This paper was originally delivered as a lecture at a symposium at
Hillsdale College, in November 1992. Papers from the Symposium were published
in the collection Man and Creation: Perspectives on Science and Theology
(Bauman ed. 1993), by Hillsdale College Press, Hillsdale MI 49242.
There is a popular television game show called "Jeopardy," in which the
usual order of things is reversed. Instead of being
asked a question to which they must supply the answer, the contestants
are given the answer and asked to provide the
appropriate question. This format suggests an insight that is applicable
to law, to science, and indeed to just about everything.
The important thing is not necessarily to know all the answers, but rather
to know what question is being asked.
That insight is the starting point for my inquiry into Darwinian evolution
and its relationship to creation, because Darwinism is
the answer to two very different kinds of questions. First, Darwinian
theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life
forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms
already in existence. If a small population of birds
happens to migrate to an isolated island, for example, a combination of
inbreeding, mutation, and natural selection may cause
this isolated population to develop different characteristics from those
possessed by the ancestral population on the mainland.
When the theory is understood in this limited sense, Darwinian evolution
is uncontroversial, and has no important philosophical
or theological implications.
Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation
occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a
much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers,
and human beings came into existence in the
first place. The Darwinian answer to this second question is that the
creative force that produced complex plants and animals
from single-celled predecessors over long stretches of geological time
is essentially the same as the mechanism that produces
variations in flowers, insects, and domestic animals before our very eyes.
In the words of Ernst Mayr, the dean of living
Darwinists, "transspecific evolution [i.e., macroevolution] is nothing
but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that
take place within populations and species." Neo-Darwinian evolution in
this broad sense is a philosophical doctrine so lacking
in empirical support that Mayr's successor at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould,
once pronounced it in a reckless moment to be
"effectively dead." Yet neo-Darwinism is far from dead; on the contrary,
it is continually proclaimed in the textbooks and the
media as unchallengeable fact. How does it happen that so many scientists
and intellectuals, who pride themselves on their
empiricism and open-mindedness, continue to accept an unempirical theory
as scientific fact?
The answer to that question lies in the definition of five key terms.
The terms are creationism, evolution, science, religion, and
truth. Once we understand how these words are used in evolutionary discourse,
the continued ascendancy of neo-Darwinism
will be no mystery and we need no longer be deceived by claims that the
theory is supported by "overwhelming evidence." I
should warn at the outset, however, that using words clearly is not the
innocent and peaceful activity most of us may have
thought it to be. There are powerful vested interests in this area which
can thrive only in the midst of ambiguity and confusion.
Those who insist on defining terms precisely and using them consistently
may find themselves regarded with suspicion and
hostility, and even accused of being enemies of science. But let us accept
that risk and proceed to the definitions.
The first word is creationism, which means simply a belief in creation.
In Darwinist usage, which dominates not only the
popular and profession scientific literature but also the media, a creationist
is a person who takes the creation account in the
Book of Genesis to be true in an very literal sense. The earth was created
in a single week of six 24-hour days no more that
10,000 years ago; the major features of the geological were produced by
Noah's flood; and there have been no major
innovations in the forms of life since the beginning. It is a major theme
of Darwinist propaganda that the only persons who
have any doubts about Darwinism are young-earth creationists of this sort,
who are always portrayed as rejecting the clear
and convincing evidence of science to preserve a religious prejudice.
The implication is that citizens of modern society are
faced with a choice that is really no choice at all. Either they reject
science altogether and retreat to a pre-modern worldview,
or they believe everything the Darwinists tell them.
In a broader sense, however, a creationist is simply a person who believes
in the existence of a creator, who brought about
the existence of the world and its living inhabitants in furtherance of
a purpose. Whether the process of creation took a single
week or billions of years is relatively unimportant from a philosophical
or theological standpoint. Creation by gradual
processes over geological ages may create problems for Biblical interpretation,
but it creates none for the basic principle of
theistic religion. And creation in this broad sense, according to a 1991
Gallup poll, is the creed of 87 per cent of Americans. If
God brought about our existence for a purpose, then the most important
kind of knowledge to have is knowledge of God and
of what He intends for us. Is creation in that broad sense consistent
with evolution?
The answer is absolutely not, when "evolution" is understood in the Darwinian
sense. To Darwinists evolution means
naturalistic evolution, because they insist that science must assume that
the cosmos is a closed system of material causes and
effects, which can never be influenced by anything outside of material
nature-by God, for example. In the beginning, an
explosion of matter created the cosmos, and undirected, naturalistic evolution
produced everything that followed. From this
philosophical standpoint it follows deductively that from the beginning
no intelligent purpose guided evolution. If intelligence
exists today, that is only because it has itself evolved through purposeless
material processes.
A materialistic theory of evolution must inherently invoke two kinds
of processes. At bottom the theory must be based on
chance, because that is what is left when we have ruled out everything
involving intelligence or purpose. Theories which invoke
only chance are not credible, however. One thing that everyone acknowledges
is that living organisms are enormously
complex-far more so than, say, a computer or an airplane. That such complex
entities came into existence simply by chance is
clearly less credible than that they were designed and constructed by
a creator. To back up their claim that this appearance of
intelligent design is an illusion, Darwinists need to provide some complexity-building
force that is mindless and purposeless.
Natural selection is by far the most plausible candidate.
If we assume that random genetic mutations provided the new genetic information
needed, say, to give a small mammal a start
towards wings, and if we assume that each tiny step in the process of
wing-building gave the animal an increased chance of
survival, then natural selection ensured that the favored creatures would
thrive and reproduce. It follows as a matter of logic
that wings can and will appear as if by the plan of a designer. Of course,
if wings or other improvements do not appear, the
theory explains their absence just as well. The needed mutations didn't
arrive, or "developmental constraints" closed off certain
possibilities, or natural selection favored something else. There is no
requirement that any of this speculation be confirmed by
either experimental or fossil evidence. To Darwinists just being able
to imagine the process is sufficient to confirm that
something like that must have happened.
Richard Dawkins calls the process of creation by mutation and selection
"the blind watchmaker," by which label he means that
a purposeless, materialistic designing force substitutes for the "watchmaker"
deity of natural theology. The creative power of
the blind watchmaker is supported only by very slight evidence, such as
the famous example of a moth population in which the
percentage of dark moths increased during a period when the birds were
better able to see light moths against the
smoke-darkened background trees. This may be taken to show that natural
selection can do something, but not that it can
create anything that was not already in existence. Even such slight evidence
is more than sufficient, however, because evidence
is not really necessary to prove something that is practically self-evident.
The existence of a potent blind watchmaker follows
deductively from the philosophical premise that nature had to do its own
creating. There can be argument about the details,
but if God was not in the picture something very much like Darwinism simply
has to be true, regardless of the evidence.
That brings me to my third term, science. We have already seen that Darwinists
assume as a matter of first principle that the
history of the cosmos and its life forms is fully explicable on naturalistic
principles. This reflects a philosophical doctrine called
scientific naturalism, which is said to be a necessary consequence of
the inherent limitations of science. What scientific
naturalism does, however, is to transform the limitations of science into
limitations upon reality, in the interest of maximizing the
explanatory power of science and its practitioners. It is, of course,
entirely possible to study organisms scientifically on the
premise that they were all created by God, just as scientists study airplanes
and even works of art without denying that these
objects are intelligently designed. The problem with allowing God a role
in the history of life is not that science would cease,
but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of
something important which is outside the boundaries of
natural science. For scientists who want to be able to explain everything-and
"theories of everything" are now openly
anticipated in the scientific literature-this is an intolerable possibility.
The second feature of scientific naturalism that is important for our
purpose is its set of rules governing the criticism and
replacement of a paradigm. A paradigm is a general theory, like the Darwinian
theory of evolution, which has achieved general
acceptance in the scientific community. The paradigm unifies the various
specialties that make up the research community, and
guides research in all of them. Thus, zoologists, botanists, geneticists,
molecular biologists, and paleontologists all see their
research as aimed at filling out the details of the Darwinian paradigm.
If molecular biologists see a pattern of apparently neutral
mutations, which have no apparent effect on an organism's fitness, they
must find a way to reconcile their findings with the
paradigm's requirement that natural selection guides evolution. This they
can do by postulating a sufficient quantity of invisible
adaptive mutations, which are deemed to be accumulated by natural selection.
Similarly, if paleontologists see new fossil
species appearing suddenly in the fossil record, and remaining basically
unchanged thereafter, they must perform whatever
contortions are necessary to force this recalcitrant evidence into a model
of incremental change through the accumulation of
micromutations.
Supporting the paradigm may even require what in other contexts would
be called deception. As Niles Eldredge candidly
admitted, "We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports
[the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while
knowing it does not."[ 1] Eldredge explained that this pattern of misrepresentation
occurred because of "the certainty so
characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940s, the utter assurance
not only that natural selection operates in nature,
but that we know precisely how it works." This certainty produced a degree
of dogmatism that Eldredge says resulted in the
relegation to the "lunatic fringe" of paleontologists who reported that
"they saw something out of kilter between contemporary
evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil
record on the other."[ 2] Under the circumstances,
prudent paleontologists understandably swallowed their doubts and supported
the ruling ideology. To abandon the paradigm
would be to abandon the scientific community; to ignore the paradigm and
just gather the facts would be to earn the
demeaning label of "stamp collector."
As many philosophers of science have observed, the research community
does not abandon a paradigm in the absence of a
suitable replacement. This means that negative criticism of Darwinism,
however devastating it may appear to be, is essentially
irrelevant to the professional researchers. The critic may point out,
for example, that the evidence that natural selection has any
creative power is somewhere between weak and non-existent. That is perfectly
true, but to Darwinists the more important
point is this: If natural selection did not do the creating, what did?
"God" is obviously unacceptable, because such a being is
unknown to science. "We don't know" is equally unacceptable, because to
admit ignorance would be to leave science adrift
without a guiding principle. To put the problem in the most practical
terms: it is impossible to write or evaluate a grant
proposal without a generally accepted theoretical framework.
The paradigm rule explains why Gould's acknowledgment that neo-Darwinism
is "effectively dead" had no significant effect on
the Darwinist faithful, or even on Gould himself. Gould made that statement
in a paper predicting the emergence of a new
general theory of evolution, one based on the macromutational speculations
of the Berkeley geneticist Richard Goldschmidt.[
3] When the new theory did not arrive as anticipated, the alternatives
were either to stick with Ernst Mayr's version of
neo-Darwinism, or to concede that biologists do not after all know of
a naturalistic mechanism that can produce biological
complexity. That was no choice at all. Gould had to beat a hasty retreat
back to classical Darwinism to avoid giving aid and
comfort to the enemies of scientific naturalism, including those disgusting
creationists.
Having to defend a dead theory tooth and nail can hardly be a satisfying
activity, and it is no wonder that Gould lashes out
with fury at people such as myself, who calls attention to his predicament.[
4] I do not mean to ridicule Gould, however,
because I have a genuinely high regard for the man as one of the few Darwinists
who has recognized the major problems with
the theory and reported them honestly. His tragedy is that he cannot admit
the clear implications of his own thought without
effectively resigning from science.
The continuing survival of Darwinist orthodoxy illustrates Thomas Kuhn's
famous point that the accumulation of anomalies
never in itself falsifies a paradigm, because "To reject one paradigm
without substituting another is to reject science itself."[ 5]
This practice may be appropriate as a way of carrying on the professional
enterprise called science, but it can be grossly
misleading when it is imposed upon persons who are asking questions other
than the ones scientific naturalists want to ask.
Suppose, for example, that I want to know whether God really had something
to do with creating living organisms. A typical
Darwinian response is that there is no reason to invoke supernatural action
because Darwinian selection was capable of
performing the job. To evaluate that response, I need to know whether
natural selection really has the fantastic creative power
attributed to it. It is not a sufficient answer to say that scientists
have nothing better to offer. The fact that scientists don't like to
say "we don't know" tells me nothing about what they really do know.
I am not suggesting that scientists have to change their rules about
retaining and discarding paradigms. All I want them to do is
to be candid about the disconfirming evidence and admit, if it is the
case, that they are hanging on to Darwinism only because
they prefer a shaky theory to having no theory at all. What they insist
upon doing, however, is to present Darwinian evolution
to the public as a fact that every rational person is expected to accept.
If there are reasonable grounds to doubt the theory
such dogmatism is ridiculous, whether or not the doubters have a better
theory to propose.
To believers in creation, the Darwinists seem thoroughly intolerant and
dogmatic when they insist that their own philosophy
must have a monopoly in the schools and the media. The Darwinists do not
see themselves that way, of course. On the
contrary, they often feel aggrieved when creationists (in either the broad
or narrow sense) ask to have their own arguments
heard in public and fairly considered. To insist that schoolchildren be
taught that Darwinian evolution is a fact is in their minds
merely to protect the integrity of science education; to present the other
side of the case would be to allow fanatics to force
their opinions on others. Even college professors have been forbidden
to express their doubts about Darwinian evolution in the
classroom, and it seems to be widely believed that the Constitution not
only permits but actually requires such restrictions on
academic freedom. To explain this bizarre situation, we must define our
fourth term: religion.
Suppose that a skeptic argues that evidence for biological creation by
natural selection is obviously lacking, and that in the
circumstances we ought to give serious consideration to the possibility
that the development of life required some input from a
pre-existing, purposeful creator. To scientific naturalists this suggestion
is "creationist" and therefore unacceptable in principle,
because it invokes an entity unknown to science. What is worse, it suggests
the possibility that this creator may have
communicated in some way with humans. In that case there could be real
prophets-persons with a genuine knowledge of God
who are neither frauds nor dreamers. Such persons could conceivably be
dangerous rivals for the scientists as cultural
authorities.
Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a strategy to prevent this problem
from arising: it labels naturalism as science and
theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the
latter as merebelief. The distinction is of critical
importance, because only knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone;
belief is valid only for the believer, and should
never be passed off as knowledge. The student who thinks that 2 and 2
make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and
oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing
a minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of
education is to cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge.
Students in the public schools are thus to be taught at an
early age that "evolution is a fact," and as time goes by they will gradually
learn that evolution means naturalism.
In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation
is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated. This
is because naturalistic evolution is by definition in the category of
scientific knowledge. What contradicts knowledge is
implicitly false, or imaginary. That is why it is possible for scientific
naturalists in good faith to claim on the one hand that their
science says nothing about God, and on the other to claim that they have
said everything that can be said about God. In
naturalistic philosophy both propositions are at bottom the same. All
that needs to be said about God is that there is nothing to
be said of God, because on that subject we can have no knowledge.
Our fifth and final term is truth. Truth as such is not a particularly
important concept in naturalistic philosophy. The reason for
this is that "truth" suggests an unchanging absolute, whereas scientific
knowledge is a dynamic concept. Like life, knowledge
evolves and grows into superior forms. What was knowledge in the past
is not knowledge today, and the knowledge of the
future will surely be far superior to what we have now. Only naturalism
itself and the unique validity of science as the path to
knowledge are absolutes. There can be no criterion for truth outside of
scientific knowledge, no mind of God to which we
have access.
This way of understanding things persists even when scientific naturalists
employ religious-sounding language. For example, the
physicist Stephen Hawking ended his famous book A Brief History of Time
with the prediction that man might one day
"know the mind of God." This phrasing cause some friends of mine to form
the mistaken impression that he had some
attraction to theistic religion. In context Hawking was not referring
to a supernatural eternal being, however, but to the
possibility that scientific knowledge will eventually become complete
and all-encompassing because it will have explained the
movements of material particles in all circumstances.
The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary
biologists do not find it meaningful to address
the question whether the Darwinian theory is true. They will gladly concede
that the theory is incomplete, and that further
research into the mechanisms of evolution is needed. At any given point
in time, however, the reigning theory of naturalistic
evolution represents the state of scientific knowledge about how we came
into existence. Scientific knowledge is by definition
the closest approximation of absolute truth available to us. To ask whether
this knowledge is true is therefore to miss the point,
and to betray a misunderstanding of "how science works."
So far I have described the metaphysical categories by which scientific
naturalists have excluded the topic of God from
rational discussion, and thus ensured that Darwinism's fully naturalistic
creation story is effectively true by definition. There is
no need to explain why atheists find this system of thought control congenial.
What is a little more difficult to understand, at
least at first, is the strong support Darwinism continues to receive in
the Christian academic world. Attempts to investigate the
credibility of the Darwinist evolution story are regarded with little
enthusiasm by many leading Christian professors of science
and philosophy, even at institutions which are generally regarded as conservative
in theology. Given that Darwinism is
inherently naturalistic and therefore antagonistic to the idea that God
had anything to do with the history of life, and that it plays
the central role in ensuring agnostic domination of the intellectual culture,
one might have supposed that Christian intellectuals
(along with religious Jews) would be eager to find its weak spots.
Instead, the prevailing view among Christian professors has been that
Darwinism-or "evolution," as they tend to call it-is
unbeatable, and that it can be interpreted to be consistent with Christian
belief. And in fact Darwinism is unbeatable as long as
one accepts the thought categories of scientific naturalism that I have
been describing. The problem is that those same thought
categories make Christian theism, or any other theism, absolutely untenable.
If science has exclusive authority to tell us how
life was created, and if science is committed to naturalism, and if science
never discards a paradigm until it is presented with an
acceptable naturalistic alternative, then Darwinism's position is impregnable
within science. The same reasoning that makes
Darwinism inevitable, however, also bans God from taking any action within
the history of the Cosmos, which means that it
makes theism illusory. Theistic naturalism is self-contradictory.
Some hope to avoid the contradiction by asserting that naturalism rules
only within the realm of science, and that there is a
separate realm called "religion" in which theism can flourish. The problem
with this arrangement, as we have already seen, is
that in a naturalistic culture scientific conclusions are considered to
be knowledge, or even fact. What is outside of fact is
fantasy, or at best subjective belief. Theists who accommodate with scientific
naturalism therefore may never affirm that their
God is real in the same sense that evolution is real. This rule is essential
to the entire mindset that produced Darwinism in the
first place. If God exists He could certainly work through mutation and
selection if that is what He wanted to do, but He could
also create by some means totally outside the ken of our science. Once
we put God into the picture, however, there is no
good reason to attribute the creation of biological complexity to random
mutation and natural selection. Direct evidence that
these mechanisms have substantial creative power is not to be found in
nature, the laboratory, or the fossil record. An essential
step in the reasoning that establishes that Darwinian selection created
the wonders of biology, therefore, is that nothing else
was available. Theism is by definition the doctrine that something else
was available.
Perhaps the contradiction is hard to see when it is stated at an abstract
level, so I will give a more concrete example. Persons
who advocate the compromise position called "theistic evolution" are in
my experience always vague about what they mean by
"evolution." They have good reason to be vague. As we have seen, Darwinian
evolution is by definition unguided and
purposeless, and such evolution cannot in any meaningful sense be theistic.
For evolution to be genuinely theistic it must be
guided by God, whether this means that God programmed the process in advance
or stepped in from time to time to give it a
push in the right direction. To Darwinists evolution guided by God is
a soft form of creationism, which is to say it is not
evolution at all. To repeat, this understanding goes to the very heart
of Darwinist thinking. Allow a preexisting supernatural
intelligence to guide evolution, and this omnipotent being can do a whole
lot more than that.
Of course, theists can think of evolution as God-guided whether naturalistic
Darwinists like it or not. The trouble with having a
private definition for theists, however, is that the scientific naturalists
have the power to decide what that term "evolution"
means in public discourse, including the science classes in the public
schools. If theistic evolutionists broadcast the message
that evolution as they understand it is harmless to theistic religion,
they are misleading their constituents unless they add a clear
warning that the version of evolution advocated by the entire body of
mainstream science is something else altogether. That
warning is never clearly delivered, however, because the main point of
theistic evolution is to preserve peace with the
mainstream scientific community. The theistic evolutionists therefore
unwitting serve the purposes of the scientific naturalists, by
helping persuade the religious community to lower its guard against the
incursion of naturalism.
We are now in a position to answer the question with which this lecture
began. What is Darwinism? Darwinism is a theory of
empirical science only at the level of microevolution, where it provides
a framework for explaining such things as the diversity
that arises when small populations become reproductively isolated from
the main body of the species. As a general theory of
biological creation Darwinism is not empirical at all. Rather, it is a
necessary implication of a philosophical doctrine called
scientific naturalism, which is based on the a priori assumption that
God was always absent from the realm of nature. As such
evolution in the Darwinian sense is inherently antithetical to theism,
although evolution in some entirely different and
non-naturalistic sense could conceivably have been God's chosen method
of creation.
In 1874, the great Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge asked the question
I have asked: What is Darwinism? After a
careful and thoroughly fair-minded evaluation of the doctrine, his answer
was unequivocal: "It is Atheism." Another way to
state the proposition is to say that Darwinism is the answer to a specific
question that grows out of philosophical naturalism.
To return to the game of "Jeopardy" with which we started, let us say
that Darwinism is the answer. What, then, is the
question? The question is: "How must creation have occurred if we assume
that God had nothing to do with it?" Theistic
evolutionists accomplish very little by trying to Christianize the answer
to a question that comes straight out of the agenda of
scientific naturalism. What we need to do instead is to challenge the
assumption that the only questions worth asking are the
ones that assume that naturalism is true.
Notes
1. Niles Eldredge, Time Frames (Heinemann, 1986), 144.
2. Ibid., 93.
3. Stephen Jay Gould, "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?"
Paleobiology, 6 (1980), 119-130, reprinted in Maynard Smith, ed., Evolution
Now: A Century After Darwin (W. H. Freeman, 1982).
4. See Stephen Jay Gould, "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," Scientific
American, (July 1992), 118-122. Scientific American refused to publish
my response to this attack, but the response did appear in the March 1993
issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, the journal of the
American Scientific Affiliation.
5. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2d ed., (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1970), 79.
Copyright © 1996 Phillip E. Johnson. All rights reserved.
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