Perhaps my experience is not the norm for a lifelong Nazarene, but evolution has never been terribly problematic for me. I cannot say the same, of course, for reductionistic naturalism. Not surprisingly, I have always viewed materialistic thinking as fundamentally incompatible with my Christian faith, as well as good sense. Despite having written a number of essays and co-authored a book on the origins debate, in recent years I have checked out of the conversation suffering from what one might call "evolutionary battle fatigue." With this essay, I step back into the conversation briefly to reflect on why the tone and content of much of the contemporary origins debate is disappointing.
My first exposure to evolutionary thinking was in 1964–65, when as a high school freshman I took a biology class shaped by the fairly new Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS). I can still recall terms from the BSCS textbook like coacervates and amino acid soup. Although the BSCS's naturalistic perspective on origins was not lost on me, I had far more pressing matters with which to contend. In those days, the big issues for a good Nazarene teen were smoking and drinking with sexual immorality not far behind, lurking in the moral swamplands of "lewd and lascivious" rock-and-roll music and Hollywood movies. Endtimes preaching and fears of world communism dominated my "larger" intellectual horizons. As I reflect on those days, I don't recall having difficulty compartmentalizing what I learned in school from the more immediate demands of my local church, with its weekly ritual of confronting me with fearsome questions of eternal destiny.
I shall always be grateful to Clayton Dyer. He was a biology teacher at my high school, though he was not assigned to the BSCS class. Dyer was also a Sunday School teacher at my church, and I recall vividly how he told the class one Sunday that we could "believe in" evolution and remain good Christians, as long as we steadfastly held to God as the Creator. Evolution, he maintained, was our best understanding of the processes God employed to bring about life. That was good enough for me then, and the framework of theistic evolution has guided my thinking ever since. It must be noted that I am not a scientist—far from it! I majored in history at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) and went on for an M.A. and Ph.D. in American history (with an emphasis on naval history—of all things!) at the University of Maine. So, my understanding of evolution has decidedly been that of an amateur. But I never encountered a persuasive argument to challenge the basic stance of theistic evolution that Dyer presented to me back in a Church of the Nazarene Sunday School class. In retrospect, I view this as a great intellectual gift.
Fast forward to the mid-1990s. A group of ENC faculty members launched an interdisciplinary book club, and in that setting, I became exposed to the emerging science and religion dialogue that the Templeton Foundation had spawned with an enormous financial investment that trickled down to evangelical Christian colleges like ENC. In 2002—after a series of improbable events for a naval historian that included interviewing Sir John Polkinghorne (with Karl Giberson and Kent Hill) for Books & Culture and engaging in postdoctoral study in science and religion at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford—I co-authored a book with Giberson on the origins debate. We intended our Species of Origins: America's Search for a Creation Story to be a non-polemical tour d'horizon of the debate over evolution in North America.
When I co-wrote Species of Origins, I harbored some sympathy for the intelligent design (ID) project. I freely admit that I lacked the expertise—and continue to do so—to reach an independent assessment of the science behind evolution and ID. But the design theorists (as they liked to be called) struck me as being eloquent critics of the ontological materialism that many science writers smuggled into their books. And while I had no quarrel with evolution as a God-created mechanism, at a gut level of intuition it did seem implausible that evolution alone could account for the astounding organized complexity of life on the planet. Now ID spokespersons, with seemingly solid academic credentials and without the baggage of a literalist reading of Genesis, were arguing that my intuitions of design could be confirmed empirically. I knew that the overwhelming majority of scientists, including many with very strong Christian beliefs, considered the ID camp's claims to be hyperbolic. And ID's talk about "theistic science" troubled me. What would that look like methodologically? But I was willing to suspend judgment, and let the IDers make their case. If empirical evidence of design could be provided, wouldn't science have to salute?
Unfortunately, the design camp did not advance much beyond its initial assertion that evolutionary thinking cannot adequately account for the manifest complexity surrounding us in nature. Moreover, its claims seemed to be increasingly based on philosophical and theological assumptions, not science. And as critics of design became shriller (something I have written about elsewhere), key people in the design camp made increasingly pretentious, even preposterous, claims and predictions. Without a body of scientific literature to support them, ID apologists, for example, confidently predicted that intelligent design would replace Darwinism as a thriving scientific research program. Undoubtedly, the most disconcerting assertion coming out of the ID camp was that it was ushering in a "design revolution" that promised to alter fundamentally the entire scientific enterprise. From ID's infancy, its advocates saw themselves as actors in a Kuhnian drama against the normal science of evolution. In 2004, however, William Dembski made the extraordinary claim that ID "fits the bill as a full-scale scientific revolution" because it challenges not only evolutionary biology, but also "the rules by which the natural sciences are conducted [emphasis added]."1 This assertion was very troubling. Any substantive alteration to the rules of science—its requirements of evidence and avoidance of private knowledge—moves us beyond science to something else. Science is science. It has limits. But it has been a wildly successful enterprise, and talk of revolutionizing its methods is, in my view, ill conceived.
So the shrillness and venom of ID's critics and the hyperbole of Dembski and company soured me to the whole origins debate. Both sides were talking past each other, hoping to "win" the debate rather than seeking to understand. I once thought that ID might take the long-standing intuition of design and, according to Dembski, "cash. . . [it] out as a scientific research program."2 If nature is chock full of design, then surely the evidence—not merely the rhetoric—would sway the debate in that direction. To my knowledge, it hasn't come close to generating a robust scientific research program. And from where I sit on the sidelines, it seems a very remote possibility that it could ever do so.
Even more troubling for me is that the shouting match over design hijacked the conversation about reductionistic naturalism in the public sphere. I cannot prove it, but my sense is that materialism is even more the default position now among science writers and public intellectuals than it was in the 1990s when ID appeared on the scene. And the evolutionary model, far from being undermined, has become the conceptual basis for much of our thinking, not just about origins but about almost everything—morality, religion, altruism, love, etc. As one of my European colleagues has quipped sarcastically, "It's all evolution, boys and girls!"
Where does all this leave me? I no longer monitor the debate over evolution as I once did. I am confident the debate still rages in some quarters, but it is not terribly interesting to me anymore. What still does engage me—deeply—is the way extra-scientific considerations shape the narratives we offer for the cosmos and our place in it. I conclude with two very different narratives, both informed by science but by necessity going beyond it.
The universe has woken up. If the scientific picture we currently have is right, this was an accident, roughly speaking, and also something that happened very locally. At various places some highly organised physical systems—living organisms—have become aware of the world they are part of. In a few cases they have also become aware of their awareness. These living systems are products of evolution by natural selection, an undirected process that began in a fortuitous combination of chemical and physical conditions, whose course is dependent on accidents of history, and which is driven by the slight reproductive advantages some organisms enjoy over others. Even if Earth is not the only place where this has happened, the vast majority of the universe contains no awareness, no life, no reasoning. We, the awoken parts of the universe, can look around and reflect on all this, including the fact that there is no overall purpose in our being here. So the universe has "woken up," but in a local, accidental, and low-key case.3
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We find ourselves in a universe that seems to have had a beginning. We find it governed by laws that have a grandeur and sublimity that bespeak design. We find many indications in those laws that we were built in from the beginning. We find that physical determinism is wrong. And we find that the deepest discoveries of modern physics and mathematics give hints, if not proofs, that the mind of man has something about it that lies beyond the power of either physics or mathematics to describe.4
It is not surprising that I find the former view bleak and utterly unsatisfactory and the latter, written by a Catholic physicist, highly congenial to my intellect and Christian faith. Note, by the way, that design for him is not antithetical to evolution; rather, it is linked to the laws of nature. For me at least, pondering the implications of these radically different narratives is vastly more important that being mired in the rancor of an unproductive evolution debate. Science can provide us with enormous amounts of data and many empirically informed theories that help to explain so much of what we encounter in nature. But we must not ask too much of it. It is a profound error to try to make sense of this world and our place in it holding to the view that science is the only reliable source of knowledge. Addressing the truly big questions of life's meaning takes us well beyond science into the realms of wonder and mystery. This is a hermeneutical and narrative enterprise of the highest order.
1 William D. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 19.
2 William D. Dembski, " The Intelligent Design Movement," Access Research Network's William A. Dembski's Files, http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idmovement.htm (accessed 2/23/2013).
3 From Peter Godfrey-Smith's review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in the London Review of Books 35:2 (January 24, 2013): 20.
4 Stephen M. Barr, "Retelling the Story of Science" First Things (March 2003): 17.
