Murray and Churchill: Mere Theistic Evolution

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

A very interesting article is available from the upcoming ETS meeting. This article is written by Michael Murray and John Churchill, and linked to in their program (https://www.etsjets.org/files/annual_programs/2019/Complete_program.pdf):

http://bit.ly/TheisticEvolutionPaper

Touching on Grudem’s 12 reasons for rejecting TE, they acknowledge the GAE. Note reason 7 that Grudem rejects evolution, because in TE:

7. Human death did not begin as a result of Adam’s sin, for human beings existed long before Adam and Eve and they were always subject to death.

However,

It is easy to see how the meanings of claims 1-12 could vary significantly depending on how one understands this latter phrase. Take claim 7 for example: “Human death did not begin as a result of Adam’s sin, for human beings existed long before Adam and Eve and they were always subject to death.” If by “human beings” one means not Homo sapiens but rather Adam, Eve, and their descendants, then the mere theistic evolutionist might well deny this claim. For on that understanding, one might hold that while Homo sapiens lived and died before Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve and their offspring (who are only a subset of the complete set of Homo sapiens) were not subject to death until Adam’s sin.

That is exactly the point. We cant really see conflict with any of Grudem’s theological points. It brings them to, I believe, the right conclusion.

In the preceding sections, we have labored primarily to show that that there are versions of theistic evolution that hew largely to consensus views in biology and yet remain viable options for Christians with traditional commitments on certain key doctrines.

[pnelson (Paul A Nelson)]

This paper by Churchill and Murray is the jumping-off point for a three-hour session on theistic evolution at the EPS annual meeting (Wednesday 11/20). Speakers include Churchill and Murray, Thomas McCall of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Jeff Schloss of Westmont College, William Lane Craig, and Steve Meyer and me (Discovery Institute). I will post a link to my reply paper here when it’s ready.

[Patrick]

@pnelson I am looking forward to the Theistic Gravitational Waves session should it be scheduled.

[T.j_Runyon]

link to my reply paper here when it’s ready.

Looking forward to it. I feel like they absolutely nailed the book (which I have read thanks to you) But maybe I’m missing something. So looking forward to reading your reply.

[ibstedt (Sebastian Ibstedt)]

I have always considered TE/EC and ID to be compatible, so that it is perfectly coherent to be an “evolutionary intelligent design creationist”. The strong opposition to TE from certain ID groups have always seemed confusing to me - there are many ways to integrate ID and TE. For example one could adhere to ID with respect to cosmic fine tuning and be either a theistic evolutionist or young earth creationist. Or one could simply say that evolution is intelligently designed. Perhaps there have been miracles along the way but not because evolution doesn’t work but because God had some other reason to intervene. Perhaps the origin of life was miraculous and the succeeding events were directed. Or if God has designed the evolutionary mechanisms to function as a genetic optimization algorithm then clearly it is intelligent design. There are endless possibilities. I am sure we all know YECists who prefer to be in the ID camp. The same might true of TEists.

I would have loved to see Del Ratzsch on the panel. His “Nature, Design and Science” is IMHO the most insightful characterization of ID that I have read.

I’m looking forward to reading your reply Paul.

[pnelson (Paul A Nelson)]

Hi Sebastian,

Did we meet when I visited Sweden on a lecture tour, about 13 years ago?

TE / EC and ID are indeed compatible – depending on how one defines TE and ID. Mike Behe, for instance, holds to TE (understood as universal common descent) because he defines ID as “design is empirically detectable.” Historically, Alfred Russel Wallace defended a form of TE & ID, compelling Darwin to object to Wallace in a letter that he had killed their child: https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-6684.xml

Most TEs, however, also hold to methodological naturalism (MN), which rules out design as a scientific matter. To my mind, MN is the real dividing line between ID and other ideas.

I’d like very much to have your thoughts on my reply paper to Churchill and Murray, which I hope to post a link to shortly.

[pnelson (Paul A Nelson)]

Here is my reply essay, responding to Churchill and Murray:

Mere-Theistic-Evolution-Paul-Nelson.pdf

Bill Craig’s organization Reasonable Faith video-recorded the whole seminar, so you should be able to watch it some time in the near future. I’ll keep an eye out for the URL when it’s available.

This 1993 discussion paper is also relevant:

Axiom-of-Biology-Paul-Nelson.pdf

26 years after writing that discussion paper for Pajaro Dunes, I’m still trying to sort out my thinking about the testability of universal common descent (UCD). (!!!) On any given morning, I can argue with conviction that UCD is a testable theory, and in fact is false. The next morning, grumpy Paul says baloney to the Paul of the previous day: UCD is held axiomatically by most evolutionary biologists, and is no more “falsifiable” or testable than the parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry.

That’s crazy-ass talk, you say? Here is systematist Andrew Brower in the latest issue of the journal Cladistics, reviewing David Quammen’s new book on Carl Woese, The Tangled Tree (Simon & Schuster, 2019). Woese spent the last two decades of his career railing against UCD; Darwin’s monophyletic Tree of Life, Woese asserted, was false.

Brower says baloney:

Quammen evidently does not grasp the simple philosophical principle that the irregularly bifurcating hierarchy is not a picture of evolutionary history that is true or false, but an epistemological framework or model through which we understand patterns of relationship, and without which, the notion of horizontal transfer is meaningless. The tree-like pattern is an a priori assumption of phylogenetic analysis, albeit corroborated by more than two centuries of empirical data…

(Cladistics 35 [2019]: 600–602; p. 601)

“Not true or false,” an “epistemological framework,” and an “a priori assumption” sound like UCD should be understood as an axiom.

I can’t buy that. It is, or is not the case, that all organisms on Earth descended with modification from a common ancestor, LUCA. UCD is either true or false.

OK, I’ll think differently tomorrow.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Thank you! I will be posting William Lane Craig’s response soon as well.

[T_aquaticus]

On any given morning, I can argue with conviction that UCD is a testable theory, and in fact is false. The next morning, grumpy Paul says baloney to the Paul of the previous day: UCD is held axiomatically by most evolutionary biologists, and is no more “falsifiable” or testable than the parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry.

Finding a species with completely different codon usage would absolutely falsify UCD, so it is easily testable. Universal common descent was always an open question until the overwhelming genetic evidence came in. Even Darwin proposed that life could have had multiple origins:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”

Brower says baloney:

No, he doesn’t. It is absolutely true that phylogenetic analysis assumes a tree-like structure. However, if UCD is false then any such analysis would return a poor fit to a tree-like structure. That’s what makes UCD testable, the phylogenetic signal that is objectively measured using the methods.

Although it is trivial to classify anything subjectively in a hierarchical manner, only certain things can be classified objectively in a consistent, unique nested hierarchy. The difference drawn here between “subjective” and “objective” is crucial and requires some elaboration, and it is best illustrated by example. Different models of cars certainly could be classified hierarchically—perhaps one could classify cars first by color, then within each color by number of wheels, then within each wheel number by manufacturer, etc. However, another individual may classify the same cars first by manufacturer, then by size, then by year, then by color, etc. The particular classification scheme chosen for the cars is subjective. In contrast, human languages, which have common ancestors and are derived by descent with modification, generally can be classified in objective nested hierarchies (Pei 1949; Ringe 1999). Nobody would reasonably argue that Spanish should be categorized with German instead of with Portugese.

The difference between classifying cars and classifying languages lies in the fact that, with cars, certain characters (for example, color or manufacturer) must be considered more important than other characters in order for the classification to work. Which types of car characters are more important depends upon the personal preference of the individual who is performing the classification. In other words, certain types of characters must be weighted subjectively in order to classify cars in nested hierarchies; cars do not fall into natural, unique, objective nested hierarchies.

Because of these facts, a cladistic analysis of cars will not produce a unique, consistent, well-supported tree that displays nested hierarchies. A cladistic analysis of cars (or, alternatively, a cladistic analysis of imaginary organisms with randomly assigned characters) will of course result in a phylogeny, but there will be a very large number of other phylogenies, many of them with very different topologies, that are as well-supported by the same data. In contrast, a cladistic analysis of organisms or languages will generally result in a well-supported nested hierarchy, without arbitrarily weighting certain characters (Ringe 1999). Cladistic analysis of a true genealogical process produces one or relatively few phylogenetic trees that are much more well-supported by the data than the other possible trees.
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 1

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Here is WLC’s response. I think it is quite good.

What about "Mere Theistic Evolution"? William Lane Craig responds...

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

From the host of Inspiring Philosophy (YouTube), an attendee:

I stayed for the entire talk and it was great. WLC directly challenged Stephen Meyer on his lecture, by noting the argument being made was not that evolution was true, but that IF evolution is true it would still be compatible with Christianity regardless. Meyer was mainly attacking naturalistic evolution, which frustrated Craig. You could visibly tell and even though Craig is not a theistic evolutionist, he was nice to see him defend compatibility. In fact we all started clapping for Craig when he directly challenged Meyer on this point.

At the end during Q&A I got up and challenged Meyer on why he has ignored other explanations on protein sequence space, which made Jeffery Schloss smile. I don’t think Meyer got my point, or maybe I didn’t articulate it properly. I think Schloss gave the best presentation and made references to Simon Conway Morris’ books. I think he basically refuted a lot of what Meyer was arguing.

I will be on his podcast soon discussing the GAE.

[structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau)]

In this response Craig basically seems to say that there is actually rather little theological difference between theistic evolution and progressive creationism (to which I would agree), and that his objection to evolution is more on the scientific side (which I find myself disagreeing with more and more as I become more familiar with the evidence for evolution - and to which I would say, if evolution is compatible with Christianity as Craig seems to admit, why not just let science figure it out?).

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

his objection to evolution is more on the scientific side (which I find myself disagreeing with more and more as I become more familiar with the evidence for evolution -

I don’t think that is precisely it. I think he is grasping for the words. Look what he says about ID:

Indeed, my main reservation about ID is whether the inference to intelligent design is not better thought of as a meta-physical inference, rather than as a scientific inference. My inclination would be, not to offer an alternative scientific theory to the current paradigm, but just to question that paradigm’s explanatory adequacy and to supplement it with a philosophical postulate of a designer.

That is a fairly large departure, for example, from @pnelson’s view of ID. I think it might be better said that he disagrees with the philosophy of TE. I think I agree with him there. We were discussing this on another thread:

Complete vs. Limited or Real vs. Non-Real?

The tendency among TE (exhibit @Jay313) is to take science as a nearly total description of the physical world, without careful attention to its limits. The tendency is to doubt and question any warrant for believing things about the physical world based on the testimony of Scripture. This, it seems, is hard to reconcile coherently with traditional or evangelical Christianity.

In contrast, we could take science and Scripture as legitimate but partial descriptions of the physical world. We do not expect them to be articulating them same things to us, nor do we limit Scripture to the realm of values (e.g. NOMA). Instead, we think that they each have legitimacy, even if we don’t know quite how to give an account of how they describe the same world.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

I totally identify with WLC on this:

Now immediately I felt myself rather left out of the conversation. For I am a Christian with traditional doctrinal commitments;

He also explains why he dislikes evolutionary creation as a term (we really are clicking, aren’t we?).

[pnelson (Paul A Nelson)]

WLC directly challenged Stephen Meyer on his lecture, by noting the argument being made was not that evolution was true, but that IF evolution is true it would still be compatible with Christianity regardless.

WLC got this entirely wrong, as one can see from reading Churchill and Murray’s discussion paper. They argue that “theistic evolution” entails asserting that “evolution” – understood as whatever represents the prevailing or mainstream scientific account of origins – is the best (as in, closest to being true) explanation for biological diversity:

Finally, all versions of theistic evolution affirm that the complexity and diversity of life are best explained by appeal to evolutionary processes that have been operative over long periods of time, where the relevant processes include those that constitute what is often called “the modern evolutionary synthesis.” (One key process in this synthesis is natural selection, acting on random mutations. But it need not be the only important biological process.) Included in this affirmation—and implicit in what follows—is an endorsement of evolution as a very good explanation of these phenomena, and not simply the best among a rather poor set of candidates.

(page 2, my emphasis)

There’s no “if evolution is true” here. Churchill and Murray are saying evolution IS true. As the passage I’ve cited comes straight from their definition of “theistic evolution,” Meyer was correct in focusing his critique on the explanatory adequacy of textbook theory.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

From Tim Stratton (@tim1) :

I was looking forward to this conversation. Two years ago I sat right next to William Lane Craig in a huge lecture hall at the EPS in Rhode Island as we listened to the panel of authors contend that Christians should be opposed to the idea of theistic evolution. Both Bill and I raised questions from the crowd. In fact, I argued that they seemed to miss the mark.

After the panel discussion I discussed this further with both Moreland and Grudem. Moreland seemed to grant my case and Grudem simply responded by saying that he was tired (I respect that).

Anyway, since my time at Biola (2011) I have offered a model based upon Molinism that shows how evolution from a single-celled common ancestor is logically compatible with the creation account in Genesis along with a literal and historical Adam and Eve. In fact, the model I proposed showed the evolutionary biologist professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, that she did not need to be opposed to the Bible because of science. Several months later she gave her life to Christ. This evolutionary biologist now helps me with the Reasonable Faith/Ratio Christi meetings on the UNK campus.

With this backstory in mind, I could not wait for this discussion in San Diego at the recent EPS conference. However, to say I was “let down” would be an understatement.

Dr. Craig’s presentation was brilliant. It was completely compatible and supportive of the model I have been proposing for several years. It seemed to me that Bill demonstrated that evolution from a single-celled common ancestor AND Intelligent Design can BOTH be true simultaneously! At that point, Meyers stood up and basically said, “But look at all the evidence for Intelligent Design!”

Well, yeah, no one is denying that!

During the break I asked Bill if he thought people might be “talking past each other.” I’ll never forget his response: “Boy, I’d say!”

After the panel discussion I talked with Steve Meyers and told him that Bill argued for the compatibility of evolution and ID. He replied and said that he had argued otherwise. I said, "No, you have argued that evolution does not make sense apart from ID. Then I added that this makes a great case for the existence of God/ID:

1- Evolution only works if ID is true.
2- Evolution is true.
3- Therefore, ID is true.

Anyway, much more could be said, but that’s the gist of what I remember.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@tim1 you are a BioLa grad. It is interesting to see you defending TE. Of course WLC is doing the same too as a BioLa adjunct. Sean McDowell also endorsed my book. I wonder if Biola is hitting a “tipping point” where perhaps they might consider versions of TE that take a high view of scripture and affirm traditional doctrines. Or perhaps they are willing to at least explore this now. Is that the right perception or not?

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

Here is my reply essay, responding to Churchill and Murray:

Interesting. Unfortunately, your imaginary reader’s questions aren’t the same as my questions.

Here’s mine: why would changes in termination factors support your position, since the existence of suppressor tRNAs, discovered in the early 1960s, shows that phage and bacteria can tolerate run-through translation.

Given that knowledge, what evolutionary theory predicts is that translation termination is far more easily modified and improved than translation initiation because the latter is much more constrained, which is exactly what we observe. An intelligent designer has no such constraints.

26 years after writing that discussion paper for Pajaro Dunes, I’m still trying to sort out my thinking about the testability of universal common descent (UCD). (!!!)

I’ve always found that doing and thinking are synergistic.

There’s no “if evolution is true” here. Churchill and Murray are saying evolution IS true.

No, they are saying that it is the best explanation. That’s what they literally wrote. Those are not the same thing.

As the passage I’ve cited comes straight from their definition of “theistic evolution,” Meyer was correct in focusing his critique on the explanatory adequacy of textbook theory.

Can you explain how Meyer can competently critique textbook early evolutionary theory while simultaneously eliding the most powerful evidence supporting the RNA World hypothesis–that the ribosome is a ribozyme, with none of the many proteins decorating the rRNA participating in catalysis?

What’s your explanation for the fact that the ribosome is a ribozyme, as one who has been thinking about ribosomes?