit are sometimes called haplotypes. You can think of a haplotype as a chunk of genes that gets inherited together. Now, if the inheritance of DNA in this region is "chunky" like this, that (in addition to the other considerations) throws all of Ayala's calculations into a cocked hat. Pause here to contemplate how easy it is to throw population genetics estimates into a cocked hat.

To do population genetics, one has to make double handfuls of assumptions about rate constancy, equiprobability, and biological independence in order to make the math workable. Sometimes these assumptions turn out to be wrong, and wrong in ways that cause overestimates.

Gauger points out in the chapter that there are just five basic groups of the HLA haplotype in the human population. She then points out that as many as four haplotypes could be carried even by a perfectly ordinary pair of individuals.

This point seriously calls into question the necessity for a minimal bottleneck of 4,000 to 100,000 in the human lineage.

Paul McBride's response to Gauger's chapter

Interestingly, McBride doesn't bother to defend Ayala's argument (as far as I can see). He seems pretty eager to drop Ayala's entire study down the memory hole and move on as quickly as possible, which I'm guessing means that the problems with Ayala's study are as decisive as they appear to be.

McBride does try to make much play out of the fact that, if we grant that the relevant haplotypes (even if only four) first showed up 4 to 6 million years ago, this was before the appearance of any of the genus Homo, including Homo erectus, and hence before any plausible candidate for the species of human beings. McBride thinks that this means that Gauger's point about four haplotypes and her conjecture that these may have been carried by Adam and Eve makes no sense as a defense of a possible first couple, because the first individuals carrying those lineages couldn't have been human at all. He points out that Casey Luskin's preferred candidate species (in a different chapter of Science and Human Origins) for the first true humans is Homo erectus, which are now thought to have showed up circa two million years ago, not four to six. So, says McBride, even the four haplotypes idea still "rules out" the existence of Adam and Eve as the first humans.

Gauger has clarified here that she was not saying that a first human pair was probably created four to six million years ago. An ordinary first couple could have carried as many as four versions of the gene. A fifth variant could have arisen by natural genetic change after humans came on the scene. (There is a reason why I keep saying "ordinary individuals," but you will have to read to the end to get to the explanation.) Since the discussion is over whether there is too much genetic diversity in mankind now to have arisen from a first couple long ago, this point is relevant.

Gauger also points out in this recent post that even some scientists who accept common descent from an ape-like ancestor estimate that there were four to five lineages of this gene long ago and that much of the genetic diversity in this gene, within lineages, has arisen much more recently--between 350,000 to 500,000 years ago. This is directly contrary to Ayala's conclusions.

Li and Durban's claims and Gauger's response

McBride seems eager to move on to discussing something other than Ayala. His favored population genetics study is one by scientists Li and Durban, using a different method from Ayala's. In particular, Li and Durban used much larger regions of DNA to try to rule out confounding effects specific to a narrow area (part of what tripped up Ayala's study). They concluded that a minimum bottleneck around the time of Homo erectus was about 15,000 individuals.

Gauger responds here fairly briefly and at more length here.

Gauger's initial post refers to problematic assumptions in Li and Durban's type of population genetics study, which is known as coalescent theory. McBride at first complains that she doesn't say what the allegedly problematic assumptions are; in her second post on the subject she goes into this in more detail. Coalescent theory, says Gauger, is based on the assumption that, in populations of the relevant size, "the vast majority of mutations are neutral and have no effect on an organism’s survival."

Let that sink in just for a minute. Can you say "natural selection"? Yes, that's right: Natural selection, a crucial, major driver of neo-Darwinian theory, is treated by coalescent theory in population genetics as having no significant effect upon population sizes over hundreds of thousands and even millions of years.

McBride insists that the assumptions made in population genetics tend to cause underestimates rather than overestimates concerning population size, but it should be fairly clear even to a layman that this is by no means necessarily the case when it comes to literally discounting natural selection as a force influencing population size! For example, as noted above, Ayala himself knew that natural selection would sometimes inflate genetic diversity. And Ayala's biological independence and mutation rate assumptions did not cause an underestimate of past population size.

Perversely, I'm tempted not to make too much of this matter of natural selection and then to sit back at a climactic moment and watch the sociobiologists and evolutionary philosophers squirm. Their goal is to "explain" complex sociological phenomena such as why gentlemen prefer blondes or why human beings are religious in terms of the effects of natural selection throughout human evolutionary history. It would be almost too much fun to wait for one of those folks to cite Li and Durban's study allegedly showing that Adam and Eve couldn't have existed and then to spring on him the unwelcome news that Li and Durban are treating natural selection as irrelevant to human evolution for the past three million years.

But actually, I won't. Because I have to admit that, again, speaking as a layman, it seems pretty implausible that most hominid mutations for the past three million years have been neutral in effect and that we can use that assumption to generate population census estimates regarding our long-ago ancestors. Did I say something above about double handfuls of equiprobability assumptions in population genetics? Yes, I believe I did. Gauger (who isn't a layman) apparently agrees, which is why she highlights the neutral mutation assumption of coalescent theory as problematic.

McBride sometimes gives the impression that the phylogenetic trees generated by population genetics are consistent and mutually confirmatory, at least as regards the claimed impossibility of Adam.

I shall reiterate: the possibility of a two-person, Adam and Eve bottleneck is simply not an open question in science. There cannot have been such a bottleneck.

Taken together, there is a bias in our estimates of actual past population sizes, but it is a bias towards underestimation. So, when we make long-term estimates of the human effective population size that vary by two orders of magnitude but bottom out at around 1,000, this lower estimate (and its corresponding census population size of 10,000) are almost-certain underestimates of the real picture. Even with the variation in different estimates, we are left with no room for a census population size of two--a further four orders of magnitude lower again.

Li and Durban, however, trace effective population sizes (evolutionarily relevant estimates of the adult breeding population size) over our evolutionary history as a species, using comparisons of entire genomes from across a range of ethnic groups. At no point is there anything approaching an Adam and Eve population bottleneck at any point that correlates to the genus Homo. Again, when an earlier chapter has drawn the human/non-human distinction between Homo habilis and Homo erectus (i.e. approximately 2 million years ago) we can be quite well assured that a literal Adam and Eve are unsupported by population genetics.The figure below, from Li and Durban, suggests an effective population size of about 15,000 at the origin of Homo erectus.

From all of these statements one might surmise that perhaps there is significant, detailed mutual support going on among various population genetics studies. McBride gives the impression that we can be quite certain scientifically that no Adam and Eve existed because, wherever else they might disagree, these population genetics estimates agree in not coming up with a two-person bottleneck.

There are several things wrong with such an argument. McBride doesn't seem to see that there are real reasons for questioning these estimates, all of them, altogether--in other words, for questioning whether population genetics (in its various incarnations) is a reliable way of finding out how many individual ancestors lived millions of years ago. That is definitely a major point Gauger is making. She says:

[I]n my opinion it is an open question whether present genetic diversity provides sufficient information from which to draw conclusions about ancient populations. Determining events in deep human history may be beyond the reach of population genetics methods.

From her book chapter (p. 119):

Where ancient genetic history is involved, dogmatic statements are out of place. We understand very little of our own genetic makeup--way too little to make accurate calculations about our distant genetic past.

Why should this not be correct? There is certainly no law that says that we have to have reliable methods of estimating how many of our ancestors were alive two or three million years ago! Indeed, to claim that we can make such reliable estimates would seem to require meeting rather a strong burden of proof.

That these various conjectural methods all "agree" in placing the smallest bottlenecks at a number greater than two has virtually no significance in and of itself as support for the enterprise of population genetics, because the agreement is much too broad. Consider: If you have three entrail readers who all agree that next year will be a prosperous year but all for different reasons, does this give you any good evidence for the reliability of entrail reading as a way of divining the future?

McBride does not even try to claim that Li and Durban's phylogenetic tree agrees in detail with other trees throughout millions of years of history. His entire focus is on their agreement that (thank goodness) there were never fewer than 1,000 human ancestors, and allegedly many more for an effective population size. But Gauger is right to point out that variations for the minimum within several orders of magnitude imply that very different trees that disagree with each other are being constructed.

We already saw this from Gauger's chapter: A tree constructed on the basis of one genetic segment was incompatible with a tree constructed on the basis of the rest of the same gene. They couldn't both be right.

According to Gauger, such problems are pervasive:

[W]e see evidence of tangled trees at all levels of phylogeny.

To my mind, this is the mark of a method characterized by guesswork and instability. That evaluation is also borne out by the points above about unjustified equiprobability assumptions. If we do indeed see conflicting and tangled phylogenetic trees at all levels, this raises a very real question as to why we should even care that various conjectures based on population genetics all "agree" with the broad claim that there was no time in deep history when we had only two ancestors.

Part of my point here, and I assume Gauger's as well, is that there is no known-to-be-reliable, independent way to check any of these phylogenetic trees for the distant past.

This points to the relevance of another complaint that Gauger makes:

In addition, all these calculations depend on assumptions of common descent as the only explanation for our origin.

[M]ore worrying to me are the hidden assumptions in evolutionary models. Population genetics is a theory-laden subject, based entirely on neo-Darwinian assumptions.

Population genetics as a scientific discipline makes use of mathematics and the principles of neo-Darwinism to try to understand how genetic variation spreads through populations and influences their evolution. It does so by assuming that all processes are purely natural and unguided, and that phylogenetic history is mainly the product of common descent, at least in multicellular organisms.

Gauger's point, simply put, is that all of these estimates assume that nothing was going on in the relevant millions of years but inheritance and mutation. No intelligent intervention, no creation, for example. Since these estimates are based on this assumption, and since there is no clear independent way to check that these guesses are right or even to confirm the reliability of the methods by independent means, why should we take the mere existence of these conjectures to be evidence against the intelligent design of man? In this situation, the accusation that the argument against an historical Adam from population genetics is circular has force.

Creation, genetic diversity, and ad hocness

Lurking behind the capitulation of some theistic evolutionists to the "no Adam" conclusion lies, I believe, something like the following thought process. The words are mine, but based upon conversations I'm convinced that something like this is worrying people:

You can't bring up the possibility of miraculous activity as an explanation of genetic diversity, because that would be ad hoc. After all, you can "explain" anything by saying that God set it up that way. We don't want to fall prey, just to save the appearances and keep our creation story, to the picture of a deceptive God who, for reasons unknown, made it look just like there weren't two original parents. If that's the best we can do, we should just conclude, however sadly, that the scientific evidence strongly disconfirms the existence of Adam.

I want to confront this concern and not let it be the elephant in the room.

I've recently been doing some philosophical work on the issue of ad hocness. (You can read the results here if your library has a subscription, or write to me for a scholar-to-scholar share of the e-offprint.)

My conclusion, in very brief terms, is that ad hocness doesn't arise unless the auxiliary hypothesis in question has low probability given the overarching theory in question. There are other necessary conditions as well, but that is one of them. Take a classic example of ad hocness: Junior discovers that "Santa's" handwriting on the Christmas present tags looks just like Mom's and confronts Mom about it. Mom tells Junior that Santa has deliberately made his handwriting look like hers to make things more difficult or to throw people off his (Santa's) trail. Why is this ad hoc? One obvious part of the answer is that, based on the assumption that Santa exists, one would have expected the opposite to be true. One would not have expected Santa to disguise his handwriting but rather to use his own handwriting. All the more so since children are supposed to know about Santa anyway, so evidently he's not trying to hide his existence.

An ad hoc hypothesis could come up in connection with God's activity. Suppose that I say that God created my table five minutes ago. Upon having it pointed out that everyone remembers the existence of my table for many years past, I could argue ad hoc that God created all of those memories in our minds. Again, why would we think that? It has very low probability given the initial hypothesis I was putting forward. On the contrary, we would expect God to show Himself by creating something, not to make it seem as if it existed previously for many years.

Now consider the hypothesis that Adam and Eve were specially created, perhaps even ex nihilo. And consider the auxiliary hypothesis that God gave Adam and Eve extra genetic diversity, more than is presently possessed and passed on via sexual reproduction by ordinary human beings. (This is my discussion of ordinary human beings, promised above.) Is this just something made up to try to rebut disconfirmatory studies of population genetics? Is it like the "Santa imitating Mom's handwriting" hypothesis? Not at all. For one thing, I've already argued that the population genetics studies don't give us anything that needs to be rebutted, because their arguments are poor.

But more: Consider what we already know about genetics, independently: We have reason to believe that close interbreeding causes the accumulation of harmful mutations. Therefore, if God were going to create Adam and Eve as the first couple and have all human beings descend from them (the overall hypothesis we are considering), we have independent reason to believe that God would do something to avoid the possible negative effects of in-breeding. One open possibility to fulfill that functional purpose is that Adam and Eve would be created with extra genetic diversity--that they would be different from modern humans in this respect. Their children might not even be genetic siblings. (V.J. Torley discusses this possibility here, among other places.)

If this were true, and if one analyzed Adam and Eve's genetic potential, there is a sense in which it would "look like" the genetic potential of more than two people. But this would not be God's pointlessly and deceptively making it "look like" we had more than two ancestors, because that design plan is not pointless. It has an important functional purpose for the first couple's offspring. Therefore, unlike an ad hoc hypothesis, it does not have a particularly low probability given an intelligently designed first couple.

Hence, even if we had more reliable methods than we do have for estimating distant past populations, and even if they did not happen to come up with a two-person first couple, this would not be serious evidence against the existence of an original couple.

Notice that since the issue is functional, the amount of extra genetic diversity that would be (to some degree) expected in Adam and Eve beyond what is normally found in two ordinary people will depend upon functional considerations--what range or level of genetic diversity would be valuable for a founding population? This should make it clear that the conjecture concerning extra genetic diversity is not being made to counter some study or studies that "seem to show" a high number as the lowest possible number of human ancestors. (As I have argued, the population genetics science is unconvincing.)

The epistemological point concerning function, creation, and genetic diversity should be borne in mind as a confounding factor if one is attempting to use genetic diversity estimates to argue against the existence of Adam and Eve.

Conclusion

What we're being told is that there is something analogous to a video of the past showing, via highly reliable methods, what appears to be an uninterrupted history of the natural evolution of mankind from non-human ancestors--a history of mankind that could not have begun with two individuals.

This is not true. Given the Scriptural evidence for the existence of an historical Adam and Eve, the first and only parents of mankind, Christians are fully justified in asking for strong counterevidence. It doesn't seem to have been forthcoming, despite all the fanfare. Even from the perspective of common sense, it should take a lot to convince us scientifically that there could not have been a first human couple as long ago as 600,000 to two million years. I have real doubts that any such negative can be proven, even within the weaker sense of "prove" that is appropriate to empirical endeavor.

One thing I am confident of: Population genetics has not given us strong evidence for that negative proposition. No, Virginia, science hasn't debunked Adam and Eve.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on July 3, 2014 10:00 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Adam and Eve) (evolution) (human origins)

If everything is holy, nothing is holy

 

If everything is holy, nothing is holy

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

One of my Facebook friends recently shared, with approval, Minnesota folk singer Peter Mayer's song "Holy Now." The lyrics are here.

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
'Cause everything's a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything's a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn't one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I'm swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child's face
And say it's not a testament
That'd be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it's not a sacrament
I tell you that it can't be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now

Compare them with his even more pointedly titled "Church of the Earth" lyrics linked from here.

Here's a little info.:

PETER MAYER is a well-known American singer-songwriter. His song "Holy Now" has become a beloved standard in liberal church contexts and was the title entry of the 2006 Songbook of the Association of Unity Churches. Peter's "Blue Boat Home" gained a place in the supplementary hymnal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

In 2006 Peter began collaborating with photographer/videographer Connie Barlow to render the particular songs that highlight evolutionary and ecological themes into captioned video formats ideal for contemplative viewing or sing-along in churches and spiritual centers.

I trust that is clear enough, if you didn't get it from the song lyrics themselves. (Interesting terminological note: Evidently some liberals use "liberal" as a term of approval among themselves.) If you are curious, earth worship features prominently in the above-mentioned universalist "hymn," "Blue Boat Home." Lyrics linked from here.

Why do otherwise sensible and orthodox Christian people occasionally fall for this kind of "everything is a miracle, everything is holy, nothing is any more special than anything else" universalist shtick? What is it about a kind of spiritual egalitarianism of things and events that is so attractive that blatant, in-your-face pantheism and anti-Christianity goes unnoticed in the same lyric? (Gotta love the reference to orthodox Christianity as "heaven's second-rate hand-me-down.")

It's only fair to admit that Mayer is a talented lyricist, so there's that. I think, too, that many Christians are looking for profundity and mysticism, and saying that "everything is holy" seems to answer that need. And saying that a little red-winged bird shines like a burning bush could be taken in isolation to mean that the creation manifests God's glory.

The problem is just that the sweeping, profound-sounding statement is false. Everything is not holy. A Black Mass is not holy. A demon is not holy. Methamphetamine is not holy. An instrument of torture is not holy. A murder is not holy. There is good and bad and right and wrong. Some acts are holy and some are evil. Some symbols stand for good and beautiful things while others stand for evil things. Some objects or substances have no function or point but the bad function for which they were deliberately made.

We can even take it up a notch by moving away from acts and symbols of evil to things that are neutral in themselves. If you insist on saying that every bit of dirt is holy, you should at least have the theological capacity to say that a bit of dirt is not holy in the same sense that the Blessed Sacrament is holy. The dirt is also not holy in the same sense that a saintly human being is holy. And the saintly ordinary human being, not being God Incarnate, is not holy in precisely the same sense, or at least not to the same degree, that Jesus Christ is holy. Even Christian mysticism must be held together and made coherent by hierarchical structure.

Furthermore, if there is not God, who is absolutely holy, and who is strongly Other than and separate from His Creation, then nothing can be holy at all. A radical anti-egalitarianism, a radical separation between Creator and creature, is a necessary condition for the possibility of meaningful holiness. The "holiness" of pantheism is merely everything-ness. It's a faux holiness that actually turns all theological categories into a giant egalitarian mush. Mayer, being an artist, can dress it up pretty nicely, but he can't make it other than what it is. God's presence can infuse glory into the smallest grain of sand only if God is God, if God is a real, personal Being (not "the All" or the Force), and only if the sand is part of God's creation. The omnipresence of the Judeo-Christian God is sharply different from the pantheist universalism of Peter Mayer's lyrics. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the two concepts are opposed to each other.

Now, about miracles: However sweet it may sound to say that everything that happens is a miracle, that is also false. And again, as with holiness, so here: If everything is a miracle, nothing is a miracle. The concept of a miracle is meaningful only if there is a contrast class of events that form the natural order, i.e., not miracles. (See also the discussion in this comment.) Every drop of rain that falls is not a miracle. Every flower that grows is not a miracle. Though it is true that we wouldn't have drops of rain if God had not made the heavens and the earth and all that is in the beginning by the Word of His power, and though we wouldn't have flowers if God hadn't made the first flowers, the growth of the flower now and the fall of the raindrop now are not miracles now. When Jesus rose from the dead, that was a miracle. When Peter was released by an angel from prison (today's Scripture reading for the Feast of St. Peter), that was a miracle. When Christians were martyred and their bodies decomposed and formed soil for the crops to grow, that was not a miracle.

Sometimes the only way to guard true mysticism and profundity is to seem to run in the opposite direction. I make no claim to be a mystic; far from it. But it seems to me evident that somewhere along the road to a true understanding of God, even by that way of darkness, lies clarity, not vagueness and muddle.

There are crossroads that come up in our thinking about God, and woe betide us if we take the wrong turn. If we are to honor God with our minds, we should see always at those crucial places where the ways part between truth and error an angel with a burning sword held aloft. And from his lips there comes a cry:

"Distinguo!"

Posted by Lydia McGrew on June 29, 2014 12:32 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (miracles) (mysticism) (philosophy of religion)

A Cautionary Tail

 

A Cautionary Tail

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

In case you haven't run into it, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle about theistic evolutionist Karl Giberson's use in a debate of a photoshopped image of a human baby with a tail. Eventually, with a monumentally bad grace combined with silly comments on his public Facebook page about Homer Simpson, Giberson apologized for accidentally using a photoshopped image. We can therefore assume he won't keep using it in debates.

Thus ends Tailgate, at least as regards the image aspect thereof. In the course of following all of this, though, I became rather interested in the claims being made about allegedly atavistic human tails which are, Giberson still insists, evidence for common descent between humans and tailed ancestors.

Here are a couple of things Giberson says on this subject. (Some of these are from a long thread on Nancy Pearcey's set-public Facebook wall.)

Here he says,

I asked the challenging question: “Why does the human genome contain instructions for the production of features we don’t use?” The scientific explanation is that we inherited these instructions from our tailed ancestors but the instructions for producing them have been shut off in our genomes, which is why Shallow Hal is the only person most people know who has a tail. Sometimes the “ignore these genes” message gets lost in fetal development, however, and babies are born with perfectly formed, even functional tails.

On the public Facebook thread he says,

In the discussion I also reference an article identifying the actual human gene for tails (same as the mouse gene, except ours is shut down.) If, for example, I accidentally showed a photo of Plato when talking about Aristotle that would be an irrelevant error. At no point did I imply that the image I showed was evidence. It was illustration.

He also claims that this is "bad design,"

The "common ancestry" and "bad design" evidences go together. It is bad design for our genomes to have dormant DNA that may or may not kick in. Common ancestry explains why.

And metaphorically speaking, shakes his head,

I have no idea how Intelligent Design theorists explain humans with tails.

Well, I'd like to help out. Here, not from Karl Giberson, is a scientific hypothesis about the reason why some human babies are born with tails:

As discussed below in detail, the development of the normal human tail in the early embryo has been investigated extensively, and apoptosis (programmed cell death) plays a significant role in removing the tail of a human embryo after it has formed. It is now known that down-regulation of the Wnt-3a gene induces apoptosis of tail cells during mouse development (Greco et al. 1996; Shum et al. 1999; Takada et al. 1994), and similar effects are observed in humans (Chan et al. 2002). Additionally, researchers have identified a mutant mouse that does not develop a tail, and this phenotype is due to a regulatory mutation that decreases the Wnt-3a gene dosage (Greco et al. 1996; Gruneberg and Wickramaratne 1974; Heston 1951)....[A] mutation or environmental factor that increased dosage of the Wnt-3a gene would reduce apoptosis of the human tail during development and would result in its retention...in a newborn.

Now, there's a big reveal coming up here in a minute, folks, and it's related to the ellipses in that quote and to the fact that I didn't give the link for that quote, so bear with me, here. Nothing will be hidden in the end, but I'd like to tell this in a particular order.

First, what is this WNT-3a gene? From Giberson's description, one would think that it is a "gene for tails" and that it is normally "switched off" in human beings. But if one thought that, one would be wrong on both points. As five minutes' googling reveals, this is the WNT-3a gene. It is not a gene for tails per se, and it is not switched off in humans. Rather, it is an important regulatory gene that, in humans, serves a function "in cell-cell signaling during morphogenesis of the developing neural tube." The neural tube, in case you were wondering, is the embryonic precursor to the central nervous system, including the brain and the spinal chord. Rather an important human gene, that.

The theory given in the above quotation is that some random, individual event in the conception of a particular human embryo results in a higher gene dosage of the WNT-3a gene. Not, mind you, in its being switched on when it was previously switched off. It fulfills an important function in human development, so it isn't switched off at all. Gene dosage, we learn, is "the number of copies of a given gene present in the cell of an organism." So the theory is that some babies are conceived by happenstance with a higher number of copies of the WNT-3a gene in their cells.

Normal human embryos go through a transient stage in which the spinal chord extends longer than it will ultimately need to be. This is the famous "tail." This extra-long portion of the spinal chord then normally regresses as part of the process of human development in utero. The theory is that a higher gene dosage of the (important and functional) WNT-3a gene causes a failure of this disappearing mechanism, resulting in a human baby born with a tail-like structure.

So let's help out Karl Giberson, who cannot imagine how ID theorists explain human babies with tails. Here goes: Humans are designed with the very important and functional WNT-3a gene. This is not bad design but good design. This regulatory gene serves an important function in human development of stuff like the brain and spine--stuff we really need. This important and functional gene isn't leftover flotsam from some time millions ago in evolutionary history. Rather, it was designed for a purpose and actually works for that purpose in human beings. That the same regulatory switch also appears to be involved in the development of tails in other creatures is irrelevant, since a designer can use the same switch for different downstream outcomes in different things he designs, and indeed WNT-3a apparently is serving partially different functions in humans and in other creatures. Occasionally an embryo is conceived, by the pure contingencies of biology which we have no reason to believe have anything whatsoever to do with tailed ancestors, with a defect, like any other birth defect. The nature of this defect is that the child has too much of a good thing--too many copies in his cells of this otherwise important and useful WNT-3a gene. This unnecessarily high gene dosage causes a failure of the normal disappearance of the extra portion of the baby's spinal chord in utero. As Casey Luskin points out here, it also usually causes other problems in the child, as one would expect given that human beings were not designed to have tails (or that many copies of WNT-3a).

Now, that's just a theory. It may be that a high gene dosage of WNT-3a is not responsible for the fact that some babies are born with tail-like structures. However, it appears to be the only theory currently connecting what Karl Giberson calls "the gene for tails" (namely, WNT-3a) with babies born with tails. In other words, it's the only visible candidate for the theory about a gene that Karl Giberson is alluding to. The problem is that this theory about this gene is completely different from what Giberson said. It does not require us to describe WNT-3a inaccurately as "a gene for tails." A moment's research shows that it is actually a gene involved in a variety of things, including neural tube development in humans. The theory, contra Giberson, isn't that the gene is switched off (which it isn't). And the theory, contra Giberson, isn't that this gene is non-functional junk that causes babies to be born with tails when the gene accidentally gets switched on or is accidentally "not ignored." In other words, Giberson is just incorrectly describing the whole theory about how WNT-3a is involved in the birth of human babies with tail-like structures. (See also Casey Luskin's discussion of the "switched-off gene" claim here.)

Now comes the big revelation. I just quoted the theory that Giberson is inaccurately explaining concerning WNT-3a from the pro-evolution web site TalkOrigins, where they nonetheless think that the fact that babies are sometimes born with tails is evidence for common ancestry. In fact, one theistic evolutionist and one person highly sympathetic to that view sent me the TalkOrigins link as though it supported Giberson's position rather than contradicting it! Here is the link, and here is the quotation with a little lead-in and without the ellipses:

As with other atavistic structures, human tails are most likely the result of either a somatic mutation, a germline mutation, or an environmental influence that reactivates an underlying developmental pathway which has been retained, if only partially, in the human genome (Dao and Netsky 1984; Hall 1984; Hall 1995). In fact, the genes that control the development of tails in mice and other vertebrates have been identified (the Wnt-3a and Cdx1 genes; Greco et al. 1996; Prinos et al. 2001; Schubert et al. 2001; Shum et al. 1999; Takada et al. 1994). As predicted by common descent from the atavistic evidence, these tail genes have also been discovered in the human genome (Katoh 2002; Roelink et al. 1993). As discussed below in detail, the development of the normal human tail in the early embryo has been investigated extensively, and apoptosis (programmed cell death) plays a significant role in removing the tail of a human embryo after it has formed. It is now known that down-regulation of the Wnt-3a gene induces apoptosis of tail cells during mouse development (Greco et al. 1996; Shum et al. 1999; Takada et al. 1994), and similar effects are observed in humans (Chan et al. 2002). Additionally, researchers have identified a mutant mouse that does not develop a tail, and this phenotype is due to a regulatory mutation that decreases the Wnt-3a gene dosage (Greco et al. 1996; Gruneberg and Wickramaratne 1974; Heston 1951). Thus, current evidence indicates that the genetic cause of tail loss in the evolution of apes was likely a simple regulatory mutation(s) that slightly decreased Wnt-3a gene dosage. Conversely, a mutation or environmental factor that increased dosage of the Wnt-3a gene would reduce apoptosis of the human tail during development and would result in its retention, as an atavism, in a newborn.

Notice several things about this. First, the lead-in sentence, taken in conjunction with what the theory actually is in the rest of the paragraph, gives us a garbled picture. The lead-in sentence implies that a "developmental pathway" in humans for tails is somehow inactive and needs to be "reactivated." Giberson has tried to spell this out by saying that there is a "gene for tails" that is "switched off" and has to be "switched on," which as we have seen is false. But the lead-in sentence, though less explicit than Giberson and hence less subject to outright falsification, is also in tension with the rest of the paragraph. What is this "inactivated developmental pathway," precisely, if the actual mechanism of human babies' birth with tails is an excessive cellular dosage of a needed and functional human gene? It seems quite misleading to call such an accidental excessive dosage (and the description itself makes the accidental nature in the individual quite clear) a "reactivation" of anything whatsoever, unless of course one is already committed to the proposition of common ancestry. But on that construal, the argument from babies born with tails to common ancestry is circular.

Similarly, the passage refers to "these tail genes" as being discovered in humans, and refers to this as "predicted by common descent." Perhaps this is where Karl Giberson got his ideas. But as one reads on, one learns that the gene in question is WNT-3a, which, one can discover by a small amount of research, is not per se a tail gene and is not deactivated in humans but is rather a functional gene in humans.

The reference to the "genetic cause of tail loss in the evolution of apes" is pure speculation based upon the assumption of common ancestry. There is nothing in the hypothesized cause of occasional human tail-like structures (extra-high gene dosage of WNT-3a) that supports this as a conclusion as over against common design using WNT-3a for the variety of functions that we know it presently has. Similarly, the use of the terms "atavistic" and "atavism" play no explanatory role as regards why a particular baby's extra spinal chord segment does not regress in utero. The passage already conjectures that this is caused by a chance mutation in recent time or even an environmental cause--in other words, by a random event connected to that embryo that is not caused by the past evolutionary history of humans as the authors conjecture it.

So what we have here is an actual scientific hypothesis concerning how particular human babies might come to be born with tail-like structures, but it is mingled with random references to conjectural evolutionary claims that are doing no explanatory work. This mingling produces a weird hodge-podge that the unwary might take to mean that WNT-3a has no function in humans and is just leftover flotsam and jetsam. Even a short googling turns up the falsehood of that claim, which the TalkOrigins author doesn't explicitly make in any event. Karl Giberson fleshes all of this out into far more explicit, but flatly wrong, claims that we humans have a leftover "gene for tails" from our species' evolutionary past that would be "bad design" if it were designed and that is "switched off" or "ignored" in human development and occasionally gets accidentally "switched on," causing babies to be born with atavistic tails!

If we strip away all the misleading talk about "reactivation" and the outright falsehood that the relevant gene is a leftover piece of junk that is switched off in humans, what is left of the argument for common descent from the fact that human babies' extra spinal chord section sometimes doesn't regress before birth? Precious little. In fact, almost nothing but the morphological resemblance of the resultant structure to a tail. As in, "Hey, look, a human baby with a tail! Gee, I wonder if that means we were descended from an ancestor with a tail! Because, see, it's a tail!" By itself, this is an exceedingly weak argument, to put it charitably. What if an occasional human baby were born with a third arm? Let us say, even, that it were a functional arm that could be moved. Would that give us any reason at all to believe that we were descended from ancestors with three arms? The negative answer should be evident. Weird, abnormal glitches happen in embryonic development all the time. Thalidomide babies are born with no arms, but that doesn't mean we were descended from ancestors with flipper-like hands attached directly to their shoulders.

I suppose one might add, to try to wring as much as possible out of the remaining data, that we do not know why humans go through a transient phase in utero in which their spinal chords are extra-long and then regress. But talk about "Darwinism of the gaps"! "We don't know why this happens, so maybe it has something or other to do with evolutionary history!" Considering that we do know that the WNT-3a gene is functional and important in neural tube development, it would be the height of folly to assume that having less of it would be a good thing on the grounds that (maybe) down-regulation of WNT-3a would result in a shorter human spinal column in utero all along rather than the normal, transient "tail" development phase. This point fits well with the fact that evolutionary reasoning has already been medically harmful, as Casey Luskin points out: Assuming that babies born with tail-like structures have merely a harmless atavism and are otherwise perfectly healthy has led to a failure to look for other medical problems, which usually do turn out to be present.

The cautionary tale here is not hard to find: When an evolutionary theorist, even a theistic evolutionist, tells you as an assured fact that some human structure is caused as an atavism by a leftover and normally switched-off gene from our evolutionary past, don't be in too much of a hurry to believe him. In this case, it turns out that Giberson's characterization is wrong even by comparison with what his fellow evolutionists are saying. As for his rush to infer "bad design," what is one to say? When the gene in question is, in fact, working just fine, thanks very much, in human neural tube development, the characterization of its existence as "bad design" cannot stand up for a moment. But of course that characterization is of a piece with the inaccurate claim that the gene is normally "switched off" and "ignored."

I am not claiming that there are no segments of the human genome that do not have presently known functions. These are the segments that scientists have recklessly been calling "junk DNA" for quite a while, though a variety of recent developments may be teaching them a little more humility and caution. I'm not even claiming to know for sure that there is no actual, non-functioning junk in the human genome, were all known. In this case, however, the gene in question is not even alleged by mainstream science to be non-functional. It would be the sheerest conjecture to try to figure out where Karl Giberson got that idea. For the rest of us, I would just say: Checking these things out for yourself often pays off handsomely.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on June 23, 2014 9:38 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

The zero-sum game in human evolution and theology

 

The zero-sum game in human evolution and theology

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

I've often talked about the zero-sum game in relation to the homosexual agenda. "Moderates" think that, if they make concessions, they will then be left alone in the area they have carved out for themselves, but it never works that way. They are always pursued to that area and required to endorse more and more, until they must surrender completely or be punished.

I think that a parallel phenomenon goes on in the area of theistic evolution. For a long time, theistic evolutionists have attempted detente with secular Darwinists in something like the following terms: We will concede that you guys are right and are justified by "overwhelming evidence" in science when you say that man evolved by what appear to be fully natural processes from non-human ancestors. However, this was only man's body. To salvage our claim to some sort of Judeo-Christian belief in God's special relation to man and man's having the imago dei, we will postulate an entirely invisible, unverifiable and unfalsifiable event of "ensoulment" at a certain point in the natural, physical history of evolution. God specially created just the immaterial part of man, a soul, and placed it into a body that had come into existence entirely through the physical means that you Darwinists state. By this event, God made a male and a female into real human beings. These were Adam and Eve who were the ancestors of all human beings. They fell through sin, and the story of redemption history continues from there. Deal?

No deal. Contrary to hopes and expectations, this theistic evolutionist attempt to retreat into pure, non-empirical metaphysics in order to give the widest possible latitude to the allegedly "settled results of science" has not met with joyous praise from the secular Darwinist side.

In fact, they have doubled down: The claim now is that there could not have been a single male and female ancestor of all human beings, that human evolution goes through a bottleneck of a supposedly minimum number of ancestors of several thousand at the supposed time of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees. This based on conjectures from DNA sequencing.

Capitulation has been widespread, with the Biologos foundation leading the way in abandoning the existence of an historical Adam and Eve who were the literal, biological ancestors of all mankind. This, of course, forced by the (new) "settled results of science."

Those Christians who thought they could just comfortably follow the consensus of the scientific mainstream while maintaining their Christian theology in a separate, spiritual realm, have been put in a bind by all of this. The existence of a literal Adam, the ancestor of all mankind, whose literal fall into sin was the great catastrophe of human history, has been regarded for two thousand years as an important tenet of Christian theology, taken without question by Jesus and the early Christians from Judaism. The Apostle Paul proceeded to expound an explicit Christian theology of grace and redemption, based on the historical existence of Adam; Jesus is the new Adam who redeems us from the Fall of the first Adam.

But now "science" is telling us that Adam was, at the very most, some kind of tribal head of a very large group of hominids, all of whom interbred. In fact, the whole idea is that there are no two human parents whose blood runs in the veins of every human alive today. Theistic evolutionist Christians have been hounded out of their niche. Either they will have to abandon some fairly basic Christian theology or they will have to start asking whether, after all, the scientific consensus is so well-supported, so objective, so unbiased a result of plain empirical research, as they have been led to believe and have previously conceded.

As I noted briefly here, the whole purely spiritual ensoulment view was always dubious. Apart from the fact that it is vastly, not to say wildly, at odds with the Genesis text, such a view implies that the body of man is entirely animalistic and requires only the addition of a purely immaterial soul, like a cherry on top, to make man. The imago dei thus becomes an entirely immaterial matter having nothing whatsoever to do with the human body. There would have been large numbers of evolved hominids with the same kind of body as the "ensouled" Adam and Eve who, lacking the addition of that purely immaterial part, would not have had the imago dei.

This is both metaphysically and empirically questionable. Is it really plausible that so important a change as that between man and an ape-like creature would have no physical consequences, in brain structure and function, if nothing else?

Metaphysically, do we really want to postulate that man is, physically, nothing but a biological animal, magically united with an immaterial soul? Even I, self-styled Cartesian though I am, think this poor metaphysics. It is both scientifically and experientially evident that human emotions, desires, and abilities are deeply wedded to our natural embodiment. This does not mean that it is literally impossible that a disembodied human soul could have similar abilities and feelings, but it does make such a state not the normal human state. I, for example, am female, and this has to do with a very deep connection between my body and soul, a connection concretely manifested in all sorts of interactions among neural firings, emotions, hormones, and much more. A being who was never intended to be embodied at all would not, indeed could not, be female in the same sense.

The angelistic ensoulment view, without any bodily consequences, was a poor compromise from the beginning. I suggest that Christians would have been better served a long time ago if they had questioned the claims to neutrality, objectivity, and "overwhelming evidence" brought for the highly conjectural theories of naturalistic human physical evolution. If they are not going to abandon an historical Adam and Eve now, they are going to have to do that now in any event--dig into the empirical evidence and make some attempt to discover whether the latest declarations from the Scientific Consensus Magisterium really reflect undeniable empirical facts. This requires getting over the fear of being burned and looking silly--what we might call Galileo Avoidance Syndrome. (HT for the phrase to Esteemed Husband.)

As in other political realms, so in such a contentious area as the origins of mankind: There really are sides, and it does us no good to be naive and to assume that we can let the other side dictate our beliefs and, thereby, our terms of surrender. We need to be more stubborn, more willing to take a forward position, and more willing to say that the "consensus of experts" may well be wrong. The same is true, by the way, in the field of New Testament studies.

I hope later to write a bit about the book Science and Human Origins, by Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin, but that is for another post.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on June 1, 2014 9:10 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Adam and Eve) (Darwinism) (evolution) (origins)

There are no slippery prior probabilities

 

There are no slippery prior probabilities

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

For the present let it suffice to bear in mind that there is no limit to the strength of working, as distinguished from abstract, certainty, to which probable evidence may not lead us along its gently ascending paths.

W.E. Gladstone, Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Joseph Butler, 1896, p. 349.

In our article on the resurrection in this volume from Blackwell, my husband and I discuss a confusion that has dogged historical apologetics for hundreds of years: The idea that a person who has "too low" of a prior probability for the miraculous is justified in dismissing evidence for a specific miracle out of hand and accepting any other explanation instead.

David Hume made famous capital out of this confusion in his claim to have delivered an "everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion." Atheists run back to the prior probabilities as a rabbit runs to its hole. Never mind the concrete evidence! If I don't already believe that God exists, why should I even listen to your concrete evidence? There must be some other explanation for it, and that's all!

One of the reasons that an understanding of probability is valuable is that it can dispel persistent errors--the intellectual equivalent of urban legends that crop up again and again.

This is such an error. And it is a case where, unfortunately, some Christian writers agree with David Hume. In the relevant section of our article we instance a quotation from the Protestant writers R.C. Sproul, Arthur Lindsley, and John Gerstner, in which they say that "only on the prior evidence that God exists is a miracle even possible" and that therefore "miracles cannot prove God."

This idea of a prior probability that is "too low" gives impetus to an extremely rigid form of classical apologetics that asserts not merely that it is a strategically good idea but that it is an absolute epistemic necessity to convince a person first that God exists, using the arguments of natural theology, before he can be reasonably expected to receive the specific evidence for a miracle such as the resurrection.

The contemporary probability theorist John Earman has done much, building on the work of 19th century thinker Charles Babbage, to demonstrate the falsity of this view. (Earman, to be clear, is not a Christian nor even, as far as I know, a theist.) Briefly, the problem with the Humean view is this: It fails to recognize that any non-zero probability, however low, can be overcome by sufficiently strong probabilistic evidence. This is simply a fact of probability theory. There is no such thing as a prior probability that is "slippery," such that one could never rationally overcome it. Therefore, it is simply false to say that, if one doesn't already believe that God exists, one should "understandably" dismiss the evidence for any miracle. For, if that evidence were sufficiently strong, it would show that, contrary to what one had previously thought, God does indeed exist!

It's important to distinguish strategy from epistemology. For sociological and psychological reasons, it may be quite reasonable in talking with a particular person to present one's arguments in stages--arguing first that God exists on the basis of natural theology and then moving on from there. The arch-probabilist among philosophers of religion, Richard Swinburne, proceeds in exactly this way. It is also probabilistically tidy to do so, because Jesus didn't walk on earth in Palestine unless life exists, and life doesn't exist unless the universe is life-permitting, so it is perfectly reasonable to present these other items as evidence for the existence of God first if one has such arguments.

But those considerations are a far cry from insisting that the evidence for a miracle such as the resurrection literally does not count as evidence or literally cannot be assimilated as evidence unless one already believes in the existence of God. That strong position is simply and flatly false and can be shown to be false by even a rudimentary understanding of how probabilistic arguments work.

In layman's terms, we can isolate the impact of an item of evidence upon an hypothesis from the prior probability of that hypothesis. We can then look at that evidential impact and at least estimate how low of a prior probability could be overcome by that evidential force. That is the strategy that Tim and I employ in our article about the resurrection.

Here is an important point: The strength of the evidence can often be seen by looking at the lengths to which the skeptic must go to explain away that evidence rather than taking seriously the hypothesis that springs to mind. Hence, rather than take seriously the possibility of the resurrection, the skeptic must hypothesize that the women went to the wrong tomb and the persecutor Paul had some inexplicable fit on the road to Damascus that just happened to make him think Jesus was talking to him and that the Christians were right and the eleven disciples all just happened to have a coordinated mass hallucination of Jesus eating, being tangible, and talking to all of them at once, repeatedly, over a forty day period and James just happened to have a similar hallucination and...You get the picture.

A major problem with saying that it is reasonable or understandable for the skeptic (who doesn't already accept the arguments of natural theology) to dismiss the evidence for a miracle is that one is in that case endorsing massively ad hoc hypothesizing on the part of the skeptic. And that is not reasonable.

One could perhaps respond that the skeptic might might simply not know about the details of the evidence for the resurrection. Perhaps he is simply ignorant. In that case he wouldn't be making such ad hoc arguments because he would just vaguely think that "scholars have shown" that the gospels are a bunch of legends made up long after the fact. But in that case, why should the only trigger, the one absolutely necessary trigger, for his finding out more be his coming to believe that God exists by being taken through a prolegomenon of natural theology? Surely we can think of other things that might make him think again--meeting a smart, respected friend or colleague who is a Christian, for example, and wondering why in the world so-and-so believes such a cockamamie tale.

It is important for Christians wanting to think clearly not to become tied to a particular, rigid order for apologetic arguments. This is important first of all because such a rigid order requirement is not defensible. We should want to know the truth, including the truth at the metalevel about how apologetics "has to" go.

Relatedly, it is important not to become tied to such a rigid order because we shouldn't be encouraging people to throw out or ignore strong evidence. We shouldn't even be encouraging them to ignore evidence until and unless they believe some umbrella hypothesis, such as theism, on independent grounds. That is poor philosophical practice. It is one thing to say that it may be helpful to show them first, on other grounds, that God exists. It is quite another to tell them that they needn't bother about the evidence for the resurrection right now, unless they already believe that God exists, because, if they do not have the proper theistic beliefs already in place, it's perfectly understandable that that evidence looks weak to them. No, it shouldn't look weak to them, and no, that isn't understandable.

There are also concerns about eternity involved here; these are matters of ultimate moment. If an unbeliever is simply ignorant of the strength of the available evidence for a miracle, the important thing is to inform him about the evidence, which speaks for itself. To say instead that it is understandable for him to dismiss any miracle claim if he doesn't already believe in the existence of God is to give him an excuse for not looking through the telescope.

We shouldn't be handing out such "get out of jail free" cards readily, because I can tell you one thing: They won't get anybody out of hell.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on May 22, 2014 11:30 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (apologetics) (evidentialism) (miracles) (philosophy of religion)

Would progressive creation undermine the existence of an order of nature?

Would progressive creation undermine the existence of an order of nature?

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

Suppose that God intervened multiple times, prior to the advent of man (presumably by some kind of special creation as well), to create species or to make it probable that a new species would come about where this would not have happened absent divine intervention.

For now, I want to set aside the question of the empirical affidavits of this suggestion. I also want to set aside arguments about the age of the earth. I hear that some Christian groups have had to ban, explicitly, arguments about the age of the earth, because they are a kind of Internet black hole. Also, the criticism I am going to answer would apply to both old-earth and young-earth versions of creationism.

So I'd like to set aside the question of whether this scenario is in fact probable and ask instead whether we should be closed to it and not investigate it on the basis of a particular theological concern.

The concern goes roughly like this. (This is my reconstruction.)

There has to be an order of nature in order for even miracles to have any meaning. If one could never know what was going to happen next, if the natural world had no order or meaning, not only would science have no subject of study, but miracles would have no backdrop against which to occur. Therefore, God can't just be keeping nature going by continual bumps and tweaks, or the entire notion of an order of nature is out the window. Therefore, anything like progressive creation or repeated divine intervention in the creation of animal species is enormously improbable even from the theistic or Christian perspective, and we should be highly resistant to such scenarios and should look instead for species to appear by a smooth operation of secondary means, i.e., by the order of nature.

Since readers will know that I have been discussing intelligent design theory with Ed Feser at Extra Thoughts, I hasten to add that I am not (repeat, not) attributing this objection to Ed. In fact, as far as I know, this is not one of his objections to ID.

In fact, since this is a blog post rather than a book, I'm not attributing it to anyone in particular, but I have a sense that it is "in the air." It's one of those things that you hear quite a lot, and I could probably find plenty of examples both in books and on-line. I remember quite definitely that one friend brought it up to me in e-mail discussion of this very topic, and I seem to recall that I've seen it in comboxes as an objection in the past when I've discussed ID. It also seems related to the objection that is much more common, which one sees in the combox here, that there must have been something wrong with the creation at first if God had to keep intervening to do new things in it. All of that will do for my purposes, because I think it's interesting enough to answer.

I myself tend to think that the ID arguments "sit well" with some kind of progressive creation of the sort sketched. By this I do not mean that they require or entail it. In fact, I find that most of the high-profile ID theorists are concerned to emphasize the possibility of front-loading, presumably because repeated literal intervention for purposes of creation is so repugnant to so many people, both Christian and secular. So even as a lay camp follower, I'm a bit of an outlier in saying, "The heck with all that" and leaning in the direction of a more robust interventionism. But there are reasons to think that progressive, interventionist creationism does sit well with the ID argument. Since the ID arguments are best understood (see this post of mine) as using special intention of an agent, and some sort of act or other to carry out that special intent, as an explanation, it is quite natural that all of this should parse out in terms of creation involving acts to carry out the special intent to bring into being some biological entity that otherwise would not have come about by secondary processes.

In a sense one can regard the young earth position in this same philosophical light, with the acts occurring within a short time period of six literal days. The above argument from the natural order is at least as much of an attack on a young earth view as on a more leisurely form of progressive creationism.

I think it is partly because ID arguments do "sit well" with some kind of progressive creationism that the above criticism of ID comes up. Is there something "off" or "wrong," theologically, about the picture of God's "reaching down" and "doing things" to the world that wouldn't otherwise have happened in order to bring into being the species we see today? Does such a picture erase the very notion of an orderly creation or an order of creation?

There are several reasons to reject this criticism. First of all, as I have said before, the natural order is a tough fabric. It would take a lot to break up our reasonable reliance on it, which is based on an overwhelming mass of daily evidence. Christians already believe that there have been periods of rather furious miraculous activity, during the ministry of Jesus and of the apostles, for example. Yet somehow this didn't make people rationally worry that their corn flakes, or the Greco-Roman equivalent, were going to disappear randomly off of the kitchen table.

Second, this is about origins. This is about where at least some biological natural kinds came from in the first place long ago, not about where individual horses and bacteria come from today. In the unlikely event that an ID proponent were to produce an argument purporting to show that a Designer individually creates each animal embryo, all the time, by something other than the operation of secondary causes, I would raise the concern that such a view is not consonant with the existence of a natural order. But arguments for the deliberately designed origin, before the existence of man, of types of animals that then reproduce for thousands or even (depending on your view) millions of years by natural processes hardly seems like a challenge to the existence of a natural order! Of course these types of creatures have to come from somewhere in the first place. Once they are here, they are part of the natural order from then on out.

Third, this concern seems to me to be a result of a kind of temporal parochialism. If we combine highly interventionist views such as arise in both old-earth and young-earth creationism, for nearly two thousand years I would say that the majority of Christians, including educated as well as uneducated Christians, believed that God specially created many animal species, but none of them took this to be a challenge to the existence of a natural order. No, I'm not saying that every Christian thought that, nor even every prominent Christian, but only that a majority did. It seems to me a post-Darwinian prejudice that leads people to think that there is some philosophical prima facie case that the origin of species (!) "ought" to occur or "must occur" by entirely secondary causes. On the contrary. The reason that Darwin's ideas and arguments, as scientific and empirical arguments, were so revolutionary in the religious world is because the opposite was more generally assumed. If we say that there is some a priori theological reason to think that the origin of species ought to be or must be by natural processes, we seem to be arguing that all intelligent Christians should have been Darwinists (at least in broad outline) prior to Darwin. This seems, to put it mildly, to smack of chronological snobbery.

Finally, to affirm the existence of a natural order that includes things with their own powers is to say nothing, I repeat, nothing, in itself about the level at which the natural order operates or about what those powers are vis a vis the origin of animal species. The claim that the biological species developed entirely by natural processes is one possible position about what the natural order is like. It is not, by a long shot, the only possible position consistent with the existence of a natural order.

This should be obvious. We can construct a future scenario in which some aspects of history have been forgotten and people erroneously believe that some weaponized germ form developed entirely by natural processes when in fact, in that form, it was partially bioengineered. In that scenario, one can imagine clever theologians telling Christians who believe that they have evidence for bioengineering that they must instead affirm the entirely natural origin of that germ or else they are denying the existence of a natural order with "its own real causal powers." It should be clear that such a rigid stance blocks the course of inquiry and, in the scenario in question, blocks access to the actual truth of the matter. The fact of the matter should be investigated by reference to the empirical evidence available. Again: To believe in the natural order is not ipso facto to believe that the natural order gave rise to this or that particular type of thing. We discover the workings of the natural order by investigation, not by armchair assumption-making.

If God specially created some species, which came into existence after the origin of the larger universe, there was already a natural order before that time and continued to be a natural order after that time. It's just that that natural order didn't happen to have the inherent causal powers to give rise to that species by those natural causal powers alone. That's all. To say, "There is a natural order" tells us precisely nothing about whether intelligent intervention is a better explanation. That has to be found out empirically or perhaps by reference to revelatory texts. But it is highly implausible (to put it mildly) that philosophical theology alone is going to tell us either "yes" or "no" to the highly specific question of whether such-and-such a species arose in the first place from the order of nature alone.

That brings us around to the empirical considerations I set aside at the outset. It will hardly be a secret after all this time (not just in this post but in others) that, as an interested layman, I think a great many of the ID arguments do succeed on their own terms, empirically. But the course of inquiry is often blocked, even among Christians, by what seem to me extremely strange a priori objections to taking that evidence on its own terms. The one I address here is one I have run across on more than one occasion, and I think a lot of people are indeed influenced by it. Therefore, it needs to be cleared away so that we can get back to examining the evidence, both Biblical and empirical.

It's a sociologically interesting fact that often people who are trying to block an examination of the ID evidence will cast their position as, "Christianity is consistent with Darwinism." But that isn't really the question at issue in such conversations. The question they are really tacitly answering "no" to is, "Is Christianity consistent with design, and evidence thereof?" I get weary in personal conversation, reading web sites, etc., running into what seems to me, perhaps unintentionally, a kind of passive aggressive move: "It's okay, you can be a Christian and a Darwinist" becomes a kind of code for, "You can't be a smart, theologically and philosophically informed Christian, and be anything but a Darwinist."

The theistic evolutionists (and by that I mean the very strong, anti-ID types) have been very successful rhetorically with this passive-aggressive move. They have been very successful, too, at marketing the proposition that it's okay to be a Christian Darwinist. At this point, I think it's important to make the opposite point: It's okay to be a Christian anti-Darwinist! There is nothing what-so-ev-er about the Christian affirmation of a divinely ordained order of nature that entails or even implies that species originated without special creation. It has always seemed to me that this shouldn't need to be said; it's so obvious. But I'm realizing that, sociologically, it does need to be said, so this post is an attempt to say it, and argue for it. Once these kinds of a priori blocks are cleared away, honest inquirers will be free to look into the detailed arguments that others have made much more ably than I ever could.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on May 14, 2014 10:34 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (intelligent design) (philosophy of religion)

How to handle converts

 

How to handle converts

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

I have been pondering lately the following dilemma for Christian witness: On the one hand, when evangelizing or talking to inquirers about Christianity, we want to focus on a fairly circumscribed set of teachings that absolutely must be believed for one to be a Christian at all--mere Christianity, if you will. On the other hand, we don't want to give the impression that other Christian doctrines, such as Scripture's moral teachings on homosexuality or Scripture's teachings about the differences between men and women, are literally optional and unimportant.

If someone insists on arguing about homosexuality when inquiring about Christianity, it's perfectly legitimate to tell him, "Yes, the Scriptures do have teachings on that subject that are at odds with popular contemporary beliefs. But for the moment, let's stick to basics: Is Jesus God? Did he die for our sins and rise again? If those things are true, much else will follow, including some things that are nowadays politically incorrect, but since you are coming to me to discuss the truth of the theological claims of Christianity, let's discuss that subject first."

This sensible and moderate approach is far different from telling the person, "Oh, none of that is essential. I know lots of gay Christians," which gives the impression that there is no Christian position on the subject.

There are, however, both rhetorical and pastoral issues that can be difficult to juggle. Suppose that someone else evangelized the person with whom you are now talking. That convert may now believe that Jesus is God, that Jesus rose again from the dead, even every doctrine in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. That convert may even have confessed his sins (or what he sees as his sins) and sought forgiveness. But now, that convert may view it as his job to help the church to be more politically inclusive. Suppose that you are a pastor or the leader of a ministry. How do you deal with that?

The issues involved can range far. Feminism is another. Suppose a young woman claims to have been raised in a hyper-restrictive home and to be glad to have found out that Christianity does not really forbid women's wearing pants or getting a college education. Well and good. There really are such odd pockets of Christianity, and she may well have been raised in one such, and what they teach really does go far beyond any real Christian teaching about the differences between men and women. At the same time, such a young woman may well be voluble now about how the church needs to "show that it has something to say to women" and about how feminism is really a good thing, etc. I would say that she needs some pushback on that. It's true that male headship in the home isn't in the Apostles' Creed, but it is in the Apostle Paul. And that God created male and female, presumably with the intent that these are different from one another, is in the book of Genesis.

To some degree we can thread our way through the minefield by not giving what the Baptists call "baby Christians" positions of leadership. New Christians, especially adult converts, need time to grow and learn. And we Christians need time to break to them various politically unwelcome truths, if no one did that before. However harsh it may sound to the ears of moderns, fed self-esteem pablum from birth, the person who has just converted or reconverted to Christianity is probably not the person who should be telling us all "what the church needs to be doing differently to be attractive to people like me." It's tempting of course to think that that is exactly what we should be asking, but I submit that to think so is to bring a market model into the church where it does not belong. Much as I love the free market, the church shouldn't think of itself as selling a product. New converts or reconverts are not members of focus groups, and their job should be to learn and grow in grace, wisdom, and understanding of the truths of the Bible, not to tell us, "What did you like about our product? How can we sell it more effectively to others like you?"

The last thing a new convert or reconvert needs is a leadership position. Don't tell them to write a book or to go on the lecture circuit. No, not even if they have a striking conversion story that makes you feel really excited when you think about it.

But I think the problem runs deeper and really goes back to our approach to evangelization. I warned here about a bait and switch as regards homosexuality: The speaker there tells his audience not to say too much to self-professed homosexuals about the Bible's position on their activities, because that might make them feel unwelcome. As I pointed out in that post, there is a great danger, then, that such people will really never get it, that they will assume, since they have been told "come as you are," that the church welcomes their continuing in their lifestyle even after they have allegedly turned to Jesus. And it gets a little embarrassing to turn around at that point and say, "Well, yes, we did try to be a welcoming and gay-friendly church, but you have to stop that now. Didn't you know?" Chances are good that it is they who will change the church rather than vice versa.

Related to this is the erroneous belief that, if we evangelize, people will magically get all of their moral (now deemed political) views sorted out after they are saved. Protestants might say that this will happen through the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit. Catholics might believe that the Sacraments will do the trick. Far be it from me to say anything against either the teaching of the Holy Spirit or the Sacraments, but they are no substitute for a morally informed and clear evangelistic approach. If you tell people, tacitly or even explicitly, "That doesn't matter" concerning their messed-up social and moral views, chances are they will believe you, which is going to make uphill going for the Holy Spirit after they consider themselves Christians. "Just bring them to Jesus and let Him do the rest" is a feckless approach and is likely to damage the church. This point is also related to the pietistic silliness one hears sometimes to the effect that we just need to preach the gospel and evangelize rather than "being involved in politics," where "politics" includes moral issues like abortion and homosexuality. Such a naive approach fails to reckon with the fact that, if we do not go out and challenge the world, the world will challenge and change us. The very success the world has had in changing Christian opinions on these issues is a sign that the churches need to be more outspoken, not less. We can't count on evangelism and conversion to do the hard work for us on these issues without our confronting them head-on.

Which brings me back to the dilemma I discussed at the beginning. It's a delicate task to discuss the basics with a prospective convert while not giving the false impression that there is nothing else to living as a Christian besides accepting those bare basics.

It's a delicate task, but somebody's got to do it. Perhaps one idea would be to make one's own opinions well-known in other contexts. If you are discussing conversion to Christianity with someone who can very easily look up your views on-line on various hot topics, he's going to have little doubt as to what sort of Christianity you are calling him to vis a vis those issues. For a pastor, this sort of thing could be done on a church web site with links to various position papers endorsed by the church.

Ultimately, there is going to be no getting around it: If your prospective convert makes his liberal moral and social views known in conversation, you have to give him some pushback. You have to make it clear that Christianity isn't going to leave him in a comfortable left-wing bubble on those issues. And if he insists on discussing them there and then, you have to be willing to do so. In this day and age, there is probably something wrong if that doesn't happen at some point along the way, because the kind of prospective convert I have in mind is almost invariably going to bring up such things. It's pretty likely that someone who has been influenced by the zeitgeist is going to think that it counts as an objection to Christianity that (he's heard) Christianity teaches that homosexuality is wrong, or that (hopefully) your church doesn't ordain women. So it behooves us to think ahead and work out a response that is both gracious and clear. Where it goes from there depends on a combination of divine action and human free will.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on April 25, 2014 9:59 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Christianity) (evangelism)