I couldn’t get through the whole paper, which was mostly the usual tedious apologetic for the worst forms of TE. Partway through the desperate analogy of the umpire’s coin toss, I could see the reasoning was going to follow the usual TE pattern, and that I was going to disagree with it as I always do, so gave up on that. However, near the end I caught the discussion about Francis Collins, and in the course of an inept defense of Collins’s vacuous thoughts on theology and science, the authors wrote:
“Rather, the epistemic value of theistic evolution lies primarily in its power to unify or synthesize two sets of claims.”
But theistic evolution – at least, as exemplified by BioLogos – and particularly as exemplified by Collins, Giberson, Falk, and Applegate – does not unify or synthesize. It compartmentalizes, which is a completely different way of handling the difficulty.
BioLogos TEs regularly distinguished between a realm of physical causes and a realm of “values, purpose and meaning” and said that faith belonged to the latter realm, science to the former. Thus, for Collins, you can look at evolution and see a totally adequate chain of natural causes, needing no supernatural assistance, and that’s true, and you can look at evolution and see God’s hand in charge of the process, and that’s true, too. Through the eyes of science, there is no evidence whatsoever that any intelligence (even sub-divine) has anything to do with happens in evolution, but through the eyes of faith, you can say that God is somehow, in some unspecified, indescribable, mysterious way, behind what happens in evolution. The two levels of description never meet; they run in parallel, or on different planes, or the like. And it’s very clear that the “God” level of description is completely optional from an explanatory point of view. You don’t need God to explain anything about evolution. You need God if you want to feel good about evolution, if you want to put a bumper sticker on your car saying, “I Love Jesus and I Believe in Evolution.” God is thrown in as an emotional, spiritual gloss on the process.
This is neither “unification” nor “synthesis”. It’s compartmentalization. It’s the device recommended by Gould to keep peace between religion and science. They have different magisteria, different territories, and as long as they stay in their own territories, and never meet, they will get along just fine – like two neighbors who get along very well because the fence between their yards keep their kids and dogs from going onto the other guy’s property.
A unification or synthesis would want to connect, into one account, how God impinges upon the evolutionary process, and how natural causes (presumably created by God, but having a certain range of effectiveness of their own) impinge upon the process, and how the two coordinate. But in the 11 years or so of the existence of BioLogos, none of the leading columnists or management have even begun to articulate how the coordination works. And whenever pressed to do so on their question pages, they ducked.
At one point they made some sounds as if they were going to try for a synthesis. Jeff Schloss said that God was “mightily hands on” in evolution, which is normal English means that God acts in a tangible way within the evolutionary process. If that way could be clarified, one might indeed have a true synthesis of science and theology. But Schloss never clarified what that meant. Of course, it was hard for him to do so, because even though he was (presumably) being paid as a “Senior Scholar” by BioLogos, he wrote maybe one column in about three years, and never answered questions of readers in the Forum. And when others were asked to pinch-hit for him (after all, the hired him as Senior Scholar, so his view presumably was in line with that of the top management, and they should know roughly what he thought), they ducked the question. Haarsma ducked. Applegate ducked. None of them would specify what “mightily hands on” meant. They didn’t know what their own Senior Scholar had in mind, apparently. Didn’t they bother to talk to him before they hired him – or at least after?
This is not to say that there cannot be a synthesis of science and faith regarding evolution. Indeed, early on, there were many proposals for such a synthesis, from people like Asa Gray and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin sternly rejected all of them. And the BioLogos TEs (except Ted Davis) always took the side of Darwin against those others.
There was also a sort of synthesis from Robert Russell, which had some influence on Ted Davis (God is subtly influencing mutations, though we can’t detect the influence at any particular point with scientific instruments), but again, BioLogos carried on as if Russell never even existed. BioLogos has never wanted clarity about how God’s creative activity connects with natural causes. It wants to keep the relationship between God and evolution, God and natural causes, as fuzzy as possible. It has acted as if its main purpose in existence is to clear all religious conceptions out of the way of scientists so that scientists can get on with their work of showing that no design is necessary to explain the origin of anything; but then, as if to compensate evangelicals for the loss of any traditionally meaningful notion of God as Creator, it has declared that God can after all be seen as the Creator of nature, but only through “the eyes of faith.” The heavens did not declare the glory of God, but human faith did. Again, compartmentalization, not synthesis.
If Murray and Churchill admire Francis Collins’s theology and BioLogos, that’s their business. Each to his own. But their claim that Collins and BioLogos ever offered any synthesis or unification of faith and science is, philosophically speaking, rubbish. Merely to assert the truth of two distinct propositions, without any coherent intellectual relationship between them, is not to offer a synthesis or unification of any kind.
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