The Khan Academy Promotes Theological Naturalism

A friend pointed out that over at the Khan Academy, Salman Khan, while assuring his students he is not taking sides, seems to have been channeling such luminaries as John Ray and Alfred Wallace as he informs them that god would never design or create the particulars of this world. Khan—who has four degrees from MIT and Harvard and is certain that evolution and its natural selection created the entire biological world—assures the viewer that “You can ask any engineer” and they will tell you that simple laws underlying a complex design, as exemplified by the Mandelbrot set, is the better way. Of course non of this comes directly from Ray or Wallace—what this illustrates is not a homologous doctrine, but rather the independent origin and persistence of theological traditions. The infra dignatatum argument appears and reappears in the history of thought not because it derives from a single teacher, but because we like it. Here then, we present the 21st century’s version of this age-old tradition within theological naturalism:

[4:19] A belief in god would not point to a god who—a belief in a universal, all-powerful god, would not point to a god who designs the particular—who designs each particular. And even more, the imperfections we see around us—and especially because we see variation and they’re being selected for—we can’t just focus on the eye, we’d have to focus on viruses and cancers and it would have to speak to a god who is designing one-off every version of every sequence of DNA. Because if someone talks about designing the eye, we know the eye is the by product of DNA, and we know that DNA is a sequence of base pairs, ATGCA, billions and billions of them, and so when we talk about design, we would be talking literally about designing the sequence, and we even know there is some noise in there, that comes from primitive viruses in there deep in our past. So the argument I’m making here is that in order to give credit to the all-powerful, at least to my mind, a system that comes from very simple, elegant and basic ideas—like natural selection and variations; in our DNA we call those mutations, but the laws of physics and chemistry, from those simple and elegant and basic ideas, for complexity to emerge. …

This speaks to a higher form of design, this speaks to a more profound design. …

This idea of the laws of physics and chemistry and natural selection … This is a very profound design, and it speaks to the art of the designer. As opposed to designing each of these entities, one off. And what is even more profound about the design is that it is adaptive. If there is environmental stress, then the other variations survive more frequently. … That to me is a better design.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

NT Wright Articulates Evolution's History of Thought

It is refreshing to see a leading thinker articulate the simple fact that evolution did not begin in 1859 and Darwin was not an intellectual revolutionary who single-handedly illuminated a new truth. In fact, the evolutionary foundation and framework was already in place. As N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, points out, the religious influences and environment which Darwin worked within were crucial, and that there was an "entire worldview already up and running" before Darwin came along.

Darwin, Wright suggests, "was as much a symptom as a cause of the deism or epicureanism which then came to be associated with him." If you're an epicurean, Wright explains, then while there may be god or gods somewhere, they are a long way away and the key is that "this world has its own processes which are rumbling along, and so evolution is basically an epicurean idea--read Lucretius."


As a rationalist program, evolution tends to use its own axioms to judge all ideas. For example, design must be false because organisms are not optimally fit (a key evolutionary concept). This parochial tendency is common, and Wright points out how it works in the infra dignatatum argument:

Once god gets pushed out of the process, then of course what happens must happen from within rather than from outside. Then you can caricature the idea of divine intervention. Because if you're a deist or an epicurean you've got this distant god, who if he's going to do anything in the world would have to reach down and rather incongruously mess around, and then go away again.

And since this sort of dabbling was beneath god's dignity, naturalistic explanations were required. This was the infra dignatatum argument used by the early botanist John Ray and others more than a century before Darwin.

But the history of thought behind evolution is fairly complex, and Wright does not venture into all its depths. For instance, Kant's opposition to the renewed interest in epicureanism in modern times was, ironically, one of the factors that motivated him to call for a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. Beyond this, there were in fact a dozen or more metaphysical concerns that converged on naturalism as a requirement for any theory of origins. But Wright cogently articulates the big picture, and continues with this explanation of why Darwin's theory was so happily accepted:

This is why Darwin gets all the mileage that he does--because it is where people wanted to go. God can't tell us how to run the world, we'll run it our own way and then religion will be an escape from the world. ... The reason why people wanted to believe that stuff was not because they said "Oh my goodness, he's discovered some very interesting finches, this means we can't believe in Genesis anymore." ... I'm perfectly happy to say that species have evolved; I'm perfectly happy to say that that's how God was at work, and maybe is at work.

Indeed, there is nothing wrong with evolution, per se. After all, the species came about somehow, perhaps they evolved, somehow, some way. The idea is scientifically challenged and religiously motivated, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. But the idea that evolution might be true is not what Darwin and his followers are pondering. For them, evolution is mandated. It is a fact, and there is a world of difference.

What Wright comes ever so close to exposing, but does not seem to understand, is that the cultural mandate was not merely crucial in the motivation of Darwin's theory, but also in its justification. In other words, it is not as though there were these cultural-religious forcing functions, but then serendipitously the idea turned out to be a fact by virtue of compelling scientific evidence. No, the scientific evidence is interpreted according to our cultural-religious template. Theology is still queen of the sciences.

All those evolutionists who think they are free of religious influence, according to some great new "Enlightenment," are living a lie. They are the most dangerous of all, for their delusion of objectivity underwrites their self righteous indignation and vitriol. Religion drives science, and it matters.