Saturday, February 06, 2021

My opinion on two controversies within Christianity

There are two controversies I've been mulling over for a long time now, and I thought I'd stick my neck out and express an opinion. I could be persuaded otherwise, so feel free to weigh in in the comment section.

The two issues are evolution and the Licona/McGrew disagreement on the genre of the gospels and harmonization vs. literary devices.

EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN

A little autobiography first

First, let me talk about evolution. I grew up believing in evolution. It's what I was taught in school, and nobody (including my dad and my grandmother who raised me) ever told me any different. I read Genesis at an early age and believed for a time that the earth was young and that God created Adam and Eve directly. When I got into middle school and learned about evolution, I remember goign home and writing a fictional story that attempted to reconcile the two views. In my story, Adam and Eve were part of a tribe of humans, but at some point, God made first contact with humankind through Adam and Eve. He separated them from the rest of humanity. I don't remember if I had the rest of humanity die off or what because I never finished the story.

I assumed evolution was true right up until my late 20's or early 30's. I was never even exposed to an alternative view until I got interested in apologetics. There were a handful of Christian apologists I followed who subscribed to intelligent design and seemed to deny evolution. Greg Koukl was one of them. I remember it made me very uncomfortable because I respected these people, but I thought their rejection of evolution was kooky. It was a bit of a scandal in my mind.

The first thing I actually read on intelligent design was Lee Strobel's book, The Case For A Creator. I didn't know what to think at the time. When I was in high school, I took physical science in the 9th grade, which was a precursor to chemistry and physics. Then in the 10th grade, I took geology and astronomy (one semester each). I took Chemistry I in the 11th grade and physics in the 12th grade. So I had no education in biology other than the 7th grade. So I didn't really have the background education to be able to tell whether the arguments for intelligent design were good arguments or not. They seemed reasonable, but that's about it.

In my internet discussions, I noticed quickly that just about everybody who was critical of intelligent design (which was practially everybody) didn't bother to understand it. I was constantly correcting misconceptions, even though I wasn't completely sold on ID myself.

For a while, I put the whole thing on the back burner because the amount of reading I'd have to do to bring myself up to speed on biology so that I could have an informed opinion was overwhelming. But eventually, I decided to give it a go. The first book I read was Vital Dust by Christian DeDuve, which was a mistake. That book was way over my head, and it left me discouraged, and I quit again.

But I did continue to be exposed to ID because of the circles I was running around in and the people I read. As my understanding of ID developed, I began to get the impression that ID was not necessarliy inconsistent with evolution. ID wasn't a very specific point of view. It only said that all the life we see around us couldn't have come to be completely on its own. An intelligent designer had to have been involved. But that is extremely vague since it doesn't postulate any sort of mechanism for how biological diversity came about. It was consistent both with theistic evolution and with special creation.

At some point, I decided to take another crack at tackling the subject. A friend let me borrow a copy of National Geographic that had a long article arguing for evolution. I figured it would be a good thing for me to read since it was aimed at a popular audience. I thought I would read it with an open mind, and try to do so carefully, and to blog on it with my impressions. Some of you reading this may recall those blog entries. After posting them, somebody came along and criticized some of the stuff I said, and it embarrassed me because it exposed just how little I knew and understood. So I deleted those posts.

The first thing I read that really got through to me and made me feel like I was starting to understand things was Signature In the Cell by Stephen Meyer. Since then I've read a lot of other stuff, and I've watched a bunch of YouTube videos on genetics and evolution and related things, and I think I have a much better understanding of biology than I had before. Just ten or fifteen years ago, I couldn't even explain how DNA and chromosomes were related. I remember being confused about that.

I'll leave it there as far as autobiography is concerned and just tell you what my position is and why I hold it. I believe in evolution. I believe in common descent and that probably all life on earth is related.

Why I believe in evolution

One of the strongest arguments against this view I've heard is the mathemetical improbability of getting a functional protein through purely natural processes. Paul Scott Pruett, who has the Pensees blog I have linked to on the right over there, made a post about it one time. But I also saw a video on YouTube that included Richard Dawkins in conversation with some other people about the mathematical obstacles to evolution, so it wasn't something cooked up by Christian apologists. It was a real problem.

The math is hard to dispute, but I do have serious reservations about the reasoning. In the reasoning, we try to calculate the probability of getting just one functional protein given a generous set of probablistic resources. It turns out to be highly improbable even given billions of years and trillions and trillions of chances. There are a handful of objections one might raise, but the biggest one in mind is the fact that any protein can be functional provided it's in an environment where it has a job to do. By specifying a specific protein, the argument makes it seem more improbable than it really is. Of course any specific protein is goiing to be wildly improbable, but the probablity that a bunch of random proteins would emerge in which they interact with each other in particular ways isn't nearly as improbable.

But life may still be extremely rare in the universe. That is what I suspect. It's how I answer the Fermi Paradox.

Whether we could have gotten a wide variety of life on earth without God intervening at various points to insert new genetic information or something like that, I don't know. I suspect it could have. But whether we would've gotten the particular life we have now, especially human life, without divine intervention, I seriously doubt. But it isn't for scientific reasons that I doubt it. It's for theological reasons. I think God had a sovereign plan, and I think humans are created in the image of God. So God must've had a purpose in things turning out the specific way that they did, and he must've intervened in some way to bring it about. This could've been anything as subtle as tweaking the environment in such a way that natural selection would make the selections that God wanted it to make. I don't know.

The argument in Signature In the Cell is that the only source of information we know of is intelligent minds, and since DNA contains a great deal of information, the most reasonable conclusion is that the source of the information in DNA is an intelligent mind. I think that's a reasonable argument, but it's also a little question-begging. If the issue under dispute is whether nature alone could've produced information in DNA, then to merely assert that information only comes from intelligent minds is to beg the question.

I just realized I accused Meyers of circular reasoning while saying his conclusion is reasonable. I don't mean to say circular reasoning is reasonable. Let me explain. What I mean is that it's reasonable to think a particular instance of information originated with a mind if minds are the only thing you know of capable of producing information. But if you are disputing with somebody over whether or not nature is capable of producing information, then to merely assert that minds are the only things that can produce information is to beg the question. I hope that's clear.

Anywho, while a lot of information can be cited in defense of evolution, let me explain briefly what most convinces me of common descent (and therefore, evolution). This is a little difficult to explain, so bear with me. All humans have the same set of genes. These genes code for proteins. Proteins are composed of strings of different kinds of amino acids in specific sequences. Those specific sequences cause the proteins to fold into specific shapes capable of performing specific jobs. So if you change the order of the amino acids or have longer or shorter strands, then you get a different shape. To use an analogy, you might get a nut, or a bolt, or a bracket, or a spring.

But within those strands of amino acids, it is possible to have slight variations. Some amino acids can be replaced by other amino acids without affecting the shape or function the protein at all. Others cause minor differences. That's why you have short people, tall people, white people, black people, and all kinds of variation between members of our species.

Given these differences, it's possible to look at the same genes in different people, and determine how they are related to each other. It works just like textual criticism. You can break texts up into families and groups (e.g. the Bysantine Text type and the Alexandrian text type) based on their similarites and differences. You could, conceivably, create a family tree just by looking at variations between people's genes.

Well, it turns out that we share a lot of our genes (and proteins) with other species. And just as you can apply textual criticism to arrange individual humans in a family tree, so also can you apply textual criticism to arrange members of different species into a family tree. I explained this in a bit more detail when I reviewed The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. To me, this is compelling evidence for common descent, and therefore for evolution.

My position can probably best be described as theistic evolution. I think evolution happened, but I also think God was involved somehow. I don't make any claims about how God was involved except for speculations.

The subject of the origin of life is distinct from evolution. We know more about evolution than we do about the origin of life. The difficulty scientists have had in coming up with a chemical pathway from simple organic compounds to single celled organisms leads me to believe that whatever happened, it must've been a rare and improbable sort of thing. It's hard to say how improbable, but I suspect it was so extremely improbable the life is rare in the universe. I subscribe to what some people call the "rare earth hypothesis," which is an answer to the Fermi Paradox. It may be that the origin of life was so improbable that we are the only example of life in the universe. It could still have happened by chance, but it would seem more likely that it happened by design. I think God did create life on earth. Whether it could have happened on its own, I don't know. It is primarily for theological reasons, not scientific reasons, that I think it happened by the hand of God. But the scientific and mathematical reasons add some weight to it.

LICONA VS MCGREW

I won't go into as much detail here. I'll just say that I mostly side with Licona. Licona argues that the gospels fall under the genre of ancient biography. Prior to the 1970's, there was a lot of disagreement and speculation over the genre of the gospels. But then Richard Burridge published a book called What Are the Gospels?, and this seems to have changed everything. Now, most scholars have come around to believing the gospels are ancient (or Greco-Roman) biographies. And that is the view I now hold, too.

Licona thinks it is a mistake to try to harmonize the gospels because the differences in the gospels are better attributed to the authors using the conventions of ancient biographies. I think there are undoubtedly differences in the gospels, and that these differences can be attributed to certain techniques, like simplifying stories or spotlighting and things like that. We actually do those sorts of things in our daily lives. For example, when you play phone tag with somebody before finally getting in touch with them, and you talk about it later on, you don't go into the details of how you called them, and they called you, etc. You might on one occasion say, "I called Jim and told him. . .," and you might on another occasion say, "Jim called me, and I told him. . ." When Jesus healed Jairus' daughter, either Jairus came to Jesus himself, or he did not. So if you take the gospels at face value, there's a contradiction. But this is clearly just an example of simplifying a story.

Lydia McGrew critizes Licona on the basis that she thinks all these differences can be harmonized. You don't need to resort to "literary device" when a harmonization is easy to come by. I think Lydia makes some good points in her critism of Licona. In general, harmonization is also something we do in our day to day lives. If you're reading something, and a person seems to contradict themselves, the automatic reaction is to assume you have some misunderstanding, and you attempt to make sense of both statements by harmonizing them. And there are situations in the gospels in which it seems like a difference is better harmonized than chalked up to literary device.

So I agree and disagree with both of them. I think Licona is right that the gospels are ancient biographies, and that the authors used literary devices that account for a lot of the differences. But I agree with McGrew that Licona sometimes misidentifies differences as being the result of literary devices when they should be harmonized instead. I think Lydia goes to far in arguing as if every difference can be harmonized and none of the difference are the result of literary devices.

Ironically, I don't think McGrew is an innerrantist, but Licona is. Licona has gotten a lot of criticism on the basis that his views undermine inerrancy. I think these criticism are ill-conceived, but understandable. I consider myself an inerrantist, but you have to understand inerrancy in light of genre. For example, I don't think Job is an historical account. I think it's fiction. Or more precisely, it's wisdom literature. But identifying the genre as fiction or wisdom literature is not the same thing as saying it contains mistakes. It's only a mistake if it intends to record history but fails to do so. You have to apply inerrancy in light of genre. If the gospels are ancient biographies, and if it is part of the convention of ancient biography to use literary devices, then the presence of literary devices should not undermine inerrancy.

6 comments:

Paul said...

Sam, old friend, if you don't mind, I'd like to respond to some of your defenses of evolution.

You said: "any protein can be functional provided it's in an environment where it has a job to do."

As you mention later, proteins are folded chains of amino acids. The ability to neatly fold into either a desirable structure, and/or that has your active region arranged just where it is need, is not a simple trick. Douglas Axe has done work to attempt to quantify the odds of getting even a folded protein of any kind to be as low as 1 chance in 10^77. https://intelligentdesignscience.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/estimating-the-prevalence-of-protein-sequences.pdf

Also, as I mention in my probability critique, there are many proteins that could be said to have arrived at a target arrangement. For one, not just any protein (even functional) is helpful in all contexts. If you are a flier, climber, runner, swimmer, or a cold vs warm climate species, then you want things that aid in your relevant niches. Also, some particular solutions have been found to be repeated in nature. They call this convergent evolution. At the macro scale, the human and squid have similar eyes, but at the micro scale you can also find examples within genes. One more way is that almost every functional system in the cell involves multiple genes to do its work. These have to arise in such a way that they are structurally and/or functionally complementary to the other proteins in the system.

You said: "Of course any specific protein is going to be wildly improbable, but the probability that a bunch of random proteins would emerge in which they interact with each other in particular ways isn't nearly as improbable."

I'm not sure how multiple parts that make up an ensemble is more probable to arise by chance than a solo act.

You said: "If the issue under dispute is whether nature alone could've produced information in DNA, then to merely assert that information only comes from intelligent minds is to beg the question."

Meyer doesn't just assert it; he starts by showing that purely natural processes are not adequate to the task of producing what is being attributed to it. He then goes on to point out that intelligent minds have been observed to produce information, and it is thus a viable explanation. If naturalistic evolution could be demonstrated to produce novel information, then, of course, his thesis would fail.

Paul said...

Continued...

You said: "Well, it turns out that we share a lot of our genes (and proteins) with other species. And just as you can apply textual criticism to arrange individual humans in a family tree, so also can you apply textual criticism to arrange members of different species into a family tree."

This is true, and it is indeed strong circumstantial evidence for something common about them. (The question of common designer or common descent aside.) However, it is not so tidy a thing. When you look deeper, you can find that you get different relationships when looking at different genes, or you can see differing rates of genetic drift. Also, in most every species you can find many genes that are unique to that species or narrow clade group. These genes are called "orphan" and seemingly have no evolutionary predecessors. Most seem to have arisen in that species de novo, and are quite important to the species.

Evolutionary biologists (and their evangelists) are constantly surprised to discover things like this. I have watched their reactions to them over the decades, and the end result is that it does nothing to shake their confidence in the theory. It only increases their confidence in the power of random chance, or the mystical ability for life to "adapt."

I believe there is circumstantial evidence for evolution, and certainly common descent of some sort, but I contrast this with those things I find to be fatal flaws in the theory. One of the biggest of those is the problem of coming up with all the necessary new information in the cell if you want to build new body plans, which presumably happened on myriad occasions. Missing from the defense of evolution is an adequate explanation for how this occurs, in spite of what I can envision to be experiments that could theoretically confirm it. One of the books that best drove the point home for me was this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Evolution-Search-Limits-Darwinism-ebook/dp/B000RG1OF2
I found its discussion on Malaria quite interesting, in that we know approximately how long any given treatment will work in an affected area because of the amount of time it takes for the Malaria organisms to overcome the probabilistic resources to develop the simplest solution to resistance. This kind of example gives us insights into the power (or lack thereof) of mutation and chance as it relates to some of the problems that must be overcome in genes.

Paul said...

I follow Fazale (Fuz) Rana on Facebook. This morning he had a couple links to articles talking about the fine tuning of Protein-Protein Interactions (PPI). As mentioned, proteins often work in assemblies, or even if not, they at least interact with other molecules. You don't want them interacting with the wrong things, but the cell is actually packed full of molecules and proteins. There is great potential for PPIs to be promiscuous if they are not fine tuned to resist such interactions except with their intended targets. Randomly evolving genes that throw proteins at the wall to see what sticks (so to speak) not only waste the cells precious resources, but also greatly risk gumming up the cell's interior with unused refuse or which bind to (and cripple) functional proteins. Unfolded or partially folded ones are particularly problematic.

Also, here's an older video you may enjoy that's one of my favorites. It shows all the many precise protein machines that are involved in the production of proteins. It is stylized to make the assemblies look like space ships, but they are really not so far off the mark. All the parts and steps seem quite complex, but this doesn't even include all the detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ygpqVr7_xs

Sam Harper said...

Paul, I was hoping you would chime in. I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner. I never got an email telling me that somebody had left a comment. Usually I get an email notification. I just happened to scroll down just now and noticed you had commented.

I could be persuaded that there is some divine cause of new information (like novel genes that suddenly appear out of nowhere), but I don't know enough to say. It seems at least possible that these genes were spliced together from pre-existing things or from viral DNA that made its way in. I remember there are lots of ways new genes can get formed that don't depend on them being built up one amino acid at a time. So it seems to me there's a lot of unknowns, and I'd be cautious jumping to the conclusion that because I didn't know how a gene seemed to suddenly appear that it couldn't have happened by natural causes.

My big thing, though, is the evidence of common decent. Common decent does not rule out God intervening to create new genetic material. So I believe in evolution, and for me, it's an open question what mechanisms were involved. I am kind of skeptical that all life on our planet is the result purely of the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection, but I don't know enough to say for sure where that could have happened or not. I'm just going on my own hunches.

Anywho, thanks for chiming in.

Sam Harper said...

>(The question of common designer or common descent aside.)

Let me say something about this because I meant to mention it in my original post but forgot. A big part of what convinced me of common decent was that when you compare multiple genes shared by two different species, and you try to reconstruct a hypothetical family tree based on those comparisons, each gene will tell the same story. If it were a situation where the common genes were the result of a designer simply reusing parts, we shouldn't expect this. The reason is because we are talking about minor differences that don't affect the resulting protein shape or function.

So let's say, hypothetically, that you've got a dog with proteins, X, Y, an Z, and you've got a human with those same proteins. You look at the X protein in each species, and there are minor differences. If you assume they have a common ancestor, you can estimate how far back it must've gone based on the differences. Then, you look at the Y gene, and you notice it tells the exact same story. And the Z protein does, too. Well, if the X, Y, and Z proteins in both species perform the same function, then it shouldn't have mattered which sequence God put in each species. God could've switched them and accomplished the same thing. If he did, you'd get a different story when comparing the X than you would the Y.

I'm not saying it's impossible that God could've used certain sequences and made it look like we have multiple lines of transmission that all reveal the same story about common descent even if there wasn't common descent. But it seems unlikely that he would do that if it didn't matter. If the exact sequence doesn't matter, as far as function is concerned, then I would expect God's choice to use certain variations to be arbitrary, and if you look at multiple proteins in two or three different species, they'd each tell different stories if you assumed common descent.

The fact that multiple proteins shared between different species all tell the same story when you assume common descent can be explained in one of three ways: (1) God just happened to choose them in such a way as to tell the same story even though there was no need for that and even though he knew it would lead people to the wrong conclusion, or (2) it's a huge coincidence that they all tell the same story, or (3) there is common descent. Of those three, the third one strikes me as being the most likely.

Paul said...

You said: "I remember there are lots of ways new genes can get formed that don't depend on them being built up one amino acid at a time."

The theories on how new genes are formed usually begin with how we get workspace in the DNA for their purposes (e.g., gene duplication). This is like asking the question: how do you add a new page into a notebook already filled with text? What is not adequately answered is how you get beneficial, functional instructions on that "page" which would be preserved from further random mutations. I see a lot of handwaving there.

You said: "when you compare multiple genes shared by two different species, and you try to reconstruct a hypothetical family tree based on those comparisons, each gene will tell the same story."

It is true that many genes might support a similar taxonomy, but it is not true across all genes. It is very common to see phylogenetic conflicts when looking across a sampling of genes. In fact, the concept of the "tree of life" is being replaced by the idea of a "web." In microbial life, they tend to answer this problem by way of lateral gene transfer, but that solution is more problematic in higher-order animals. Additionally, as I mentioned, most species consist of a number of orphan genes which have no analog in any of the neighboring taxonomic groups. These genes tend to be important to the unique character of the species, and, so, those genes common to other species necessarily represent common instructional material.

That being said, there is enough support for common descent that there are some ID proponents who accept it, but it is not as clean and straightforward as evolutionists had hoped. How design played out is an interesting question, which I think the continued, metaphysically open-minded, study of biology might hope to trace. I personally do not think it would be out of the question for the Designer to take existing creatures, or design templates, tweak them, and insert new information as needed. In fact, when Genesis talks of God creating from the dust of the earth, this seems to suggest making man from existing material, rather than ex nihilo as He did in the case of the universe itself.