The debate between Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig was
excellent, full of good information, full of interesting arguments, and full of
surprises. One surprise was that Sean
Carroll chose Dr. Alex Rosenberg as one of his supporting speakers. In February 2013, Craig debated Rosenberg at Purdue
University and pummeled him. You know
you are going to have a bad day when you agree to a debate and then proclaim in
that debate that debating is not a good venue to exchange ideas, as Rosenberg
did.
Rosenberg is a co-director of the Center for Philosophy of
Biology at Duke University. As a philosopher,
one would think he could give logically sound reasons for why he does not
believe in God. Rosenberg claimed the
purpose of his talk was to show “the incompatibility of Darwin’s theory of
natural selection and theism.” Obviously
this has nothing to do with the debate topic of God & Cosmology (aka a red
herring), but maybe Carroll wanted a philosopher to give a good argument
against theism even if the argument has nothing to do with cosmology. So how does Rosenberg claim that evolution is
incompatible with theism?
“An omniscient God would therefore
know that…..the probability of the emergence of life was low, the probability
of the emergence of vertebrate life was even lower, the probability of the
emergence of mammalian life was minuscule, the probability of the emergence of
sentient life was even smaller, and of sapient life was vanishingly small. God would have known this.”
There you have it. The
probability of human life evolving is so extremely small that God could not
possibly have been involved. Regardless
on one’s view on evolution, I don’t see how it follows logically that if the
probability of sapient life forming naturally is “vanishingly small” that this
means God was not involved. It seems the extremely low probability would show outside help may be needed. If human
life evolving naturally is extremely improbable, yet not enough to show God was
involved, what could God have done to show that he was involved in the creation
of life? Here’s what Rosenberg says,
“God could have created us by a means
so fiendishly clever, that involved so many complications, that involved so
many laws of nature, and boundary conditions working together that we, as smart
as we are, will never be able to figure out what that process was. We will never be smart enough to identify the
laws that governed our evolution from the basic distribution of matter from the
beginning of the universe.”
Then he later says,
“Biology is much harder than quantum
mechanics. Why is it harder than quantum
mechanics? Because for one thing it
involves the operation of quantum principles, the operation of classical
physical principles, the operation of chemical thermodynamic laws, on a
conjuries of initial conditions so complicated, so fine, so different across
various environments that we now know relatively less about life on our planet
than we know about the cosmology of the universe.”
In other words, God could have used the laws of physics and
the fine-tuning of the universe to show that he exists….and that is what he did. By the end of his talk, all I could say was “Amen!”
