Confessing Evangelical

In my previous post I mentioned Nick Matzke's extended dissection of Jonathan Wells's book Icons of Evolution, Icons of Obfuscation. I don't know what Matzke's religious affiliation is, but he is clearly some way removed from the "evolution = atheism" position of someone like Richard Dawkins - or, for that matter, Ken Ham. (Dawkins and Ham are like antiparticles of one another, working on basically the same logic but drawing opposite conclusions. And, like antiparticles, it would be best not to be around should they ever meet...)

As Matzke comments (in the section on Wells's chapter on fossil horses) that what really seems to motivate Wells is the belief that evolutionary biology's emphasis on the "random" and "undirected" nature of evolution undermine the Christian doctrine of divine creation. Matzke continues:

Two points should be made about the words like "random" and "undirected," which Wells digs out of several textbooks (as if the purpose of a science textbook is to be a philosophical treatise suitable for word-by-word analysis for conceivably debatable points).

In response to this, Matzke comes out with an interesting analogy with another area of science:

Readers should ask themselves: is the weather "random" and "undirected", or not?

• If yes, according to Wells you are subscribing to "materialistic philosophy in the guise of empirical science" and we should expect Wells to write his next book about the dogmatic materialism of meteorologists (and statisticians, etc.).
  


• If you think that Wells may be overreacting a wee bit to the implications of such words (perhaps because of the provocation provided by certain campaigners for atheism such as Dawkins, who is an excellent zoologist but who should do a better job of keeping his metaphysics separate from his science), then join the club, and consider the possibility that evolution is "random" and "undirected" in the very same way that the weather is considered "random" and "undirected."

In the conclusion to his article, Matzke revisits this analogy:

But is it really necessary to force theology into science? As we saw in the fossil horses chapter, Wells imputes far more metaphysical significance to words such as "random" and "undirected" than they actually have scientifically. Scientifically, evolution is described as "random" and "undirected" in the same way that the weather, earthquakes, and numerous other natural processes are described as "random" and "undirected." (For that matter, evolution is also predictable in a way similar to weather and earthquakes.) Does describing the weather, or evolution, as somewhat "random" really have the offensive metaphysical implications that Wells thinks?

As an alternative to Wells's position, Matzke offers a quotation from the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, whose statement "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" Wells decries, without mentioning that Dobzhansky was in fact "a lifelong Russian Orthodox Christian". Indeed, the very same article by Dobzhansky from which that quote is taken includes the following statement:

"It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutual exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's, method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 B.C.; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.

"Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy; the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."

I'd be particularly interested to hear what others think of Matzke's comparison of "random and undirected" evolution with "random and undirected" weather. It is certainly the case that the biblical teaching (and Christian conviction) that God is in ultimate control of the weather has not been particularly shaken by the fact that meteorologists have found there to be considerable explanatory and predictive value in treating the weather as random and undirected.