The recent article condemning Darwinism but approving of "real" evolution was good so far as it went. You needed to at least tell us that the second part would be coming in which you would explain the 'evolution' you think we can believe in. Too many of us assume that Darwinian theory is all there is. Or, you might have recommended a book on the subject. Peace, - L.R.
Benjamin Wiker responds:
The letters from readers of my "Time Out on Evolution" came thick and fast—for which I am grateful. While it would be a pleasure to reply to each of them, one in particular demands a response on my part. A reader rightly put me on the spot. If I reject Darwinism but accept evolution, then exactly what version of evolution is that? Let me answer in steps.
First, let me make clear that it isn't just Darwinism with God sitting on top. That is the fundamental error of too many who call themselves theistic evolutionists—the adjective "theistic" is defined by the noun "evolution," and the noun evolution is defined by Darwinism. The result is an account of evolution for which God is entirely redundant, and in fact, incongruously adapted. Darwinism purportedly works by random variation and natural selection, i.e., chance and survival of the fittest (or more accurately, the death of the less fit and the breeding of what's left, however fit they may happen to be). With Darwinian evolution, it's not only that God has nothing to do, but that the very process is defined against any possibility of intelligent structure and direction. As Richard Dawkins rightly states, with Darwinism the explanation of biological structures, functions, and behaviors always takes the form "It looks like it was set up by a supremely intelligent being, but…"
I'm a skeptical believer in evolution. By that I mean I'm skeptical of a lot of claims made by evolutionists precisely because, for over a century and a half, evolutionists have been collecting evidence constrained by the intellectual paradigm of Darwinism. Darwinism is a species of materialism; modern materialism has had, from its inception, the implicit or explicit goal of eliminating belief in God. It thereby follows that scientists working within the materialist Darwinian paradigm would look for—and only for—evidence which would support the fundamental thesis that evolution has a purely material explanation and is led by no other guide than blind chance working within the confines of brute physical laws.
That skepticism leads me to lend credence to some aspects of current evolutionary thought, but distance myself from others. I see no reason to doubt the old age of the earth or universe. In fact, I would wager that, if the theory of evolution had never arisen, but the geological and astronomical data that supported an old universe and old earth developed just as it had during the 19th and 20th centuries, there would be no young earth creationists. Just creationists who accepted our new understanding of the actual age of the earth. The old earth itself isn't much of a threat to faith, and our understanding of the Bible would easily have shifted to accommodate it. (We don't, after all, fight to keep a literal dome over our heads in the heavens, as Genesis would seem to indicate.) But the use of the old earth as a fulcrum for the secularizing crusade of Darwinists—ah!, that's what unhappily yoked ideological atheism historically with the scientific affirmation of an old earth.
So, I think we must unyoke them. Independently of evolution itself, the respective ages of the earth and universe are too well confirmed from too many different angles to conjure up much doubt on my part. Someone may have legitimate reservations about certain aspects of carbon dating, but what about (for example) the ice cores drilled in Antarctica that show, layer by layer, year by year, records of snowfall going back nearly half a million years, or the geophysical record of magnetic reversals of earth's magnetic field taking place roughly every million years that are written onto our ocean floors, or the well-attested unfolding of stellar evolution over billions of years that integrates so seamlessly with what we observe astronomically and what we know about the chemistry?
Further, I think that it is in the best interests of creationists to treat the age of the earth and evolution distinctly. As one reader rightly pointed out, we cannot infer from the old age of the earth that evolution happened just because there is lots of time—a thing that evolutionists often forget. Just having lots of time doesn't guarantee the success of evolution, and (here's where evolutionists will howl at me), no amount of time is sufficient to make Darwinian evolution successful. Because of its anti-theistic bias, Darwinism has to make chance the creator of living biological form, "building" up biology blindly from the simplest chemicals up. That is not just improbable. It is impossible.
But showing that Darwinism is impossible, doesn't (for example) explain the existence of a very good collection of fossils that gives every appearance of there being a lot of very similar creatures, rising and falling, emerging and becoming extinct, over millions of years. That is, showing a defect in Darwinism's explanation of the evidence does not relieve us of the burden of trying to find an adequate explanation. Too often, enemies of Darwinism believe that merely showing that Darwinism doesn't explain some aspect of evolution means that the evidential problem-to-be-solved disappears with Darwinism. To cite an important example, showing that Darwinism is utterly unable to explain the Cambrian Explosion, where the body plans of almost every animal suddenly appeared in the geological blink of an eye 530,000,000 years ago, still leaves us with the fact that life exploded on earth 530 million years ago and the fact that the critters that appeared and were fossilized are really different than the ones around now.
So, I would say that I hold a very thin version of evolution, and hold even that very gingerly. It is thin because so much touted by Darwinism must either be rejected or fundamentally reworked, and so much that has been uncovered by biologists must be understood in a non-reductive way. Darwinists have made great headway, for example, in peering into the complexities of DNA and heredity, and that's all well and good. But the notion that DNA preceded the living cell and randomly contrived it, or that DNA by itself explains the living form and ongoing activity of the cell, or (extending it outward) that the complex, living creature is merely an afterthought of DNA, is preposterous. If researchers would begin to approach living things from the top-down, rather than the chemical-bottom up, I believe that biology and evolutionary theory would leap forward. In so doing, it would collect ever more evidence that a purely a materialistic, reductionistic account of evolution (i.e., Darwinism) is scientifically untenable. It would also demonstrate that the complexities of life, even and especially the details of evolution, confirm the existence of an Intelligent Creator.
What books? I suggest Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards' excellent The Privileged Planet, followed by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World, and then Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution. (I don't know how far I would ultimately want to follow Morris' path, but it is, at least, a significant non-Darwinian, theist-friendly path.) I would also suggest reading my Darwin Myth, which brings to light the importance of first rate evolutionists in the 19th century who rejected Darwin and offered theist-friendly accounts of evolution instead. I particularly recommend, in this regard, Michael Flannery, ed., Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution and St. George Jackson Mivart's On the Genesis of Species (which can be found online).
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