A couple of decades ago, when I still lived in the world of general medical practice, one of the local GP appraisers persuaded me and another GP, John, to run a course on spinal manipulation for the next generation of medics. Both of us had learned the same stuff, from the same pioneering doctors, John Paterson and Loic Burn, when we were young GP partners in the early 1980s.
Although the diagnostic and therapeutic techniques involved made a fundamental difference to the way both John and I practised medicine, he worked several miles from me and we had never discussed this field. In fact, I only discovered that he, too, was employing the methods because the GP appraiser knew both of us.
What was interesting, after around twenty years of independent work, was how each of us had refined (or perverted, depending on your viewpoint!) what Paterson and Burn had taught us. We had each developed a preference for different manoeuvres, either because of different practice profiles, or just because of what seemed to work for us. And even when we used the same techniques, each of us had unconsciously adapted them to our own way of working. In my case – and perhaps John’s too – my preferences had partly developed as I gained new theoretical understandings of how spinal problems work, and therefore what I believed I was seeking to achieve for my patients.
This divergence proved not to be a problem on the course, as it showed the punters that we were dealing with general principles, not a rigid protocol. In fact, it led to a very interactive few days, to the extent that I even consented to be a guinea pig for an acupuncture demonstration by one of the attenders who was already working with that model.
I was reminded of this recently, as I have been thinking about doing a seminar at church about science and faith – in particular about how Baconian science, which began as a deeply Christian, even Puritan, enterprise, came to be a bastion of atheism, and why that situation may be changing in our times. That seminar may or may not happen.
But noticing that Sy Garte’s latest book, Beyond Evolution, also deals with what one might call “the re-enchantment of science,” because of the new discoveries in biology that are making materialist reductionism untenable, I decided I should buy a copy. Maybe it would even be a useful post-seminar bookstall choice.
Sy was one of the five authors of this blog when we upgraded it in 2013. He was a working biochemist and geneticist, who was soon employed by NIH under Francis Collins to be responsible for a large chunk of their research budget. He was also a relatively recent convert from Marxist atheism.
We had already interacted for three or four years on the BioLogos forum, and like me (and our other authors) had become somewhat disillusioned with the concept of “theistic evolution” they predominantly championed, which seemed theologically “semi-deist” and scientifically Neodarwinian in a doctrinaire way. The result, to our way of thinking, was a rather incoherent ragbag of ideas in which inanimate nature has “freedom” (aka ontological randomness) from God’s “interference,” yet God mysteriously either gets what he wants without planning it in any way, or likes what he gets from evolution because he has no choice. We both tended towards a more robustly theistic version of evolution, for which I coined the term Classic Providential Naturalism.
Sy credited me with introducing him to the work of James Shapiro, one of the scientific challengers to orthodox Neodarwinism, and founder of the “Third Way” project acting as an umbrella for other “New Paradigm” biologists. I may be taking too much credit by suspecting that my introduction first set him investigating teleological processes in biology. But he certainly did investigate them in original research as well as looking at what these dissidents were discovering.
Sy parted ways with The Hump in order to write his own blog, and several books, around the time he retired. Since then, he has been developing the same interests, to put it broadly, pointing to research on teleology and cognition in non-human life as tangential evidence for the God of Christianity. He’s achieved a much higher profile than I have, because he has a more impressive CV, and you can find him on YouTube in discussion with ID people like Doug Axe, Old Earth Creationists like Fuz Rana, evolutionary agnostics like James Tour, and Christian apologists like Sean McDowell. He’s also become editor of the Christian American Scientific Affiliation Journal. The boy done good.
I’m only two chapters into his book so far (it arrived late because the Amazon delivery driver left it out in the rain behind our gate, which it survived only because of the plastic inner wrapper and our being spared thunderstorms). It’s interesting to see him mention many of the issues we discussed back in the day, including the process of the secularisation of science that would form the basis of my seminar.
That history includes the deeply Christian origins of science, the motives of those seeking to secularise it in the late nineteenth century, the construction of the “science-faith warfare” myth at that time, and so on. It also includes seldom-recognised issues we once discussed and I wrote about, such as the eclipse of Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, before the Neodarwinians managed to combine Natural selection with Mendelian genetics, and later with mutations, to revive it.
Sy has a much more sympathetic understanding than most biologists of why Young Earth Creationists rejected the whole evolutionary bundle, and a more candid admission of the bullying tactics used by some of Neodarwinism’s spokesmen (he had his own real fears of cancellation by those like Jerry Coyne whilst thinking about teleological evolution during his time at The Hump).
But I can see that, were he to be planning my seminar, his presentation would differ quite a lot. His views have developed since we collaborated, and mine most certainly have evolved. One example would be that, in my view, he is weaker on philosophy, theology, and history of ideas than I would like for myself. And that is not really a criticism, because he’s obviously a lot stronger on the nuts-and-bolts biology than I am.
A large part of the differences I perceive between us now comes from his being, recently, part of the “guild” of evolutionary biologists. I have seen in myself, 17 years out from retirement, how loyalty to my tribe coloured my beliefs. I am a lot more sceptical about the medical profession now than I was when I was in it.
And so when Sy criticises the intolerance and bigotry of militant defenders of mindless evolution, but defends most working biologists’ open-mindedness, I recognise that he speaks some truth. But I also remember, back at BioLogos, how many working biologists identifying as Christians rooted for Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and so on not only against “ignorant” Creationists and “IDiots,” but against respectable dissident scientists like Jim Shapiro or Denis Noble. I’m also far more aware than I once was how prone human beings are to Group-think, and the open-minded scientist who keeps quiet and goes with the flow to keep the grant money and career prospects coming might as well be a bigot, for all the good he does to moving the discussion on.
Sy gives respect to all the various Christian positions, but I noted with some interest that he tends to bracket Intelligent Design with Creationism in the way that scornful Neodarwinists used to do. He also repeats the claim that “microevolution” and “macroevolution” are distinguished nearly exclusively in Creationist and ID circles, whereas I learned about them from historical mainstream sources, because one of the big issues surrounding Darwin’s theory from the start was whether it was legitimate to scale up observed variations to the trans-species level, and that still remains an unresolved question. Sy appears to take the upscaling for granted.
The biggest divergence between us, I’m pretty sure, is that Sy remains firmly wedded to Neodarwinism as a major mechanism of (macro)evolution, and as far as I can tell (subject to my reading the rest of the book) he sees the emerging evidence of purpose and planning in biological organisms as indicating some as yet uninvestigated “natural,” but non-physical, laws. Such principles would, indirectly, point to the personal God who could, in love, create such powers in nature.
In other words, evolutionary theory would be correct in saying that the origin of species is natural (whatever that means – a philosophical and theological sticking point for me!), and proceeds through common descent, under the invisible providence of God rather than through acts of new creation.
Although Sy distances himself from Intelligent Design, his seems to me actually an ID argument, and not dissimilar to the those of the more “fine-tuned natural processes” ID writers like Michael J. Denton.
For myself, I could live with that scheme theologically, but my own journey has led me to increasing doubts about the actual occurrence of gradualist change on the global scale, and the power of Darwinian mechanisms to achieve it. I have therefore come to question whether common descent is sufficiently well-evidenced, or is simply an assumption based on acceptance of evolution.
Perhaps surprisingly, I don’t see my move away from evolution (of all kinds) to progressive creation as based mainly in theological difference, but because my scientific interest began with palaeontology and zoology, which give dubious support to evolutionary theory, whereas Sy’s began with biochemistry and genetics. From his background (it seems to me) the focus is on processes, which may be assumed to scale up to macroevolutionary outcomes. From mine, the focus is on outcomes, doubts about which lead to questioning the adequacy of the processes.
Whether evolution is “irrelevant” to the harmony of faith and science, as Sy suggests in his book, is perhaps contentious. For example, should a new ruling paradigm emerge in which the academy, school texbooks and TV documentaries all agree that evolutionary teleology exists because of panpsychism, but God definitely mustn’t get a foot in the door, then evolution would be, once more, highly relevant to the science-faith question.
However, Sy is certainly right to say that creation-through-evolution simpliciter ought not to divide Christians from science, and need not divide Christians from other Christians. In Britain, when I was at University in the 1970s, it was not a divisive issue as it was in America. That was because it was seen as a secondary theological issue, the primary issue being that God is truly the Creator, whether Genesis 1 be taken historico-literally, or not.
I have come to see that chapter as a phenomenological temple-inauguration account designed to reflect the tabernacle-construction texts in Exodus. Genre is crucial. But if the dinosaur soft-tissue were to turn out to be only 6,000 years old, the egg on my face will certainly be washed away by the washing of Christ.
Where, in my view, some Christians have gone seriously wrong is in, effectively, denying the sovereignty of God, who works out everything in conformity with the purposes of his will (Ephesians 1:11), in creation. The reason it wasn’t a big issue in the England of my youth was because we sat light to the claim of Neodarwinism (but originating in Darwin) that if God directed evolution in any way, it destroys the theory. In my scientific universe, or in my theological one, I see no sound basis for the existence ontological chance, but only divine choice.
Neodarwinism mechanisms could not specify lilies of the field, sparrows, humans, or Sy and Jon, but only “life.” It remains to be seen if any theory of “natural teleology” can restore God’s very specific purposes in creation to science. And so it would be ironic if the admission of teleology in living things, which I agree with Sy is going to become inevitable soon, were to be used to exclude teleology from the final cause of all things, the triune God.
Specifics aside, the broader issue of conceptual divergence has a lot to do with iron sharpening iron. I think the reason I find so many agreements with Sy’s work, apart from a shared participation in Jesus, is because many of our ideas were forged in mutual conversation over several years. Any divergence, by the same reasoning, is partly because we have not been in conversation to any significant extent for several years. I’m not complaining – that’s simply life. But it is a reminder that the resolution of science-faith issues, like any others, will come from mutually-respectful discussion, and the challenging of weak ideas on all sides, rather than by setting up tribal borders… though some boundaries will need to be maintained, if only because good fences make for good neighbours.
