Last Thursday I was interviewed for a podcast on God’s Good Earth by geologist Gregg Davidson, co-author with Ken Turner of the excellent Manifold Beauty of Genesis One, as well as writing an excellent sci-fi trilogy. The podcast should be online in about five weeks, Gregg says, so I’ll let you know about it when it happens.
As a “bonus track” to the interview, I agreed to discuss the “God of the Gaps” fallacy, since Gregg had read my recent post on it here. My argument there was that secondary causes in nature have been assumed since mediaeval times, God being the prime Cause at the head of each chain of secondary causes, so that there was never a time when intellectuals said, “We can’t explain this, ergo God did it.” Rather God always did it, and the question was only about what secondary causes he used.
I went on to argue that it was only when science began for the first time to propose “natural” (meaning godless) mechanisms for origins, which had always been attributed to God’s creative agency, that the “God of the gaps” charge was invented. I finished off by showing how, rather than science filling such gaps and squeezing divine agency out, the main role of increasing knowledge has been to reveal ever wider gaps in our knowledge of the world.
Now, it turned out that I was under-prepared for this discussion, because Gregg, having agreed that the universe as a whole declares God’s handiwork (as per Romans 1:20), leveled the God of the Gaps argument at Intelligent Design proponents saying, “We can’t explain this aspect of evolution, therefore God did it.” He said that he’s actually heard Stephen Meyer employ this argument. My response was that if he did, he was undermining his own principles. I’ve heard Meyer speak once “in the flesh,” but in his writings and various videos he is consistent in saying that his take on ID is very different from that. Consequently, I hadn’t really thought through an answer to the charge. So here is some reflection.
Meyer’s usual argument can be summarised as
- Close examination of phenomenon X shows that the current Neodarwinian paradigm is insufficient to explain its organised complexity and speed of appearance.
- There are no viable “natural” alternatives to Neodarwinian theory.
- Daily experience tells us that such complexity and rapid development can be achieved by design
- Therefore, the best explanation for phenomenon X is design.”
Without arguing further about whether Meyer allows his Christian theism to go beyond that argument sometimes, let me expand this ID argument on the basis of my previous writing.
The first point to make is that the Darwinian explanation follows a different intellectual trajectory from most science. When Joseph Priestley proposed his Phlogiston Theory to explain combustion, everyone already agreed that some series of secondary causes in nature was available to investigate. Antoine Lavoisier’s oxygen theory explained the phenomenon better, and so prevailed. Had some major flaw been found in Lavoisier’s work, it would have been legitimate to revert to phlogiston until something better came along – although to my mind, the flaws already demonstrated in that theory would make scientific agnosticism an equally valid position to adopt.
But Darwin’s evolutionary theory, in complete contrast, was presented as a way of doing away with an entire metaphysical category – teleology – in a field in which the whole scientific world had hitherto seen teleology as indisputible. Previously even “evolution,” as proposed by Lamarck for example, meant the unfolding of an intrinsic teleology within life itself, analogous to the Japanese water flower that emerges according to pre-ordained plan when the tight wad of paper is put in water. In keeping with the fashion of the times, Lamarck conceived of a deistic God as the designer of this unfolding plan of life. But his theory would work just as well in an Aristotelian system in which teleology was simply intrinsic to the universe, a conscious Creator being unnecessary to the hypothesis.
Darwin, for the first time, sought to paint apparent design as the result of a completely undirected process. Because the philosopher Herbert Spencer used the term “evolution” in the unfolding flower sense, Darwin even avoided the word in early editions of his book, because his concept was entirely different – it was open-ended change.
Natural selection as proposed by Darwin was, and remains, the only game in town that avoids simple handwaving to produce complex order by randomness, rather than by admitting teleology. It was initially opposed by many scientists of the day on the grounds that it was insufficiently evidenced, not least by the livestock breeders invoked by Darwin as a primary model, who knew from experience that there were strict limits to variation within species. As Robert Shedinger has pointed out in his recent book Darwin’s Bluff, Darwin presented very little empirical evidence and a lot of “might haves,” pointing in Origin of Species to voluminous support in a later book that never actually appeared.
So when Stephen Meyer, or anyone else, points to major failures in Darwinian theory, such as the waiting time problem, the non-gradual stasis-saltation pattern of the fossil record, the phylum-down pattern of diversification, the impossibility of producing viable developmental mutations, and so on, it is as legitimate to reject the theory as it would be to reject Priestley’s phlogiston. Only in this case, what is being rejected in the sole plausible ateleological mechanism on offer.
Now, teleology means goal-directed activity, which is essentially a synonym for design. This is recognised in the burgeoning alternatives to the Neodarwinian paradigm. Denis Noble – Richard Dawkins’s PhD supervisor – is the champion of the mainstream debunking of evolution by natural selection. His position is that Darwinism is, essentially, dead in the water, because it is clear that living systems exhibit strong teleology, which is anathema to the core position of natural selection in Darwinism. Noble’s watchwords are physiology and homeostasis, both of which point inexorably towards goal-driven change. That being the case, it is legitimate for ID folk to point out that Noble’s only explanation for life’s teleology itself is that teleology evolved, back in some inaccessible past, by Darwinian variation and natural selection. That is not to explain, but to pass the buck to a speculative narrative, just as Darwin did.
The same is true for every “natural” alternative to Darwinian evolution. All the other approaches require teleology/design, but propose what seem to be unevidenced accounts of its own origin. At one end of the spectrum, “self organisation” theories are little more than variably plausible narratives that cannot be demonstrated empirically (so they are not science). At the other end, non-theistic metaphysical foundations are proposed for the universe itself, such as panpsychism, the idea that every particle in the universe has some minimal consciousness, which (by unspecified means) in combination inevitably produced the directional change that is instinctively seen as teleology by everyone not already wedded to the hypothesis of pseudo-teleology by natural selection.
In summary, to the extent that ID follows its stated criteria of concluding teleology (not God) by demonstrating the inadequacy of the current theory, it is not only being logical (Darwin’s theory being shown up as the only, disproven, alternative to the pre-existing teleological view of life), but it is even saying, strictly speaking, the same as Denis Noble or James Shapiro are saying: that natural selection won’t cut it, and that teleology is abundantly evident in life.
Where the Discovery Institute differs from Third Way boils down to that weasel-word “natural.” As I have argued extensively in the past, this is a word largely devoid of meaning, especially to a Christian. To the atheist materialist, it means “without God,” but to the theist, God is the first Cause and maintainer of the whole of reality, so nothing happens without him. Those who believe in the kind of meticulous providence that enables God to plan our lives without being stymied by random accidents (like a speck of dust in the eye causing a car crash, or a falling roof-tile forestalling Christ’s whole ministry) must reckon on his involvement in every particular, as Thomas Aquinas followed the earliest Christians in doing.
As Bishop Butler observed, and was cited by Asa Gray in response to Darwin, “natural” only really means “regular and reproducible.” And teleology/design (increasingly admitted on all sides to be a feature of life) is not regular or repeatable. It aims at some goal internal to itself, which we can only observe in its end product of a Stegosaurus, a bullfinch or a Venus fly-trap. If offered a fully-developed theology of divine action, it is mere prejudice in a scientist to exclude God as the source of teleology a priori. Are panpsychism, or vitalism, or kicking the teleological can back into the past, in any way more plausible – or more “natural,” come to that – than the work of the Creator?
The irregularity of living things should go without saying, since nobody has ever been able to predict the direction of evolutionary change in the fossil record by looking at the precursors. And one evidence against common descent is that, as palaeontologist Gunter Bechly so often documents, we can’t even successfully predict precursors from the end-products of evolution, nested hierarchies being so messy and contradictory. In fact, it is hard to see evolutionary biology as much more than a series of teleological narratives constructed after the fact, the “natural selection” part being simply a formal mantra that can explain anything since it doesn’t require proof.
So if Stephen Meyer ever has argued that because we don’t know how natural selection produced an effect (rather than his showing how it couldn’t) and that therefore God did it supernaturally (as opposed to his reverting simply to teleology/design as the default position), then he was being scientifically sloppy, logically lax, metaphysically murky and contradictory to the publicly stated criteria of ID. And furthermore, he was achieving some distinction as one of the few to have actually fallen into the “God of the Gaps” trap in scientific history.
I have to say that I’ve not personally observed him to fail in such a way – though I’ve frequently seen it argued that he does by people who don’t notice the distinctions he draws. Either way, you can treat this as my argument that the God of the Gaps is still an Aunt Sally.
