Daily Archives: February 8, 2012

C Rulon: Biological Evolution: Replacing scientific fact with creationism can border on blasphemy

By   Charles L. Rulon,  Emeritus, Life Sciences

Long Beach City College

To insist that God abruptly created all of the different major kinds of life can be tantamount to blasphemy in the minds of liberal theists.  Consider:

Violent earth: Doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that an all-loving God would purposely place His favorite creations on a planet destined to experience catas­trophic disasters, including gigan­tic vol­can­ic eruptions, ice sheets cover­ing much of the planet, devastating tsunamis and earth­quakes, plate tectonic move­ments that tear apart entire conti­nents and asteroid bombardments that have resulted in global mass extinctions?

 Evolution: Doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that God would deceive liter­ally hundreds of thous­ands of dedicated scientists by making it look in every last detail as though evolution via natural selec­tion has been at work for the last several billion years? This includes data converging from a dozen different scientific disci­plines, along with millions of fossils spanning billions of years that all but spell out evol­u­tion. Isn’t it tantamount to blasphemy to even imply that the God of the Jews and Christians would personally carry out such a monumental deception?

Parasites: Doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that the all-wise, all-good God of Abraham would have purposely created the overwhelming majority of all His species to be deadly parasites, which they are?  Indeed, the study of our living world is, for the most part, the study of parasites.  To insist that the God of the universe created a parasite that blinds millions of people, or 10,000 dif­fer­ent species of tape­worms, or 2000 different species of disease-spread­ing biting lice, or thousands upon thousands of dif­ferent species of harm­ful bacteria, viruses and protozoa, or dozens of species of mal­aria-transmit­ting mosqui­toes is tantamount to blasphemy.  On the other hand, an abundance of parasites is just what one would expect if only natural selection were at work.

Blood sports: Consider cheetahs: they seem perfectly designed to kill gazelles.  Their eyes, teeth, claws and muscles are all what one might ex­pect if God’s pur­pose in designing cheetahs was to maximize their ability to catch and kill gazelles.  But now look at gazelles.  They also have been optimally designed to escape from cheetahs.  It looks just like cheetahs were designed by one god and gazelles by a rival god.  Either that or God made both because He’s a sadist into blood sports.  So, doesn’t it border on blasphemy to claim that God instantly created cheetahs and gazelles rather than to accept their evolution through natural selection?

Extinctions: Over 99% of all the billions of species to have ever inhabited earth sooner or later went extinct. Also, several mass extinctions in which up to 90% of all species on the planet went extinct have been documented in the fos­sil record.  If this is God’s purposeful handiwork, doesn’t that suggest a god that’s waste­ful, inept, care­less and uncon­cerned with the wel­fare of his cre­a­tions?  But since such thoughts are considered blasphemous, many Christians refuse to accept that ex­tinctions have actually occurred, or try to explain away the evidence with mythologies like Noah’s flood.

Oddities and Defects: The human body defi­nitely seems to be a marvelous ‘feat of engineering’.  For those who don’t understand the awesome power of natural selection working on continuous genetic variability over hundreds of millions of years, it’s easy to conclude that God specially created us.  But then that also means that God Almighty, Lord of the universe, must also be given the credit for all of our anatom­ical oddities such as nipples in males, plus dozens of what appear to be poor engi­neering designs or anatom­ical defects.

Examples of defects include an appendix that can be life-threatening; a birth canal that’s too small in females resulting in ex­tremely painful and often dangerous deliveries, with the deaths of untold numbers of women and new­borns throughout history; a miscarriage rate of over 60 percent; males with a pro­s­­tate gland that enlarges with age, blocks urination and inevitably becomes cancerous; a windpipe right next to our esophagus so that we can choke to death on a bite of food; males with extremely sen­si­tive testes vul­nerably exposed all the time instead of being withdrawn into the body as is done in numerous other mammals; our human brain with enough serious defects to fill neurology and psychi­atric text books and is now endangering the entire biosphere.

Rationalists can’t help but comment that if the above anatomi­cal and physiological ar­rangements really did originate from God, then God is either a sadist, a practical joker with a sick sense of humor, or needs to go back to design school.  On the other hand, if only natural selection is at work, then all of the above oddities and defects have perfectly natural explanations.

Prominent evolutionary biologist (and theist) Francisco Ayala had this to say regarding these apparent designer defects: “Not only can natural selec­tion account for the ‘design’ of organisms, but also it amounts to blasphemy to attribute it to God’s special action.” Ayala adds: “The defective design of organisms could be attributed to the gods of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, who fought with one another, made blunders and were clumsy in their endeavors. But, in my view, it is not compatible with a special action by the omnis­cient and omni­potent God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”[i]

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[i] “Arguing For Evolution” by Francisco Ayala, The Science Teacher, February 2000 (vol. 67, no. 2), pp. 30-32. Ayala is in the Department of Ecology and Evol­u­tion, University of California, Irvine.

C Rulon: God, Natural Theology & the Argument from Design

By Charles L. Rulon     Emeritus, Life Sciences   Long Beach City College

A favorite argument for the existence of God(s) from the ancient Greeks up to 1859 was the argument from design. The incredible design of the human eye, the bird’s wing, the human brain and all the harmony in nature could not have happened by chance. Where there is design, there must be a designer. After all, what are the odds of all this design happening by chance? It’s like believing that scraps of metal could be randomly thrown together to create a 747. God was truly everywhere.

As a result, in the 1700s and early 1800s many in England turned to nature to study the products of God’s Creation in an attempt to learn more about the mind of God. Butterfly and shell collections were proudly displayed in homes as the equivalent of the Bible laid open on the coffee table. Those who would study God’s works (nature) began to be seen as theologians as much as those who would study His word (the Bible). Natural history became transformed into Natural Theology and in the early 1800s nature books even outsold novels. Humans and nature belonged to an almighty purpose and the study of nature’s biological wonders revealed God’s personal concern for humanity.

The English theologian William Paley in 1802 became well known because of his comparison of the complex design in nature to that of a watch. To loosely quote Paley: “Look, if I found a watch on the beach, I would obviously know that all of the parts of the watch didn’t fly together just by accident. I would know that there had to have been a watchmaker. Well, the human eye is much more complex than a watch. So is a beautifully camouflaged butterfly. All of this design obviously proves the existence of an unbelievably intelligent and enormously powerful designer. He had to have been incredibly precise and creative in order to make a livable habitat for all the creatures He designed. The human mind, in particular, is a product of such high quality and complexity that it had to have been designed by a craftsman of infinite skill. That means that He has to be a personal being who cares for his creatures. This designer has to be the Christian God!”

However, there were many critics of Natural Theology, in particular the two famous philosophers and empiricists of the late 1700s, David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In addition, criticisms of Natural Theology continued to grow as more and more scientific discoveries were made related to faulty biological designs, to the appearance of fossils of extinct species, and to earth being extremely old. Some of these criticisms were as follows:

Critic 1: “Even if there is a designer, that doesn’t mean he’s your Christian God. Suppose I find a watch that has design flaws. Doesn’t that tell me the watchmaker is inept? So what about all of the design flaws in humans, like our useless appendix that ruptures, or our wisdom teeth that are mostly impacted, or our wind pipe right next to our esophagus so that we can choke to death on a bite of food, or the birth canal being too small, resulting in hundreds of  thousands of deaths at childbirth? And what about nipples in males? Doesn’t all this prove that your designer god is inept and maybe even mean-spirited?”

Critic 2: “Also, to use your watch analogy, there are lots of different watch-makers, so maybe there are also lots of different designers. Besides, just because all watches have watchmakers, why should it follow that a butterfly has to have a butterfly maker? After all, everyone’s seen a watchmaker, but no one has ever seen a butterfly maker. Maybe there’s some unknown law of nature responsible for making the butterfly and we’re just not smart enough to figure it out.”

And so it went – back and forth – back and forth. Supporters of Natural Theology absolutely knew that God’s goodness and intelligent design was real and, for hundreds of years, continued to present arguments as proof. And for hundreds of years these arguments were rebutted by the critics who pointed out all the cruelty and suffering in the animal world — and all the parasites — and all the extinctions. But the believers had answers for everything.

So why wasn’t either side able to convince the other? Was it because believers had some secret proof unknown to the skeptics, or vice versa? No. Was it because one or the other had just carelessly overlooked the invalidity of their arguments. No. If it were any of these, this issue would have been settled long ago. All the cards were on the table for everyone to see, yet intelligent human beings still continued to disagree over them.

So why wasn’t either side able to convince the other? One reason was blind faith. Another was the fact that well-designed species actually existed. What other possible explanation than “God (or a universal mind) did it” could there be for the existence of all these different species (including us), each with intricate adaptations and designs? If we weren’t created by some kind of super intelligent designer or designers, then how did we get here?”

As a result, even though many scientists and philosophers, especially on the European continent, no longer believed in Natural Theology, biology was still very much tied to theology. How could it be otherwise? All the design in nature obviously demanded a Designer. All of the different species obviously demanded a Creator. As a result,

almost all scientists and philosophers in the early 1800s were either Christian men to some degree, or at least were deists. Also, virtually all the naturalists in England in the early 1800s were ordained ministers, as were the professors at Cambridge who taught botany and geology.

 The Origin of Species

Then in 1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published. The Origin seriously challenged several major pillars of Christian dogma, in particular special creation, the design argument and man’s unique status. God was no longer required as an explanatory factor for all of the design in nature. Instead, The Origin contained considerable argument and evidence to show first, that the evolution of species had really occurred and second, that species could evolve naturally and automatically without guidance or foresight through a process called natural selection. Natural selection could explain the evolution of eyes, of wings and of all the different species, including their many defects. It could explain why species go extinct and why there are far more parasitic species than free-living ones.

The Origin sold out on the first day of publication and subsequently went through six editions and the world has never been the same since. It was the book that “shook the world.” It was to eventually bring about one of the greatest paradigm shifts in scientific, philosophical and religious thinking in the history of the world!

From the moment of its publication Darwin’s fundamental ideas inspired intense reactions ranging from ferocious condemnation to ecstatic allegiance. Most of Darwin’s Victorian contemporaries bitterly opposed and ridiculed the idea that man might have descended from an ape. For scientists and philosophers alike, from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant, man was a creature above and apart from other living beings. He held a unique position in God’s Creation. He had a soul. There was no possible transition from animal to man.

But there were many who supported Darwin. One was Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and one of the founders of meteorology. On reading Darwin’s book, Galton wrote him the following letter: “My Dear Darwin, I always think of you in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of superstition. I used to be wretched under the weight of the old-fashioned arguments from design, [which I felt were worthless, but unable to prove it]. Consequently, the appearance of your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition as if it had been a nightmare and [gave] me freedom of thought.”