In a current Scientific American article, the prominent Catholic evolutionary scientist Francisco Ayala complains,
Despite outreach efforts by scientists and constitutional rulings against them, creationists and intelligent design advocates “are not getting weaker… If anything, they’re more visible.”
But Ayala thinks that scientists who attack religion and ridicule the faithful—most notably, Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford—are making a mistake. It is destructive and gives fodder to the preachers who insist followers must choose either Darwin or God.
This article is a marvelous microcosm of Ayala’s mistake in the book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion. (I have written on this at length already.) His goal is more or less to save God from embarrassment—the shame of all those miscarried embryos, for one thing, and more generally, the whole problem of evil. He wants to do it without attacking religion the way Dawkins does. His solution is effectively remove God from the scene.
He refers to science-savvy Christian theologians who present a God that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection.
I’m having a bit of trouble parsing the logic there. I think he said God is continuously engaged by not directing events. It reminds me of the cliché: “There are three kinds of people in the world: those who make things happen, those who watch what happens, and those who say, ‘What happened?’” God is the second kind, if Ayala is right. If there’s any virtue in making things happen, that’s a virtue God lacks.
Evolution is driven by randomness. Its only creative engine is blind chance in genotypic variation. Natural selection, acting upon such variations, is in a certain sense more goal oriented in that it favors reproductive fitness. But natural selection is not creative. It cannot make genetic changes happen; it can only conserve them in individuals and their offspring, and spread them around a population. Evolution is essentially variation plus natural selection. Variation is blind but creative; natural selection possesses something analogous to sight (very distantly analogous, I must add) but it is utterly lacking in creativity.
I have to read this again. God “is continuously engaged in the creative process,” proposes Ayala, “through undirected natural selection.” Now, which part is God “continuously engaged” in? The blind part or the uncreative part? Would it help if Ayala said both? “God is neither just blind nor just uncreative, he is both blind and uncreative.”
I’m further reminded of an ad I once saw in an in-flight magazine for a miniature Lotto machine. “Employ the power of random selection to choose your next lottery number!” it said. I’m going to assume my readers here know what’s laughable about that. Ayala is granting God that very same level of power.
And he says Dawkins should do things his way, because it’s not good strategy to attack religion. We shouldn’t force followers to choose between Darwin or God. No, we can have Darwin and God—as long is this God (this god, I should say) is “engaged” just as a useless spectator who can only watch what happens, whatever that might turn out to be.
And that, dear friends, is how Dr. Ayala suggests science can avoid ridiculing belief in God.
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