Binary Oasis

Two recently produced resources are very insightful to help us understand the current state of the conflict between evolutionists and those that identify themselves with Intelligent Design. One, Nova’s Intelligent Design on Trial has a complete program and other resources that focus on a case in Pennsylvania where Intelligent Design was tested. Two, ActionBioscience.org released a special report with overview arguments from the Intelligent Design community and rebuttals from proponents of evolution.

I find Ken Miller’s closing statement to be particularly good:

“If Behe wishes to suggest that the intricacies of nature, life, and the universe reveal a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence, his point is philosophical, not scientific. It is a philosophical point of view, incidentally, that I share. However, to support that view, one should not find it necessary to pretend that we know less than we really do about the evolution of living systems. In the final analysis, the biochemical hypothesis of intelligent design fails not because the scientific community is closed to it but rather for the most basic of reasons — because it is overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific evidence.”

My own summary (for now): The role of “Intelligent Design Theory” is to attack a theory to advance a particular philosophical/religious worldview. It’s not completely unreasonable to attack a theory without providing a testable alternative, and in fact, it seems that the attacks (or, more gently, “identification of difficulties with the theory”) have led to the strengthening of the theory of evolution.

Case in point: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg

I’ve been curious for a while now what John Piper’s views are about evolution.  If I can’t find that information online or in a book, I hope to one day talk to Piper about that.  Regardless, the latest monthly newsletter at DesiringGod.org was entitled “Learn from Darwin,” so Piper and his organization at least do not have a completely hostile view of Darwin.  Following a link to another Piper sermon reveals some more interesting information, as well as some great advice from the late Clyde Kilby as concerns what we can or should do when we juxtapose our awe of the world around us with the inclination to suggest that evolutionary theory renders our lives meaningless.  (Scroll to the end of the sermon to see Clyde Kilby’s Resolutions.)

Newsweek published some interesting survey results this week. If I had to summarize the main thrust of the survey, I’d say that it concerned religious belief systems and how it shapes ideas about evolution. Surveys can be colored to support a particular bias, but this particular subject matter is straightforward enough, and I can’t see any motivation for Newsweek to try to skew the results, so I assume that they are credible and representative.

Getting to the point, a few of the results of the survey are as follows:

• 91% of American adults believe in God
• 82% identify themselves as Christians
• 48% reject the theory of evolution
• 34% say that they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact
• 73% of Evangelical Protestants believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years

Apparently just about 40% of Catholic and non-Evangelical Protestants believe that last statement (that is, that God created human in their present form within the last 10,000 years).

This is very interesting to me. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we learn and form our thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. On those subjects that have any degree of complexity, or those subjects for which we gain the knowledge indirectly, we very often rely on sources that we believe to be credible. If I am correct, the “credible source” that shaped the thought of Evangelical Protestants is Henry Morris. For a slightly younger generation (perhaps those in their 20’s and 30’s), Ken Ham has been the source.

To the consternation of many Evangelicals, Young Earth Creationism has fallen out of favor with many Christians. I suspect that there are a number of interworking factors behind this trend, but perhaps the most significant factor was the rallying of a particular credentialed community to create a structured argument for Intelligent Design. This community was (and still is, I assume) comprised of individuals from a variety of faiths, but each was/is trying to use scientific principles, logic, and philosophy to build support for a theistic world view. While the impact of the ID argument has been limited outside of Christian circles (and other theistic circles), it did have the impact of opening many eyes within the Christian community. As a general rule, ID accepts the old universe (i.e. 13 to 14 billion years old), though ID’s proponents typically deny that evolution can explain the variety of life that we see on earth.

So here we stand with a seemingly insurmountable gulf between the belief system of Christianity and the theory of evolution (which, as I understand, is nearly universally accepted by those in the bioligical sciences). Where do we go from here? If Francis Collins has his way, we will try to bridge these together. Could we actually believe both in God and evolution without destroying one or the other? Collins believes so. In his book The Language of God, Collins argues for the existence of a personal God, and he also argues that we have, in DNA evidence, compelling and indisputable fingerprints of evolution.

It’s easy enough for a Christian to accept the argument that an atheist only believes in evolution because of his bias against God. It’s not as easy to reject a credible and accomplished Christian physician and geneticist like Dr. Collins. For that reason, I suspect that his book would receive a more than a mention if we were to compare the survey results of a similar Newsweek poll 10 years into the future. My own opinion is that the statistics will slowly change, with fewer Christians viewing evolution as a hostile ideology and more Christians viewing it as pretty good science and the best science that we have to offer.

6/12/07 edit: an updated poll and analysis.

Well, I only had to renew the book four or five times (from Chandler Public Library), but I finally made it through Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos.” I strongly recommend it to those looking for an overview of string theory, though it is a relatively small portion of the book that is devoted to string theory. Even if you read just the first half of the book (before it touches on string theory), it’s a good read, and it feels like it can stand alone. There’s some great history in here as well. The historical overview ends up being perhaps the best part of the book.

Most of the topics are fleshed out with analogies, and he shies away from even the simplest math (though I understand he hits on the hard math in “The Elegant Universe”). Most of the time, his analogies and analysis are very good, but there were a few times that I felt his intermediate analysis (that is, not his final analysis) was not sound (or at least I didn’t follow him), particularly with respect to entropy increasing toward the past. He seems to be leading into the philosophical question of “How could things have begun?”, but he doesn’t actually phrase it that way, and he mostly ignores some of the philosophical questions (or at least lack of answers) that a beginning highlights.

The chapters on general relativity are good. It turns out that “spacetime” is absolute according to the general theory of relativity. Time is relative, and space is relative, but spacetime is absolute. So not everything is relative, even in our postmodern world.
The most important thing that I got from the book is that the motivation for string theory is not just a desire for a “beautiful unification” of the four forces. Instead, the primary motivation is that nonsense results when we try to combine quantum theory with general relativity theory. Both of those theories have ample theoretical and experimental support, but they break each other. That’s not a problem for just about all of our regions of interest, but it’s a huge problem for small, massive things like black holes and like the assumed early condition of the universe. We’ve always found that nature follows rules, so to have nonsensical or unspecified rules is a huge irritant for scientists.

String theory holds the hope of addressing some other questions such as “How is it that the universe seems to be designed for life?” Certain values and ratios and characteristics of things just “are,” and they are “just right” (see the anthropic principle for some more discussion). Greene thinks that string theory could help to address this issue from a scientific, not philosophical, perspective.

This book has certainly changed my perspective on string theory. I used to have some animosity toward the theory; now I am just one part indifferent and one part curious.
It will be interesting to follow some of the upcoming experiments that have the (small) possibility of providing support for string theory.

I’ve been thinking and reading a lot recently about the philosophical/religious implications of what we see and experience in the natural world, including cosmology.  In particular, cosmology has some really fascinating questions and problems that literally stump the best scientists in the world.

There is one fundamental paradox about origins that anyone can understand.  It has to do with the fact that science and philosophy agree that there had to be a beginning to the universe.  Scientists have no answer to this paradox, though there have been some proposals to try to get around the paradox.  For instance, Stephen Hawking has toyed with the concept of imaginary time to get around the materialistic problem of the paradox.  Christianity, along with most major religions, have creation stories that point to God as the Creator.  Secularists might reply with this a version of this same fundamental question: “Who or what created God?”  To me, the answer is that He has always existed.  It certainly is something of a paradox, but I believe it is a very reasonable answer, especially in light of the non-answers that we get from secularists.

I’m reading Brian Greene’s book “The Fabric of the Cosmos” right now.  It is a fascinating overview of the history and current theories of cosmology.  Cosmology is full of tough and profound questions, including the most basic question of “where did everything come from?”