Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
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Here in the northern hemisphere, summer has at last arrived, and Jan and I are enjoying our early morning swims in the community pool!
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During June I recorded the second installment of my dialogue with the agnostic philosopher Michael Ruse on “Why Believe in God?” for the Bryan Callen podcast. We talked about several arguments for God’s existence, and my overall impression was that Ruse’s scepticism is rooted, not so much in philosophical arguments, but in his childhood Quakerism, which makes him averse to arguments for God’s existence as opposed to a mystical, non-cognitive approach to God and religion. He really had no good objections to the arguments I shared but is just emotionally repelled by a rational approach to God. I emphasized that the rational and experiential approaches to God are not mutually exclusive, so that we can and, indeed, should have both.
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After talking about cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence, I was so glad that Bryan Callen chose to close out the podcast with the moral argument for God’s existence. This argument exposed just how deeply conflicted Ruse is. On the one hand, he says, “The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says 2+2 = 5,” a statement that places certain moral truths on the same level as elementary mathematical truths. On the other hand, when pressed, Ruse collapses back into moral subjectivism and anti-realism, treating moral beliefs as nothing more than illusions that have been ingrained into us by biological evolution and social conditioning. It was so interesting for me to see how repulsed Bryan Callen was by this nihilistic worldview. He said, “I don’t want to live in a world like that!” Together with the first installment that we did on Christian claims about Jesus and his resurrection, these two podcasts make a powerful case for Christian theism.
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Kevin Harris and I also recorded three very substantive Reasonable Faith podcasts on the recent debate between Prof. James Tour and David Farina on the subject “Are We Clueless about the Origin of Life?” This acrimonious debate was more like a cock fight than a debate! Farina behaved shamefully and unprofessionally by focusing almost entirely on personal attacks upon Tour’s integrity and faith. I chose to analyze the debate using the rubric from Aristotle’s Rhetoric: there are three aspects of any speaking situation: the logos (the intellectual content of the speech), the ethos (the personal character of the speaker), and the pathos (the speaker’s connection with his audience). We listened to and then commented on clips from each speaker in the debate to evaluate each of these three aspects. I think that our discussion will prove to be very helpful for those trying to understand and assess this debate, as well as to those who may find themselves involved in a debate situation.
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Later in the month I did an interview with Cameron Bertuzzi for a documentary that he is filming on the historical credibility of Jesus’ resurrection. Since I have not had the opportunity to talk about this subject much in recent years, I really enjoyed reviewing the evidence for the fundamental facts undergirding the inference to Jesus’ resurrection. I hope that my remarks on the multiple, independent sources behind the New Testament will be helpful for Cameron’s film.
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This past month I corrected and returned the copy-edited typescript for Peter van Inwagen and my forthcoming book Do Numbers Exist? with Routledge. The book is in the format of a debate, and I’ll be very interested to hear people’s reactions to our discussion of van Inwagen’s Platonism versus my anti-Platonism. Routledge lists the following key features in the book's description:
- Showcases the presentation and defense of two points of view on the existence of abstract objects, from two of the world’s leading philosophers
- Presents definitions in an easily accessible form
- Provides frequent summaries of previously covered material
- Includes a glossary of all specialized vocabulary
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I am finally wrapping up my discussion of “The Evolution of Life” for my section on Doctrine of Creation in my projected systematic philosophical theology. Because of the breadth of this subject, it has been one of the most difficult topics I have yet addressed in my projected work.
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I think one of the most important take-aways for laymen from my study of this subject is the realization that the theory of biological evolution has itself evolved. If we leave aside the theories of Charles Darwin’s predecessors, there are three major stages in evolutionary theory:
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Stage I: Darwinism. This was Darwin’s original theory of evolution laid out in his book On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s theory of evolution comprised two fundamental theses: (i) descent with modification of all living organisms from one or a few common ancestors, and (ii) natural selection as the explanatory mechanism for evolutionary change. Darwin’s theory was dead almost upon arrival. While his thesis of common ancestry quickly won the day, for seventy years following the publication of Origin of Species Darwin’s second thesis was widely regarded as explanatorily deficient. Ignorant of Mendel’s genetics, Darwin could provide no account of the sources of the variability of hereditary traits nor how such traits were inherited. It has been justifiably quipped that Darwin’s theory explained the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.
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Stage II: The Modern Synthesis. Formulated during the 1930s and 40s, the Modern Synthesis represented the marriage of Darwin’s natural selection and Mendel’s genetics. Its chief contribution was the thesis that hereditary variability arises by random genetic mutations, which, when acted upon by natural selection, can be the source of new and advantageous traits over time. It thereby supplemented Darwin’s theory with a genetic explanation of the source of heritable variations. On this theory new species originated by rather small steps that accumulated over many generations. This theory, sometimes called “Neo-Darwinism,” rapidly became orthodoxy among evolutionary biologists and prevailed almost till the close of the twentieth century.
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Stage III: The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Proponents of this theory indict the Modern Synthesis for its myopic focus on genetic inheritance as the source of evolutionary change. They contend that new data from adjacent fields such as developmental biology, genomics, epigenetics, ecology, and social science now demand a wider theory. The following diagram illustrates the relation between the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the Modern Synthesis, and Darwin’s theory:
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The fact is that the Modern Synthesis did not really offer much by way of explanation of the causes of how organisms change over time. The Modern Synthesis postulated correlations between an organism’s genotype (its genetic makeup) and its phenotype (its observable traits) but not causal mechanisms connecting them. As a result, the Modern Synthesis treated all mechanistic aspects of evolutionary change as a “black-box” and so was unable to explain how organismal change is actualized.
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According to Pigliucci and Müller, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis thus prompts several reforms to the Modern Synthesis:
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- First is gradualism. Because the Modern Synthesis assumed that evolutionary change proceeds via incremental genetic variation, all non-gradualist forms of evolutionary change were excluded. But various new approaches show that non-gradual change is a property of evolutionary processes.
- Second is externalism. Under the Modern Synthesis the direction of the evolutionary process results exclusively from natural selection. In the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, organisms themselves are determinants of selectable variation and innovation. Thus, in sharp contrast to claims of the Modern Synthesis, mutations may not be random but actually biased toward the benefit of the host organism in which they occur.
- Third is “gene-centrism.” The Modern Synthesis’ focus on the gene as the sole agent of variation and unit of inheritance suppressed all calls for more comprehensive attitudes. In the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, extra-genetic (epigenetic) influences on developing embryos is increasingly emphasized, in contrast to genetic mutations.
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Creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design have long complained about the explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis but were uniformly ignored, probably because they were able only to poke holes in the theory without offering a credible alternative. J. B. S. Haldane once remarked that “Theories pass through four stages of acceptance: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I have always said so.” Today contemporary textbooks already incorporate many of the new insights of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis without noting the explanatory deficiencies of the Modern Synthesis thereby exposed.
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It should not be thought that with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the evolution of the theory of evolution has come to an end, and we can breathe a sigh of relief that all is well. No, while the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis served to expose explanatory weaknesses in the heretofore prevailing evolutionary paradigm and so to open new avenues of research, many of the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis remain unproven, poorly understood, and controversial, so that the quest for a final theory must continue. The evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin observes that what follows in a “post-Modern” era is not a post-Modern Synthesis but a post-Modern state “characterized by a pluralism of processes and patterns in evolution that defies any straightforward generalization.” He opines that whether the directions currently being pursued in post-Modern research “can be combined in a new evolutionary synthesis in the foreseeable future, is too early to tell. I will venture one confident prediction, though: those celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Origin will see a vastly different landscape of evolutionary biology.”
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This month I’m looking forward to recording more videos with the Zangmeister for our series on the attributes of God. Meanwhile, I’ll keep working on finishing the locus Doctrine of Creation by writing on the doctrine of Providence.
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For Christ and His Kingdom,
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Dear members of the reasonable faith team,
I am writing you this email on behalf of my fiancé Konstantinos. He is one of Dr Craig's biggest fans!
A few years ago Kostas struggled a lot with his faith. He felt as if believing in God wasn't aligning with his rational way of thinking. He became an agnostic and all through a period of two years he was constantly watching every possible debate between Christians and atheists.
There he came across Dr Craig's work. In him he found an incredibly rational person who was also a Christian, a thing that Kostas thought to be impossible! From that moment and on Kostas has seen each and every video of Dr Craig, he has read many of his books and is now following the online lessons in your website. I honestly believe that through Dr Craig God spoke to Kostas and he came back to Him! He is now a devoted Christian!
I want to deeply thank Dr Craig for what he has done for my fiancé ! It has really changed our lives!
Blessings from Greece!
Yours sincerely,
Effrosyni
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