Alex Rosenberg Rejects Theism Because the Probability of Sapient Life is “vanishingly small”.

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!”

Francis Collins & Theistic Evolution



Francis Collins was a physician and the project manager for the Human Genome Project, which was a project to map the DNA of humans.  A single strand of DNA consists of 3 billion base pairs.  If you were to read it at an average pace, 7-days per week, 24-hours per day it would take 31 years!  Mapping this is no small task.  He wrote a book called, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  As always, why read a book if there is a video to watch instead!?!

 

The first half of the video is his testimony on how he came to realize the truth of Christianity and second half is how he reconciles faith and evolution.  Here’s a summary:

 

Francis Collins was not raised in a religious home and was an atheist when he started med-school.  He had a patient who was dying and he wondered how she was so at peace at the end of her life.  She was a Christian and asked him what he believed.  He realized that he didn’t really know and had never investigated any evidence to form an opinion one way or the other.

“Scientists are supposed to make decisions after they look at the data, after they look at the evidence.  I had made a decision that there was no God and I’d never really thought about looking at the evidence.  That didn’t seem like a good thing.  It was a decision that I wanted the answer to be, but I had to admit I didn’t really know whether I had chosen the answer on the basis of reason or whether because it was a convenient form of perhaps willful blindness to the evidence.  I wasn’t sure there was any evidence, but I figured I had better go find out.”

After a two year search, he found that nature provides some interesting pointers to God:

·        There is something instead of nothing

·        The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

·        The Big Bang

·        The precise tuning of physical constants in the universe

·        The Moral Law

 

He came to believe in a creator, but did not know which god to choose from.  It seemed to him that this type of evidence required monotheism.  He investigated Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.   After reading CS Lewis, he settled on Christianity since it provided the redemption he felt he needed.  He also was relieved that there was good evidence for his faith in Christ and that it did not require him to take a blind leap.

“I discovered this great sense of peace and a joyfulness about having finally crossed that bridge, and also to have done so in a fashion that seemed to live up to my hopes that faith would not be something you had to plunge into blindly, but something were there was in fact reason behind the decision.”

One of the things I found interesting about Collins is that he is what is known as a “theistic evolutionist”; he believes God created through the undirected process of evolution as described by Darwin.  He rejects the Intelligent Design movement, where many claim that evolution needed God’s direction to create the complex changes we see, as using the “God of the gaps” argument. 

“ID turns out to be, and I’m sorry to say this for those who have found this a very appealing perspective, but I think it is the truth that ID turns out to be putting God into a gap in scientific knowledge which is now getting rapidly filled.  And that God of the Gaps approach has not served faith well in the past and I don’t think it serves it well in this instance either.”

“ID is not only turning out to be science that’s hard to defend, it’s also sort of an unusual kind of theology cause it implies that God wasn’t quite getting it right at the beginning and had to keep stepping in and helping the process along because it wasn’t capable of generating the kind of complex structures that were needed for life.  Wouldn’t it actually be a more awesome God who started the process off right at the beginning and didn’t have to step in that way?”

Collins thinks the term theistic evolution is confusing, so he prefers BioLogos which means, Life through The Word.  He founded the BioLogos website to help show that faith and science, specifically evolution, can be reconciled.  He makes the following statement in the video:

 

“Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time created our universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.  God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet.  Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.  After evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a sufficiently advanced neurological “house” (the brain), God gifted humanity with free will and with a soul.  Thus humans received a special status, “made in God’s image”.  We humans used our free will to disobey God, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law.  Thus we were estranged from God.  For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

This obviously does not match a literal interpretation of Genesis nor a literal Adam and Eve.  One of the responses Collins gives is to say that Genesis 1 & 2 seem to disagree in the order of creation for humans and plants, so why do we think those chapters were meant to be taken literally or as science?  Collins also says that requiring a literal interpretation of Genes is a recent phenomenon and quotes Augustine from 1600 years ago:

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received.  In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”

~Saint Augustine, 400 AD, The Literal Meaning of Genesis

Evolution is something that I’m starting to look at.  I’ve never investigated the evidence for or against it nor thought through all of the implications.  I hope to write about my findings as I go along.

The Skull That Rocked the Evolutionary World

In Darwinian Evolution, there is no distinction between micro evolution (change to species over time) and macro evolution (change in a higher taxa over time).  To a Darwinist, macro evolution is simply micro evolution over a very long period of time.  When it comes to human evolution, Darwinian Evolution does not say that humans evolved from monkeys or apes; the theory says that humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. There’s no need to ask why there are still monkeys around or why we don’t have any duck-gator fossils; these are misconceptions about the theory.  The “missing links” everyone talks about are the fossils that get from homo sapiens to the common ancestor we share, including the common ancestor itself.  Those who oppose Darwinian Evolution have been quick to point out the gaps in the fossil records and filling those gaps with “God did it”, which is where the “God of the Gaps” label comes from.  Over time, scientists have found more and more fossils to close that gap….or have they?

 

In Dmanisi, Georgia (by Russia), anthropologists discovered a new hominid fossil that has rocked the evolutionary world…ok, that’s a slight exaggeration.  Estimated to be 1.8 million years old, this skull is the most intact hominid skull found from its time period and is the earliest hominid fossil found outside of Africa.  In Africa, paleontologists have labeled several unique hominid species due to the separate geographical locations and time periods they believed these hominids lived.  Big deal, eh?  Here’s where it gets interesting.  In Dmanisi, this new skull (the one on the right) is very different from the other fossils found in that same area and from the same time period.  It prompted scientists to examine the variations between the fossils found in Dmanisi and compare them to the variations found in modern humans and also in modern chimpanzees.  The variations in the Dmanisi fossils are within the same range.  This is causing scientists to realize that what they thought were several different hominid species might be part of one species, homo erectus, a predecessor to homo sapiens.  The human evolutionary chain may have shrunk by 5-6 species!

Click here for the article at The Guardian

“David Lordkipanidze at the Georgian National Museum, who leads the Dmanisi excavations, said: "If you found the Dmanisi skulls at isolated sites in Africa, some people would give them different species names. But one population can have all this variation. We are using five or six names, but they could all be from one lineage."”
 
 
Click here for the video

If Fezzik (Andre the Giant) and Princess Buttercup were found in separate locations and from separate time periods, wouldn’t they also be interpreted as different species?  Is it possible that some of these ancestor fossils are not as different from us as some believe?  As time goes on and more fossils are found, I wonder how much more will the human evolutionary history compress.