Does Evolution Need God?

[Patrick]

@swamidass

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

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