Francisco Ayala has won this year’s Templeton Prize, which “each year honours a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.”
As highly as I regard the Templeton Prize, I have to wonder about their selection this time. I do not mean that it makes no sense at all. “He is evangelical,” says a 2002 Ayala profile, “…about promoting the philosophical compatibility of scientific knowledge and methods and religious faith.” Nothing wrong with that. It goes on,
He compares religious insights to artistic ones. Suggesting that religion is unscientific or anti-scientific is, he says, “like saying that studying the humanities, or becoming sophisticated in art appreciation, would work against science.
“Shakespeare has a lot to say about the world … but it is not science. It is a different kind of knowledge. Say that in a sonnet Shakespeare refers to his beloved as a rose. Scientists could say, ‘This guy is an idiot. A woman is not a rose.’ Of course the idiot would be the scientist who made that comment. Shakespeare knows she is not a rose! But that doesn’t mean that describing his beloved as a rose is not telling the world a lot about what he thinks about her and what she is like, and what love is like.”
That much is fine as far as it goes. But his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion was philosophically and theologically weak, in my strong opinion, especially in regard to God and the problem of evil. His solution to that is no solution at all. The 2002 profile on Ayala indicates, “he refuses to say even whether or not he believes in God and whether, or in what ways, he worships these days.”
Oh, and he was formerly a priest. Is that really an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension?
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I believe the problem for theistic evolutionists like Alaya and Collins is that they have not been fully honest in the explanation of their beliefs. I am someone who is more disposed to believe in theistic evolution than intelligent design as these terms are normally used. However, there are still problems with theistic evolution. Now, I may be using these terms in less orthodox ways than they are normally used but the following is the issue I have with theistic evolution.
Theistic evolution is intelligent design. I find it disingenuous for the theistic evolutionists to claim they don’t believe in intelligent design much less be critical of it. Even if God has used methods to shape the development of life that cannot be distinguished from naturalistic evolution, it was still God who did that. Even if we cannot point to a specific place where we can directly or indirectly see or even infer God’s hand, his hand was still at work. That is what theistic evolution claims.
To say that is somehow different than intelligent design is just parsing of words. God is intelligent. God designed life one way or another in all its aspects. How is that not intelligent design in its most basic understanding? We may end up disagreeing about just how God did all this. We may disagree whether we can actually discern that handiwork via scientific or philosophical means. That doesn’t mean we disagree that God, using his intelligence (and much more), designed what we observe as all of creation.
It cuts that other way, of course, for the intelligent design proponents. Even if they are right about the places where God’s work is apparent, they still believe that much of that they see was “theistically evolved” in some very real sense. It seems to me that we are in much more agreement about all of this than we care to admit. I think both sides of this issue have looked to secure their intellectual territory more than understand what they have in common.
At least Francis Collins was explicit about his religious beliefs. His book, The Language of God, recounts his journey from atheism to theism and eventually to Christianity. Perhaps he was too explicit.
David Heddle made the distinction and I am a little puzzled by it myself.
I can see why someone might distance themselves from a specific version of ID theory, but not ID altogether because it’s impossible to do that. You can’t escape some form of ID theory while remaining a theistic evolutionist because both are explaining the history of life using a design narrative.
Maybe some do it for political, cultural or social reasons. They don’t want to drag God or theistic evolution into the muddy waters of the ID debate wars. I can understand that completely and perhaps this is what David and many others are doing.
Steve,
Of course you are right. Intelligent Design has acquired a stigma and the theistic evolutionists want to distance themselves from it. However, it is still true that theistic evolution is intelligent design in some real sense. It would seem to me that it would be beneficial to theistic evolution as a theory if its proponents would embrace the basic commomalities. Of course, the same can be said for those that embrace intelligent design.
“Theistic evolution is intelligent design.”
Sort of but not really. TE is a theory of how everything happened, and God’s role in evolution. ID is about detecting design in nature. They are getting at 2 different things. An ID proponent can be TE, YEC, an old earth progressive creationist or anything in between.
The key difference is that most people who advocate for TE now also deny that design is detectable in biology. But Collins, at least, sees design in fine tuning. And Behe accepts common descent. Most ID folks who are Christians accept some degree of evolution. Collins and the rest agree that evolution does not explain everything and that God was necessary at some point.
But these thoughts are part of the reason I launched my blog “The Design Spectrum.” I argue that the TE folks like Collins are just in a different place on the design spectrum.
Tom, I agree with most of your comments here about Ayala.
pds,
The distinctions you make are certainly true. However, what these different ideologies have in common is rarely discussed. Further, those who hold these different beliefs seem to act as if they have nothing to do or even act with distain towards with one another. I see the bottom line as this. Life did not begin nor did it flourish without the guiding hand of God. However, there are many that would disagree. Together, we should be focusing on addressing that contention and not arguing among ourselves.
to BillT:
Unfortunately, you are just engaging in a semantic debate. You can argue that intelligent design, according to the plain meaning of the words, should encompass theistic evolution, however, the words are used as short hand for a very specific set of claims that explicitly deny the efficacy of evolution.
Similarly, I could argue that artificial flavors don’t exist, since really artificial flavors are not chemically any different than ‘natural flavors’ (in fact, for the most part, ‘artificial flavors’ are simply ‘natural flavors’ that have been isolated from various food stuffs, such as orange peels.) However, every one knows what ‘artificial flavors’ are, and making such an argument would have the tendancy to obscure, rather than elucidate, the topic under-discussion (say, whether artificially flavored foods are gastromically inferior to whole foods.)
Similarly the label ‘intelligent design’ has been claimed by people making a particular claim that evolution doesn’t work. So when I say that ‘intelligent design’ is pseudo-science, I am not saying that Steve Jobs’ employees used voodoo to design the iPod, but rather making a specific statement about a specific social movement. If you don’t like that the label of intelligent design has been absconded with by a William Dembski and Micheal Behe, then take it up with them.
Finally, by confusing the beliefs of Ayala (theistic evolution) with the beliefs of Dembski (intelligent design) you are ignoring the very heart of the debate: whether the biological sciences are intellectually rotten. According to Dembski they are, and according to Ayala they aren’t. The rest is just details.
But, to end on a more positive note, I genuinely applaud your effort to find commonality between the two camps. Additionally, I think you do make a good point, despite my objections to the route you use to get there. The difference between theistic evolution and intelligent design creation are chiefly differences in factual claims, and not theological positions.
Matt,
The points you make are certainly true. I think (hope) I made it clear that I was using those term outside of their normal usage. I do, however, appreciate your summary of my efforts. It’s probably better than mine. It is the factual positions not the theologial ones that separate the respective camps. To me it seems obvious which is more important.