Michael Ruse thinks that if you’re a theistic evolutionist, you most probably believe the following three claims:
Evolution and the Bible are compatible Much of the Bible (especially Genesis) should be interpreted metaphorically When it comes to theology, “there is much to be said for a nice shade of grey” (2018, §6)
Kelly James Clark is a real life theistic evolutionist, and he seems to agree with Ruse's first claim: “theistic evolution holds both that God is Creator (a supernatural claim) and that species evolved through natural selection (a natural process)” (2014, 104). Clark is a philosopher by trade, but we can also find scientists who are theistic evolutionists. The molecular biologist Kenneth Miller is an excellent example. He gives us further reason to think that Ruse's second and third claims are right: “We are indeed Eden's children,” writes Miller, “yet it is time to place
What are these divine purposes and intentions? The geneticist Francis Collins—perhaps the most well-known proponent of theistic evolutionism—gives us some idea: “God had a specific plan for the arrival of humankind on the scene, and … He had a desire for personal fellowship with humans” (2006, 230). We find this idea echoed in the more recent writing of Andreas May: “It is important to the Creator that life can arise and develop in this universe”. It therefore follows that “the Creator of the universe deliberately intervened to promote the development of intelligent life” (2021, 28). The precise way in which the creator intervened must be such that it is not amenable to scientific investigation.
Speaking very generally, it is clear that theistic evolutionists believe that faith and evolution can get along. There is no conflict between the two. Religion and science can be friends.
Ironically enough though, theistic evolutionists find it difficult to make friends. On the one hand, proponents of “Intelligent Design” creationism find theistic evolutionists too yielding to the naturalistic (or, as they see it,
Poor theistic evolutionists! They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t! I sympathise with the theistic evolutionists, as I myself also find it difficult to make friends. Having said that, I fear that the cause may be identical in each case: an unappealing cocktail of deep and irreparable flaws.
In this paper, I want to look at just one of those flaws. The flaw is related to anthropocentrism. I will argue that the anthropocentrism of theistic evolutionism cannot be squared with the extinction of several species of
Why be a theistic evolutionist anyway? One reason might be the consideration that scientific explanations are eminently successful. And “whenever scientific knowledge advances,” writes Maarten Boudry, “religion is forced to retreat.” (2015, 3.4). The so-called “god of the gaps” shrinks each time one of those gaps in our scientific ignorance is filled in. If that is right, then a good way to avoid any future error would be to take God out of as many gaps as possible, restricting his role to something immune from the advance of science.
Take the era before Darwin. It would have been quite natural to accept, as many people did, that the various species had emerged by an act, or several acts, of divine creation. No competing explanation was any better. No competing explanation made successful predictions. And in reality, there weren’t really any truly competitive naturalistic explanations anyway. Yet after Darwin, special creation lost its footing to the superior explanatory power of natural selection. This is just a statement of historical fact. We can draw an example of this superior explanatory power directly from Darwin's New Zealand possesses two bats found nowhere else in the world: Norfolk Island, the Viti Archipelago, the Bonin Islands, the Caroline and Marianne Archipelagoes, and Mauritius, all possess their peculiar bats. Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? On my view this question can easily be answered; for no terrestrial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across. (201, 351)
It's an elegant explanation that appeals to our common sense understanding of basic physical processes in order to explain an unusual phenomenon which would otherwise be puzzling. That puzzling phenomenon is why the distribution of mammals is such that bats are the only ones found on remote (and usually volcanic) islands? Now, one could, of course, develop some very odd theology to account for the uneven biogeographical distribution of mammals (for example, you might hypothesize that God thought that islands were ugly if they contained terrestrial mammals). But such a change to one's theology would be both
This is just one example of the great retreat. Before Darwin, there was a gap in which God could be squeezed. After Darwin, this gap gets filled in with a naturalistic explanation, and the god who was hiding there must leave. Where scientific knowledge advances, religion must retreat. Where naturalistic theories gain ground, supernaturalistic theories must flee and regroup. So, reasons the theistic evolutionist, why not embrace the naturalistic story of science, while restricting God's role to something like a grand designer or an intelligent being who may intervene in the natural processes, but in scientifically undetectable ways?
Indeed, many modern liberal theists are underwhelmed by this scientistic approach to God. Sure, say the liberal theists, “Religious believers who claim God as a scientific hypothesis may find their beliefs squeezed by increases in scientific knowledge. But if God is not a scientific hypothesis in competition with other scientific hypotheses, belief in God will be untouched by increases in scientific knowledge” (2014, 77)
When we treat theism as a scientific hypothesis, then it may indeed fail on scientific grounds. But rather than inferring that theism is therefore a failure, we could infer that theism is not playing the same game as science. Alvin Plantinga's sardonic prose makes the point more elegantly:
When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn’t say, “Hey, look at that weird bush! It's on fire but isn’t burning up! And listen to those sounds coming out of it! What's the best explanatory hypothesis I can think of? Perhaps there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, wholly good being who created the world, and he is addressing me from that bush. (1996, 17)
The story goes, for the liberal theist at least, that scientific advances may change our beliefs about God's
Yet the bare statement that a God exists is not particularly informative. And through all this retreating from science, the liberal theist seems to have backed her way into a redundant kind of deism. God exists, she says. God is the transcendent cause of the universe, she says. But apart from these platitudes, God's actions are never seen and God's intentions are never really clear. Well, that's hardly satisfying! There must be more to the story.
Theistic evolutionists are committed to more than a vacuous deism. They want to answer the questions of Clark provides four possible models of God's action in a world which contains some degree of randomness, each of which he has given a delightfully playful name: 1. God as a “Riverboat Gambler”, 2. God as a “Chess Master”, 3. God as “Santa Claus”, and 4. the God of the Philosophers (2014, 114).
The question that I want to address is what theistic evolutionists think we can infer about God's will. After all, the theistic evolutionist thinks that the biological evidence is relevant to theology. The evolutionary story
Ward's argument is interesting, since it appeals to the likelihoods of two competing hypotheses: atheism and theism. He invites us to ask what the likelihood is that we would find intelligent life in a universe without an intelligent creator. It is not high, he contends, since on the assumption of atheism, this universe is just one possible way the universe could be. He then asks what the likelihood is that we would find intelligent life in a universe
But I am willing to put to the side quibbles about Bayesian calculations in order to focus on the general conclusion made by the theistic evolutionists. They almost all conclude that the generation of anatomically modern humans was not merely one of the divine designer's intentions. Instead, the creation of intelligent life was paramount on the creator's wishlist. I must confess, I am not entirely sure why this conclusion has been arrived at. Perhaps I am simply not sensitive enough to the nature of the available evidence, but I can’t help but think of J. B. S. Haldane's famous observation about an “inordinate fondness for beetles”:
The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles, on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, … as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. (1949, 248)
Despite my own failure to come to terms with the anthropocentrism of theistic evolutionism, it is nevertheless a commonly held view. God exists, the idea goes, and He has an inordinate fondness for intelligent life. But what should we expect if God does indeed have such an inordinate fondness? This is, I believe, where an important distinction can be made between two kinds of
According to Haldane, if God were anthropocentric, then where we see 300,000 species in the genus
Think of a vending machine. Now consider two people, Barbara and Dennis. Barbara goes to the vending machine to buy a chocolate bar. She puts a coin in, when suddenly the dispensing mechanism jams open and out fall twenty
We might call this latter sort of luck
As we will see, however, theistic evolution is no good hypothesis, because the genus
What are the relevant facts about our evolutionary history that will allow us to determine the nature of the creator and his workings in the world? Allow me to quote May at some length:
All races and tribes of the modern-day
That is mostly correct. But the same story may be told differently, with a little more sympathy for the Neanderthals. It might go like this: Anatomically modern humans left Africa. They met some very distant cousins. They made some babies together. The cousins were then wiped out around 31,000 years ago (Slimak et al. 2011). How were Neanderthals wiped out? The most popular current theories suggest that they were outcompeted by the invading
What is important to note is that the story May tells is just one part of the story of the history of the genetic introgression of anatomically modern humans. The newest evidence suggests that Neanderthals were not the only cousins with whom we interbred. The recently discovered species
There is also genetic evidence that, apart from Neanderthal and Denisovan gene flow, modern humans may also carry genes from a third unknown archaic hominin (Mondal, Bertranpetit and Lao 2019, 5). This signature in our genetics is found primarily in East Asian populations. As yet unknown hominins such as these, known only by signatures in our DNA, are usually referred to as “ghosts”. So, let's call this third introgressor the „Eurasian ghost”.
Evidence of ghosts is not restricted to Eurasian populations. Despite the common myth that archaic interbreeding was entirely a Eurasian phenomenon, data from sub-Saharan Africa indicates introgression from an “unknown archaic hominin that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans in the Lower-Middle Pleistocene and remained isolated for several hundred thousand years” (Hammer et al. 2011, 15126). The gene flow from this unknown, extinct hominin has strongly influenced African Pygmy populations of the Congo basin as well as San populations further south. What is intriguing is that this introgression may have occurred as recently as 30,000 years ago (Hsieh et al. 2016, 291). If that date is correct, this would entail that at least one archaic hominin population, call it the “African ghost”, went extinct within the last 30,0000 years.
It would be remiss to give a summary of recent advances in our paleoanthropological knowledge without mentioning the discovery, in 2003, of a relic hominid,
In summary, the biologist's understanding of human evolution has become far more complex and tangled over the last 20 years or so. This is especially owing to discoveries made through advances in our methods of analysis, but also to paleanthropology's recent turn of focus to the East, and most prominently to the archipelagos of Indonesia and the Philippines. What was once a relatively simple story that began in Africa and spread eastward is now a complex web of introgressions, extinctions, relics and dead-ends. Importantly, our current best evidence supports the case that within the last 100,000 years, at least six distinct hominid species have lived. Three were distinct species of
May takes these prehistoric genetic introgressions to be unlikely, and therefore he takes them as evidence for the claim that “the Creator actively intervened to promote the development of life—and especially intelligent life” (2021, 27). One reason for this conclusion, he writes, is that the odds were stacked against it. This is an appeal to the Charlie Bucket view. It is more likely that
Yet this conclusion, as we can see, neglects to acknowledge the fact that the
What about the maximization view? The claim that God wanted to maximize the development of intelligent life is a pretty unconvincing conclusion to draw given the state of the available evidence. As we have seen, there were various species of archaic
My scepticism can be summed up by way of a rhetorical question: If God was concerned with the development of intelligent life, particularly as it emerged in the genus If God were especially concerned to maximise production At least two subspecies of Therefore, God is not concerned with the production and preservation of
But the argument might be made more broadly to address archaic If God were especially concerned to maximise production At least three species of Therefore, God is not concerned with the production and preservation of
I have a feeling that the theistic evolutionist will push back against the claim that God is not concerned with the production of human beings. And I think that the rebuttal to my argument would run in one of two directions.
The first direction will run something like this: God is concerned, says this theistic evolutionist, not with the
I remain unconvinced. This argument is a very peculiar kind of
Apart from the theological issues, we have evidence indicating that anatomically modern humans are not special in the relevant sense. Although there is, at present, little evidence concerning Denisovan material culture, there is extensive evidence of Neanderthal symbolic thought, demonstrated by the existence of cave painting (Hoffman et al. 2020), decorative body adornments (particularly the use of feathers and raptor talons (see Finlayson et al. 2012 and Radovčić D. et al. 2015)), body painting (Roebroeks et al. 2012) and by the ceremonial burial of the dead, possibly alongside lithic and floral grave goods (see Balzeau et al. 2020 and Pomeroy et al. 2020). This demonstrates a capacity for symbolic thought and ritual behaviour that is the very mark of our genus. It is this behaviour which we tend to consider part and parcel of the
The second tack that the theistic evolutionist might take runs something like this: to say that Denisovans and Neanderthals went “extinct” is something of an exaggeration, since their lineages live on within us. That is just what the genetic evidence shows. Indeed, one large part of the theistic evolutionist's argument for the anthropocentrism of God is to note that the interbreeding of anatomically modern and archaic humans resulted in modern humans drawing and retaining those genes which are beneficial from those populations. So not only have the Neanderthals and Denisovans lived on
There are two points to be made here. First, not all the genes which we derived from archaic
There is a further point that needs to be spelled out, which is a relevant rebuttal to both of the above theistic rejoinders. Both of the above arguments seem to take it that God
In short, there are many other ways that a god could have shaped the genetics of anatomically modern humans, which are far more consistent with the hypothesis that God is anthropocentric. The preventable extinction of subspecies of
Theistic evolutionists will probably not be impressed by the claim that we can fathom the actions of God, even if such actions are entirely reasonable. I have presumed that we can make sense of what went into the decision to allow Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the rest to perish. Almost all theists believe that finite creatures like us cannot pretend to fathom God's ways. So why should this case be any different?
This case is, alas, quite different. It is different just because of the assumption of anthropocentrism. At the very least, we require a definition of “human” if we are to understand the implications of this assumption. And whichever direction we take this definition, we encounter problems. If our definition of “human” is broad enough to encompass archaic humans, then the assumption must be false (since some are extinct). If our definition is so narrow as to exclude them, then the assumption appears
As already stated, it seems that what underpins the anthropocentric assumption is the idea that God specially prizes intelligence, creativity, rationality, and all the other hallmarks of the Species
The trouble with any appeal to the inscrutibility of God's actions is that if we assume that God is rational, and if we assume that God is anthropocentric, then the extinction of humans is an anomaly. The most ardent sceptical theist might protest that this anomaly is a by-product of our finite understanding. But such a response would make a mockery of the central project of sceptical theism: to
What can the theistic evolutionist do now? Without any appeal to a convincing theodicy, it seems there are only three options: 1. Reject the evolutionary evidence, 2. Reject theism, or 3. Reject anthropocentrism. The least radical of these options for the theistic evolutionist seems to be the last one. Indeed, it is a position that some extremely liberal theistic evolutionists have already felt compelled to accept.
Clearly, the evolutionary story is one built on daily cruelty, torture, extinction, and suffering that has persisted for millions of years. Until recently, we were unaware that we had coexisted on Earth with cousins like the Neanderthals and Denisovans. And it has only been understood, within the last ten years or so, how entangled our genetic heritages have been. Yet our cousins died out. Entire human species have been snuffed out. If we align God with the extinction of human beings alongside the rest of the suffering that sits at the heart of the evolutionary story, we have crafted a nasty god for ourselves indeed. Such a god seems to fall short of the expectation of omnibenevolence.
But we might turn this picture on its head then. Here's how Peters thinks of it:
I look for divine presence in the unfit. In the battle between predator and the life that gets eaten, God identifies with the eaten. In the battle between species that survive and those that go extinct, I look for God amidst extinction. (2013, 168)
It is an interesting thought, but of course, straightforwardly, the problems with this position are clear to see. To look for God amidst extinction and death is only to recapitulate a very familiar problem. For if we are to accept that some creator guides the evolutionary process for any purpose whatsoever, this approach seems to require an untenably barbaric creator whose purpose in creation is a perverse self-identification with death, torture, suffering, and extinction. We may ask the old familiar questions: Is he willing but not able? Is he able but not willing? Is he both? Is he neither? It is simply the problem of evil.
Similarly, John Haught, takes a non-standard view, which apparently rejects at least part of the anthropocentric view. Humans are not accorded a special place in the history of creation, and God took no active role in steering the course of human evolution. Indeed, the evolutionary universe of God is taken to have a degree of freedom in its development. If we can draw any conclusion about the nature of the creator, it is that he so loved the world that he allowed it the freedom to develop without constant corrections. Evolution is a narrative that is still unfolding. And it is in the
This is more or less the final step of the Great Retreat. It is at this point that any theological maneuvers begin to look
But the facts are in, and they seem to suggest that humans hold no special place in the universe. Our subspecies is one of only a handful to have arisen, with the rest having been discarded and erased. Where are the cousins who we may have befriended? They are gone forever. The extinction of humans cannot be reconciled with the existence of a god who putatively seeks to collect them. And if that's right—if that's what the data suggests—then perhaps, just perhaps, it really was all for the beetles after all.