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by Mike Gray
A new book, God and Evolution edited by Jay Richards, has just appeared that deals with the ever popular notion of “theistic evolution.”
According to Anika Smith:
The book is a response to growing efforts by some Darwinists to enlist the support of the faith community by downplaying Darwinism’s core principles. Chapters of the book detail the failures of theistic evolution, address the problem of evil, and explain how intelligent design is consonant with orthodox belief.
“Our main focus remains on the science,” says John West, a contributor to the book and a senior fellow with Discovery’s Center for Science & Culture. “But it’s important to set the record straight about the broader implications of Darwin’s theory.”
The book will be launched with a national advertising campaign focused on the faith community, and a one-day conference at Biola University where Jonathan Wells, John West, David Klinghoffer, Denyse O’Leary, Jay Richards and Casey Luskin will be joined by WORLD Magazine Editor Marvin Olasky to explore the issues and critique the scientists and scholars who are trying to reconcile Darwinism with belief in God.
We haven’t read God and Evolution yet, but here is the product description from Amazon.com:
What does it mean to say that God “used evolution” to create the world? Is Darwin’s theory of evolution compatible with belief in God? And even if Darwin’s theory could be reconciled with religious belief, do we need to do so? Is the theory well established scientifically? Is it true?
In the century and a half since Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, Christians, Jews, and other religious believers have grappled with how to make sense of it. Most have understood that Darwin’s theory has profound theological implications, but their responses have varied dramatically.
Some religious believers have rejected it outright; others, often called “theistic evolutionists,” have sought to reconcile Darwin’s theory with their religious beliefs, but often at the cost of clarity, orthodoxy, or both. Too few have carefully teased out the various scientific, philosophical, and theological claims at stake, and separated the chaff from the wheat. As a result, the whole subject of God and evolution has been an enigma wrapped in a shroud of fuzz and surrounded by blanket of fog.
The purpose of this anthology of essays is to clear away the fog, the fuzz, and the enigma. Contributing authors to the volume include Jay Richards, co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery; Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design; William Dembski, author of The Design Revolution; Jonathan Witt, co-author of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature; Denyse O’Leary, author of By Design, or by Chance?; and David Klinghoffer, author of Shattered Tablets.
A streaming video of the author discussing his book is here. Run time is 4 minutes 19 seconds.
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If you have a technical bent (we don’t), you might not only understand but also enjoy Donald E. Johnson’s Programming of Life, described below:
This book highlights the informational aspects of life that are usually overlooked or ignored in chemical and biological evolutionary scenarios. Each cell of an organism has thousands (or millions) of interacting computers reading and processing digital information using algorithmic digital programs and digital codes to communicate information.
Life is an intersection of physical science and information science. Both domains are critical for any life to exist, and each must be investigated using that domain’s principles. Yet most scientists have been attempting to use physical science to explain life’s information domain, a practice which has no scientific justification.
This book stresses the principles of information science to show that the natural scenarios proposed so far fail to account for life’s information and related processing systems. The book doesn’t propose any alternative scenario, as that would fall outside science, just as the current scenarios do. After reading PoL, the terms used in these final paragraphs of the book will make sense.
Known facts of life include its extreme cybernetic complexity, with millions of interacting co-dependent structures and components. Life is cybernetic in that it generates and controls its components using its components. Life’s control and communication is digitally-based, and can be analyzed as a multi-computer system. Some of the specific problems that require explanation before propagating naturalistic speculations as science include the following:
How did nature write the prescriptive programs needed to organize life-sustaining metabolism? Programs are shown by computer science to require a formal solution prior to implementation. How did inanimate nature formally solve these complex problems and write the programs? How did nature develop the operating systems and programming languages to implement the algorithms? How did nature develop Turing machines capable of computational halting? How did nature develop the arbitrary protocols for communication and coordination among the thousands (or millions) of computers in each cell?
How did nature develop multiple semiotic coding systems, including the bijective codon-based coding system (for symbolic translation) that involves transcribing, communicating, and translating the symbolic triplet nucleotide block-codes into amino acids of the proteins? How did nature develop alternative generation of such messages using techniques such as overlapping genes, messages within messages, multi-level encryption, and consolidation of dispersed messages? A protein may obtain its consolidated prescriptive construction instructions from multiple genes and/or from the “junk” DNA, sometimes with over a million nucleotides separating the instructions to be combined.
How did nature defy computer science principles by avoiding software engineering’s top-down approach required for complex programming systems? How did nature produce complex functional programs without planning by randomly modifying existing algorithms? How did multiple such programs become simultaneously modified to result in the production of irreducibly complex structures?
Speculation is important when generating or imagining new scientific theories. Scientists should strive to keep such speculation within the scientific community, however. Since the public tends to view what a scientist expresses as a view or belief as being “truth,” it is important not to propagate unsubstantiated speculation as something worthy of consideration by non-scientists. It should be noted that all science is tentative, so new findings may require modification of what is considered “true.”
The questions raised in this book require scientific answers before promoting as “science” any scenario for the origin of life or the origin of species. Perhaps different avenues of thinking are required in order to find scientific “truth” in these areas. Doggedly insisting that a scenario is true despite the evidence is unscientific. Maybe it’s time to leave the “flat-earth” mentality that views things only from a particular limited perspective, and really examine what science is telling us.
Progressive evolution of design, as evidenced by the theory of Evolution, but by advanced science and not nature over 12000 years. Followed closely by some 13000 years of our humanity’s history..This is against a backdrop of our planet being very ancient, and upon which there have been many humanities, which have disappeared for he self-evident reasons we can well understand today.
Once one can understand the scientifically predictability of the situation we find our s-elves in today, then one can understand the ORIGINAL good intention behind all forty of the world religions, in a respectful and logical, 21st century scientific framework
The condition of being falsifiable is a cornerstone of scientific method. Science knowledge starts out as a hypothesis which works itself toward some thesis. It must potentially be refutable by testing in valid experiments, which must be repeatable anywhere on earth. This is how science is different from faith. Essentially, faith works the other way…from an observed outcome (thesis) backwards to a comfortable hypothesis. Is this not so?
“Did God Use Evolution to Produce Us?”
God who?