Jason Rosenhouse finds this, from Kenneth Miller’s Only A Theory, to be lacking:
[Link: EvolutionBlog : My Review of Only a Theory]Turning our attention to the special case of our own species, we can be fairly confident, just as Gould tells us, that our peculiar natural history would not repeat, and that self-awareness would not emerge from the primates. Indeed, we would have no reason to suppose that primates, mammals, or even vertebrates would emerge in a second running of the tape. But as life reexplored adaptive space, could we be certain that our niche would not be occupied? I would argue that we could be almost certain that it would be — that eventually evolution would produce an intelligent, self-aware, reflective creature endowed with a nervous system large enough to solve the very same questions that we have, and capable of discovering the very process that produced it, the process of evolution.
Miller, a strong opponent of Intelligent Design, takes the position that God and evolution are compatible features of the universe. He particularly defended, in Finding Darwin’s God, the idea that evolution is undirected. Kenneth claims to believe in Christianity (he’s a Roman Catholic) but also believes the course evolution has taken was not guided by God. I’ve been scratching my head over that one since I read Finding Darwin’s God. The Bible is chock-full of statements of God planning things out well in advance (Ephesians 2:10, for example). To believe in undirected evolution is to believe in something other than the biblical view of God and his relationship with humans.
Rosenhouse is no theist and no friend of Intelligent Design, but he is right to question Miller about this:
Actually, to argue otherwise is simply to acknowledge that Darwinian natural selection driving animals to fill adaptive niches is not the only thing that goes on during evolution. It was not just the relentless march of natural selection that made possible our appearance on this planet. There were also numerous mass extinctions to open up large numbers of new niches….
I don’t agree with Rosenhouse’s full conclusions, but it sure seems that he’s being more consistent to his underlying theory than Miller is. Either accept that God exists and cares about life on earth, or set aside the whole idea of God entirely. Miller seems to be trying to keep one foot in Christian theism and another foot unguided, undirected evolution. But that’s like trying to keep one foot on the dock and one foot on the rowboat–when the rowboat’s mooring lines have been thrown off, and the current is flowing away from the dock.
It’s been a real eye-opener to me to realize what it is that many of the big-name theistic evolutionists are actually saying. And by eye-opening, I mean it’s been infuriating.
I saw this quote from Kenneth Miller recently:
It’s hard to believe that Miller isn’t being intentionally disingenuous here. There’s nothing about chemistry that calls into question whether anything is intended by God, and which would thus require a chemist to clarify that they were nevertheless a theist. Meanwhile, Miller is quite aware that he sees evolution as denying that God intended man, a position that is certainly bound to throw the status of one’s theism into doubt in the minds of others.
Again, it’s hard to believe that he doesn’t know he’s presenting a false parallel, and that he really thinks that evolution as he presents it is as innocuous as chemistry. I want to believe that what we have in debates over TE is just an honest disagreement among sincere Christians, but a lot of these TEs are making it increasingly hard for me to do so.
Yes, this is a problem I’ve had with Miller for a long time. He pretends to be a theistic evolutionist, but his view isn’t theistic evolution. It’s a very thin theism with a God who doesn’t have much say in what goes on in the universe. He has an extremely limited role for providence and no sense that God might cause via secondary causes or final causes. It’s as if God breaks the chain of efficient causes to do miracles that violate the laws or nature or God has nothing to do with it. It’s as ignorant of the history of Catholic thought (most notably Thomas Aquinas) as a Catholic intellectual could possibly be.
I don’t doubt that he wants to be a pious Catholic, but he certainly hasn’t reflected on whether his views are consistent with orthodox Catholicism, because they’re not. He’s explicitly rejected the most recent papal statements on this issue by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which happily allow for evolution as long as it’s directed and thus intelligently designed in exactly the way design arguments have long claimed (although silent on whether it’s designed in the particular way Behe, Dembski, Johnson, and other recent ID defenders have claimed). He’s free to deny the argumentative efficacy or epistemic status of any philosophical argument involving design, but he can’t hold to Catholic teaching and reject the conclusion of such arguments, and that’s exactly what he does.
Deuce, compare Francis Collins. He’s a true theistic evolutionist. He doesn’t accept the recent ID arguments coming out of Discovery (at least the biologically-based ones; he’s fine with the fine-tuning ones). Yet he doesn’t think design arguments are contrary to science or irrational, and he insists that God’s control does stand behind all that occurred in evolution.
I haven’t seen him go as far as I would want him to. He really ought to say that there’s nothing in Behe-style arguments that conflicts with evolution and that it’s not an argument against evolution but an argument against the undirected view of God’s control of human origins. It’s a final cause argument rather than the efficient cause argument almost all ID opponents pretend it is.
I’m waiting for a theistic evolutionist to make that point, and I don’t care one way or the other whether they think the arguments are any good (I don’t think myself that they’re convincing, partly because I don’t know enough science to evaluate the major premise). I just want theistic evolutionists and atheists alike to recognize that there’s pretty much nothing in ID that conflicts with evolution unless you build into evolution the unscientific and theological claim that God doesn’t direct evolution, and anyone teaching that is teaching religion in a much more explicit way than ID proponents are.
Excellent points. Jeremy.
Very much my take on the situation as well.