For example, in his "Why is evolutionary theory so upsetting to some?" post, Prof. Singham says of ID advocates that he suspects their "main concern [is] that evolution by natural selection implie[s] that human beings [have] no special status among living things."
I've had the same thought. But I wonder whether there isn't, among fundamentalists, an even greater beef with the seeming implication of Darwinism that God does not perform "mighty works" with respect to the world's biological history ... and, accordingly, perhaps not with respect to each of our individual, personal histories, either. A "personal God" who does not continually do "mighty works" in the world which he created, even though he could: Is such a God even worth speculating about, let alone worshipping?
All the same, Prof. Singham's point is well-taken, that Darwinian evolution is manifestly not goal-directed. Outcomes depend on countless (in effect) "coin tosses" strung together in arbitrary series such that where you wind up cannot be predicted:
Think of starting out on a journey by car. At each intersection, we toss a coin and if it is heads, we turn left and if it is tails we turn right. After millions of tosses, we will have ended up somewhere, but it could have been anywhere. It might be San Francisco or it might be in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas. There is no special meaning that can be attached to the end point. We can try and reconstruct our journey starting from the end and working backwards to the beginning (which is what evolutionary biologists do) but the end point of our journey was not predetermined when we began.
The important point is that, according to natural selection we were not destined to end up as we did. The many small random genetic mutations that occurred over the years are the analog of the coin tosses, and the end point could have been something quite different.
For people who believe that humans are created in God’s image, this is pretty tough to take because it is a steep drop in one’s self-image.
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| At Home in the Universe |
Kauffman, a theoretical biologist, has done pioneering work in the field of complexity science. His work suggests that a lovely order emerges spontaneously in the natural world. The living forms which "selection chooses among," says Kauffman (p. 8), "were generated by laws of complexity." That makes "self-organization" natural selection's "handmaiden."
Organisms, Kauffman writes, are "not just tinkered-together contraptions, but expressions of deeper natural laws." Kauffman's book is about the early stages of the scientific search for the laws according to which "vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand," ready for Darwinian evolution to locate and exploit.
Which means this, on the bottom-line: "Not we the accidental, but we the expected."
It remains true in Kauffman's view that the details of our planet's evolutionary history were and are unpredictable. Speaking in the language of computer algorithms, Kauffman affirms (p. 23) that "evolution is such an incompressible process" — meaning that there is no computer program which could replicate it with identical results but using a more compact sequence of steps.
Even though the nitty-gritty steps of evolutionary history are such an incompressible litany of coin tosses, says Kauffman,
... it does not follow that we may not find deep and beautiful laws governing that unpredictable flow. For we are not precluded from the possibility that many features of organisms and their evolution are profoundly robust and insensitive to details. If, as I believe, many such robust properties exist, then deep and beautiful laws may govern the emergence of life and the population of the biosphere. After all, what we are after here is not necessarily detailed prediction, but explanation. We can never hope to predict the exact branchings of the tree of life, but we can uncover powerful laws that predict and explain their general shape. I hope for such laws. I even dare to hope that we can begin to sketch some of them now. For want of a better general phrase, I call these efforts a search for a theory of emergence.
What if the "profoundly robust" properties that pertain to human beings in particular are the ones we mean when we say we were made "in God's image"?
What if among the human-only robust properties that emerge from "deep and beautiful" natural laws are our vaunted consciousness, our unique self-awareness?
What if there is something built into the fabric of the cosmos which pretty well guarantees that conscious, self-aware creatures will emerge, simply because the laws of self-organized complexity indeed serve as Darwinian natural selection's "handmaiden"?
Then we would be justified in calling ourselves, as Kauffman does, "we the expected."
It might even give us a basis for doing what Kauffman hopes we will (p. 5): "reinvent the sacred — this sense of our own deep worth — and reinvest it at the core of the new civilization."
But what of the problem I mentioned earlier: the idea of a "personal God" who does not continually do "mighty works" in the world which he created, even though he could? For Kauffman seems to point to a God who sits back contentedly, without intervening in nature, and lets the "deep and beautiful laws" work out nature's destiny.
Such a God may not, to many people, seem even worth speculating about, let alone worshipping — even if the "deep and beautiful laws" do produce a species such as us, "made in God's image"!
I tend to feel, as Kauffman does, that the "deep and beautiful laws" of the cosmos fully attest to God's creation of it and justify a new sense of sacredness and awe among us. But I doubt the idea of a God who does not magically intervene in the outworkings of evolution — because he doesn't need to — can ever satisfy the fundamentalists among us.
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