Evolution and Intelligent Design

Okay, I am editing this blog since my girlfriend said that it was a little rambling and illogical...what I get for falling asleep in the middle of writing it. I need more sleep!

This is the key to a tale: never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The so-called 'debate' between intelligent design and Darwinists is a good story, but it is not science, and it never will be. It is clear beyond the most implausible shred of a doubt that evolution occurs and is the best scientific explanation for how humans and the rest of modern life came to be. Facts are what science uncovers, and the story the facts tell is an evolutionary story.

But let's put all the false claims of the intelligent designers aside, and look at it from another angle. Could God have created the biological world through evolution? Well, it's possible: there are many people who believe in evolution who also believe in God. Evolution and a created world, seemingly disparate beliefs, can be welded together into one story.

Here's a metaphor I've heard: God is the smith, making the world out of iron. The hammer is evolution. So, if that's true, additional questions arise.

Why would God create the world in this roundabout way? What kind and loving God would favor billions of years of 'survival of the fittest' and send meteors to Earth to slaughter millions of innocent dinosaurs? What kind and loving God would use evolution to craft parasites whose sole job in life is to grow inside caterpillars and eat them from the inside out, while their hosts are still ALIVE and in PAIN? Isn't the nature of the universe supposed to reflect the nature of its Creator?

These are some of the very questions that Darwin, the former clergyman-in-training, posed when he was wrestling with the moral implications of his theory. The caterpillar parasite made Darwin lose his faith in a loving God or purpose in the natural Universe. For Darwin, no loving God could create a universe where random chance allowed such horrors as the caterpillar parasite to arise and flourish.

It is important to remember that this was simply Darwin's opinion on the subject: you can agree with his science while disagreeing with his embittered, emotional take on the philosophy behind the science. Darwin's faith was sorely tested: he lost a daughter to fever and got attacked by every clergyman in England for a fine scientific idea.

I personally think Darwin was wrong. God did not simply allow the caterpillar parasite to randomly come to exist: he used evolution to design it. God is responsible for all the suffering of organisms down through history, all the slaughter of innocent animals and people in natural disasters. And yet, he is still a kind and loving God who has done all of this for the best. How can God be kind and loving while still creating a Universe that is full of pain? That's the question of Job: every Christian has a different answer for that question. I have my own, but that lies beyond the scope of this blog. The real question is: How can God create anything through evolution?

The science of evolution tells us that mutation is random, and therefore evolution as a whole is a purposeless, essentially random process. Organisms adapt only in response to selection from nature, not in response to their own desires or the prompting of a mysterious religious force. So how can I, a scientist by training, tell you that I think that God designed the world for his own purposes using evolution, a random process?

Random is something that we can measure, but it is a false idea, a mathematical construct that helps us model the universe, but does not teach us about its deeper nature. To be random is to be without cause, but we know that all things in this world are caused by prior events. Even though the motion of atoms in a gas cloud (and the path one atom follows) appears to be a random process, it is not. It is a chaotic process in which the current position and velocity of any one atom has been caused by interactions with other atoms in the past. Everything in the universe is a chaotic process on some scale: it is caused by past events, but its future path cannot be predicted.

So when God created the universe, I think it likely that He set certain events, like the course of evolution of life on Earth, into motion just by moving a few molecules in the right direction to create a 99.9% chance. What followed from there, the story of evolution, appears from our perspective to be completely random. What is always unpredictable and unknowable to us, the chaos of the Universe, is laid out completely in the mind of God. God knows all possibilities, foresees all eventualities, and is intimately following the fall of every sparrow in the ever-changing Universe that is revealed by the present.

As humans with free will, God has given us complex brains with more neuron connections than all of the grains of sand in the ocean. He foresees the possibilities of our behavior, but he does not make our choices for us. Indeed, we are free actors who alter the possibilities of His Creation with every step we take. In a chaotic universe, where small actions can have big consequences, not stepping on a butterfly in Brazil can make someone smile in Ethiopia, or lead to the rise of giant insects. We live in a world carefully designed by the actions of God and humankind, but to us it appears effectively random.

So I think there is really no conflict between the belief in a universe that is purposeful and grounded in moral law (in other words, religion) and the belief that the universe evolved through effectively random events (the science of evolution). You can believe that God designed the Universe through what appear to be random events without falling back on believing in a 6000-year old cosmos (creationism) or constant direct interference by God in natural events (intelligent design).

So why do religious people have a hard time with evolution? Religious people espouse a purposeful universe, and they have a hard time accepting a scientific theory that is essentially a purposeless, atheistic mechanism for the origins of life. They have clung to silly, obviously incorrect beliefs in creationism and intelligent design because they believe those stories are the only ones that give the Universe purpose. A good story is better than the facts, right?

The creationist point of view poises an interesting conundrum. There are two TRUE Creations of God, the sole testaments to his Majesty: the Universe and the Bible. If you take the Bible literally, then evolution over billions of years must not have occurred. However, if you take God's Creation literally (and by extension, God), evidence for evolution is everywhere. Now, either God is trying to trick us by leaving all of this false evidence around, or the Bible cannot be taken literally. We know that God would not lie to us. So who is incorrect, God or the Bible?

Me, I am betting on the Bible. It's all about the metaphors.