Does Evolution Need God?

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Happy to oblige, @swamidass!

@J.E.S, my usual recipe for God guided evolution is:

1] God decides what mutation and when. (When a human is born with a congenital defect, many might see it as an act of God.)

2] God decides what the environmental factors will be that affect the reception of the mutations. (When the dino-killing asteroid hit Earth … wiping out of all the larger sinus made it possible for mammals to start to evolve.)

3] Old Earth creationists have already come to terms with the oddities if God using such a ling time scale. But for God there is no time at all. All the steps described in creation all happen in an instant anyway. So it seems that the timeframe is not for God… but for humanity!

God doesn’t seem to want humans to expect instant gratification!

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Thanks for obliging us, @gbrooks9!

Your answer indicates that you believe God was deeply involved in the evolutionary process, correct?

So (according to your perspective), do you think that the evolutionary process would get along just fine if God was not involved in any way? Or, do you think that divine involvement (like you described) would be necessary for evolution to produce the outcomes we see today?

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Thinking on this I’m confused on the phrasing. What does it mean to “work properly” in your mind? Are you asking if the results of evolution processes alone would be the precise results God intended from the beginning? Or are you asking if God’s directly is needed in some ongoing basis to enable to produce what we see in the biological world?

I’m confused…

@swamidass

I suppose I am asking: Do you believe that evolution needs God’s guidance in order to produce what we see in the biological world? Or, would you agree with @T_aquaticus when he says:

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I’m going to clarify this a bit, by referencing a more common claim. It is often said that evolution is sufficient to explain the diversity of life we see. For example:

I think this is false. Here is why…

  1. First of all, biological evolution depends on several things for which we have no good account (physical laws, abiogenesis or a first cell, etc.).

  2. Second, the course of evolution depends on “stochastic” events we couldn’t have predicted, like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and other “chance” events. We have no way of distinguishing between chance and providence. It seems almost certain that some of these contingent events were fundamentally important to produce what we see here. For example, both humans and chimps had the same starting point, but only we are anything like humans. Why are we different? Some combination of providence and chance.

  3. Third, the claim of “sufficiency” is a universal negative claim about the nature of life, and science cannot usually make these sorts of claims. For evolution to be sufficient, every step along the way to us must have been possible to evolve without any providential inspiration of God. I’m not sure how we could possibly know this about everything that has evolved when we have not had (and will not have) ability to study in detail everything in the history of life that has been made.

  4. Forth, the claim of “sufficiency” seems to be false because evolution depends on contingent events (e.g. that asteroid). They are unpredictable events that profoundly shape the final product of evolution, even though evolution itself has no account of how these events arise. So evolution seems obviously not to be a sufficient explanation for the diversity of life.

I can agree that it appears as if everything we see could have been produced by natural processes. However, I’m not sure how to distinguish between between God’s action and natural processes. God could have inspired a mutation here or there, but how would we know? It would look just like a natural mutation to us. How in the world could we know that it was a special mutation?

So yes, I do think God was necessary, for several reasons, and science has not ruled out God’s guidance in origins. Evolution is certainly not a “sufficient” explanation of life. However, it is not at all clear how he providentially governed evolution.

I could go on about how evolution is not “sufficient”, but this of course should be balanced that with fact that none of the ID arguments have been convincing to me either. Evolution is not sufficient to explain everything, but it certainly explains a lot. It seems more a matter of prior belief about God’s involvement than anything about the evidence. As I pointed out before, if God inspires a mutation, how could we possibly know He did? How could we establish that it was not a “natural” mutation?

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All above is true, and doesn’t require the existence of God to be true.

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Exactly, which is why we should not say that evolution is sufficient to explain the diversity of life. This seems to be a very strange and indefensible claim.

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@swamidass, @Patrick

My thoughts exactly… :wink:

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I think a better way to put it is:

Evolution is a legitimate but incomplete account of how the full diversity of life arose. It makes a great deal of sense of the complex patterns we see in biology, but it is certainly not the whole story. Alongside our confidence in evolution, there is a great deal we do not know, and may never know, about the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of our origins. While we see no direct scientific evidence for God’s action here, even scientists are regularly startled into an awe and wonder by the beauty and the grand of life. There is no good account for why it had to be this way.

This description, it seems, is more truthful that defensively retorting that “evolution is sufficient”.

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Evolution is certainly sufficient to explain the diversity of life to a reasonable confidence level.

Evolution depends on the laws of physics, especially as expressed in chemistry. How does biological evolution explain how the the laws of physics arose?

Biological Processes are emergent from Chemical Reactions which is emergent from Physics. For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, there was no chemical reactions nor biological processes in the universe. Just nuclear physics according to the laws of quantum mechanics. The first hydrogen atom at 380,000 years after big bang released the cosmic background radiation. First stars and galaxy at 100 million years after Big Bang. In the gas outside of stars first chemical reactions emerge, so just physics and chemistry at 100 million years. In the solar system it took 4.1 billion years for biological processes to emerge on Earth from the chemical reactions.

Biological evolution doesn’t need to explain how the laws of physics arose because Biological Process emerged from Chemical reactions which emerged from physics.

That means evolutionary theory is not sufficient and needs additional theories to give a complete account of the diversity of life.

@J.E.S

How can anything in nature work without God?

Can the wind blow even if there is no air?

To explain evolutionary biology well enough to understand it, use it, teach it, learn more about it, you can make use of the underlying physics and chemistry, but you don’t need to know the quantum states of each atoms to continue researching a tiny aspect of evolutionary science. So for all practical purposes, our present knowledge is sufficient to continue working on gaining new knowledge. If you want to prove evolution like you would a mathematical proof well you with never have sufficient information to prove it. That’s why is will always be called the Theory of Evolution. But at this point in history, with all we know about the world, it makes no sense invoking God into the natural world. It is unnecessary and divisive as everyone’s God only exists as thoughts in their brains as sequences of synaptic firings.

There may be deeper fine-tuning of chemistry and biology as well. These are things im starting to work on. Swinburne states it well when he says evolution only works because there is a certain type of biochemistry. But why these laws instead of other laws?

@swamidass,

Providence… vs. The Human perception of Chance or Randomness…

Completely beyond anyone’s ability to distinguish.

You appear to be agreeing with me in this quote. When I say that evolutionary mechanisms are sufficient I am saying that the evidence is consistent with the actions of those mechanisms within the confines how species evolved since life emerged. I suspect that you would agree that the known physical laws and mechanisms are sufficient to explain how clouds form and weather works. That isn’t to say that God isn’t involved in weather, only that if God does act that it is indistinguishable from the physical laws that we know about.

That is all I meant by “sufficient”. I am not saying that God is not involved. What I am saying is that if God is involved that it is indistinguishable from the known processes that we already know of. Where we may differ is if you think a specific mutation or specific event could not have occurred through natural processes.

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