Okeanos Explorer Searches The Deep Sea

What Will They Find Next?

There is a reason why explorers have always gone forth—they are rewarded. And so not surprisingly there have been many rewards for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Okeanos Explorer which is exploring the ocean floor, several miles beneath the surface, near the Marianas Trench. In this far away land the mission has found all manner of strange life forms never before seen. You can watch the video live and, as one report put it, “The video makes for strangely addicting viewing. There's a constant cliffhanger: What will they find next?”

What they have found is an array of incredible, and lowly (pun intended), creatures. Surely Ralph Cudworth and John Ray would have, by this point, doubled down on their infra-dignitatem argument that such creatures are beneath the Creator’s dignity. There must have been an intermediate creative force to account for the muck and its inhabitants, not to mention those bungles and errors we find in creation.

Isn't it amazing what those random mutations will come up with? (And no, natural selection doesn’t help).

Metaphysics From John Ray to Nima Arkani-Hamed

An Ad Hoc, Capricious Creation

When John Ray refused to conform to the 1662 Act of Uniformity—aimed mainly at the Puritans—and so was forced to leave his position at Cambridge University, he roamed Europe for three years doing what he loved: observing nature. Ray and his companions were in for a surprise: unfathomable diversity. They found thousands of different kinds of insects, animals and plants. Every place had a different flora and fauna, and with different interactions. Life did not seem to follow the kind of compact formulas Isaac Newton was discovering for the new physics. With the overthrow of Aristotelianism, physics was becoming more parsimonious in line with Occam’s Razor. But biology was headed in the opposite direction. Were all these organic life forms and their detailed life histories really necessary? Ralph Cudworth had warned that the immense details of the world, while refuting Descartes’ rejection of final causes, were surely beneath the sovereign Creator’s dignity, and Ray’s three-year tour upped the ante. The Infra Dignitatem argument for a less hands-on creation story was born. There must have been something between the majestic Creator and this ad hoc, capricious, gritty creation. Like the Gnostics, the Aristotle of England, who would also become the father of natural theology, called for a separation between the Creator and the world.

The ancient Greeks described the cosmos as a set of concentric spheres that rotated and rubbed against each other producing harmonious tones. We have always wanted a simple, beautiful world. Certainly that is what God would have wanted too. But nature has not lived up to our expectations.

In fact ever since Newton, physics has been backsliding and becoming increasingly complex. All this was well explained in a Quanta magazine article from last week about leading physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed:

in recent years one question about the universe has come to preoccupy him, along with the field as a whole. Particle physicists seek to know whether the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, “natural,” as they say, locking together into a sensible pattern, or whether the universe is extremely unnatural, a peculiar permutation among countless other, more mundane possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allow life to arise. A natural universe is, in principle, a knowable one. But if the universe is unnatural and fine-tuned for life, the lucky outcome of a cosmic roulette wheel, then it stands to reason that a vast and diverse “multiverse” of universes must exist beyond our reach — the lifeless products of less serendipitous spins. This multiverse renders our universe impossible to fully understand on its own terms. As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead.

Like Ray’s seventeenth century findings about biology, today’s physicists are finding what seems to be a capricious creation. There is no natural explanation as the world seems to consist of a long list of ad hoc, randomly selected designs. One thing they know for sure: no creator would have done this. It must have arisen by chance.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Solution to Pop Quiz: Who Believes and Promotes the Fixity of Species Belief?

Like punctuated equilibrium, Ernst Mayr occasionally sprinkled his work with unintended bits of brilliance. In one spurt, he once told Michael Ruse that “People forget that it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief.” Indeed, atheists say they are not religious because, after all, they don’t believe in god, and creationists say atheists are religious because, after all, believing in evolution requires faith. But both are wrong.

When atheist PZ Myers says he doesn’t think god would have created this universe or atheist Richard Dawkins says our eye’s backward photocells would never have been designed, they are expressing non scientific, religious beliefs. There is no scientific experiment that demonstrates Myers’ or Dawkins’ convictions. These atheists are “intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief” in god.

This oft-heard argument that god doesn’t exist because god wouldn’t have created this world is not an argument from atheism. The conclusion is atheism, but the argument is from theism. Ironically, not believing in god usually entails beliefs about god.

Who believes in the fixity of species?

How does this apply to the fixity of species? The fixity of species refers to the religious belief that if god created the species they would be fixed. Populations would not undergo any kind of biological change under the divine plan. This belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history is often associated with the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus. But Linnaeus soften his views and no longer accepted the fixity of species in his later years.

Linnaeus had tremendous influence, but not enough to rid the world of the doctrine of the fixity of species. And so a century later Darwin inherited the view that if god created the species they would be fixed.

This is why those differing bird populations on the Gallapagoes Islands were so significant for Darwin. Surely god would not stoop so low as to create slightly different variants of birds on some remote islands. The great botanist and natural theologian John Ray had made this argument a century earlier and by Darwin’s time the infra dig (beneath god’s dignity) argument was well entrenched.

But on the other hand, if these differing bird populations were different species, then the species were not fixed. And if the species were not fixed, then god must not have created them, because if god did create them, they would be fixed. Therefore those bird species must have evolved.

So while arguing that the species are not fixed, Darwin also argued they would be fixed if god had created them. God didn’t do it, because here’s how god would do it. As Mayr said, it is possible to be intensely religious even when god is removed from the picture.

The tiny differences between the bird species did not suddenly reveal to Darwin how fish could change to amphibians, or how amphibians could change to reptiles, or how reptiles could change to mammals. Rather, the revelation was that the idea of creation was suddenly becoming untenable. The crucible for Darwin was not an abundance of positive evidence for evolution but rather negative evidence against creation.

This has become even more true today. Darwin had no scientific reason to think that variations between bird populations revealed that all life arose spontaneously. And today the evidence even more so rejects such a move. Even evolutionists agree that the massive biological changes their theory requires must have come about by some unknown mechanisms more powerful than the adaptive mechanisms we observe at work in populations.

But such problems are inconsequential, for evolution has been proven. True we don’t know how macro evolution could have occurred, but we know god did not create the species. As Mayr points out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome in order if the concept of evolution was to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

This is why the species barrier, as fuzzy as it is, has always been so important to evolutionists. They do not believe the species are fixed, but they do believe in the fixity of species.

Today’s evolutionists inherit these religious ideas and replay them over and over. In his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology Mayr writes that “evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation.”

What? Changing gene frequencies make the spontaneous origin of all life a fact? This would be laughable if not understood within its historical context. But such statements do make sense once we understand the historical context of the fixity of species doctrine.

Isaac Asimov claimed that color changes in the peppered moth prove evolution. Steve Jones wrote that the changes observed in HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) contain Darwin’s “entire argument.” According to science writer Jonathan Weiner, the changes in the beaks of birds show us “Darwin’s process in action.”

Likewise Professor Marta Wayne tells us that “Evolution is change in gene frequency” and science writer Emily Willingham defines evolution as “a change in population over time.” Professor Pamela Bjorkman states that a mutating virus is “evolution at work” and that “In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale.”

These statements by evolutionists make no sense from a scientific perspective. Evolutionary thought would be absurd in the absence of its historical context. But it is perfectly logical when we understand the underlying metaphysics. Remember, it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Infra Dig: What Goes Around Comes Around and Why Evolution is a Fact

re•li•gion [ri-lij-uhn], noun: A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the world, especially when considered as the creation of a god or gods.

The view that God should work according to natural laws rather than direct providence has always been attractive to religious believers. These believers prefer a more distant God for many reasons. For instance, is it not obvious that God would not have directly created such an evil world? Instead, God must have created the laws and went away. Like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, God is removed from the evil and not culpable. But there are several other theological traditions that argue just as strongly against divine intervention, and for creation by natural law. One is that the world, especially the lowly things of the world, are beneath God’s dignity.

In the era of modern science the infra dignitatem argument, or infra dig for short, traces at least back to the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century. The idea was that God would not, as the Anglican botanist John Ray put it, “set his own hand as it were to every work, and immediately do all the meanest and trifling’st things himself drudgingly, without making use of any inferior or subordinate Minister.”

The subordinate minister or agent was Plastic Nature which, unlike the Creator, was not infallible or irresistible. Instead, Plastic Nature had to contend with the ineptitude of matter. The results were those “errors and bungles” of nature.

Such gnostic tendencies by no means ceased with the seventeenth century. Indeed, this view seemed to have a divine sanction. After all, to control the world exclusively through natural laws—God’s secondary causes—required an even greater God. In 1794 Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin wrote this Gnostic-sounding vision of how natural history should be viewed:

The world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution by the whole by the Almighty fiat. What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of the great architect! The Cause of Causes! Parent of Parents! Ens Entium! For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves.

A striking example of these gnostic tendencies in Darwin’s time arose when John Millais’ painting Christ in the house of his parents was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850. In the painting, the boy Jesus had injured his hand in his father’s carpentry shop. Mother Mary attended to the boy while Joseph continued with his work. Outside the door sheep patiently awaited their future savior. The scene was both symbolic and realistic, with wood scraps lying all about and workers going about their duties.

But the Victorians emphasized God’s wisdom, power and transcendence. Could he really have bruised his hand in a messy carpenter’s shop? The Times complained that the painting was revolting, for its “attempt to associate the holy family with the meanest details of a carpenter’s shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, even of disease, all finished with the same loathsome meticulousness, is disgusting.” Blackwood’s Magazine said “We can hardly imagine anything more ugly, graceless and unpleasant,” and Charles Dickens called the painting “mean, odious, revolting and repulsive.”

The gnostics could not believe God became a man for the same reasons they could not believe God directly created the world—they could not envision God involved in a world so fraught with misery. Similarly, just as the Victorians were troubled by Millais’ depiction of the human side of Jesus, they also would have trouble with the idea that God so lowered himself to create the messy and detailed biological world, so full of not only of useless bloodshed but of anomalies and particulars. It was all beneath God’s dignity.

A few years earlier the Reverend Baden Powell had insisted that physical and moral problems had completely separate foundations and should have nothing to do with one another. God’s works and God’s word were separate and moral and physical phenomena were completely independent. He wrote in 1838:

Scientific and revealed truth are of essentially different natures, and if we attempt to combine and unite them, we are attempting to unite things of a kind which cannot be consolidated, and shall infallibly injure both. In a word, in physical science we must keep strictly to physical induction and demonstration; in religious inquiry, to moral proof, but never confound the two together. When we follow observation and inductive reasoning, our inquiries lead us to science. When we obey the authority of the Divine Word, we are not led to science but to faith. The mistake consists in confounding these two distinct objects together; and imagining that we are pursuing science when we introduce the authority of revelation. They cannot be combined without losing the distinctive character of both.

The message here is that religion and science are to be kept separate. God is retained to supply the former, but it would never do to consider him in the latter. So it is not too surprising that in his 1844 book Vestiges, Robert Chambers reissued the infra dig argument:

How can we suppose an immediate exertion of this creative power at one time to produce the zoophytes, another time to add a few marine mollusks, another to bring in one or two crustacea, again to crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the end. This would surely be to take a very mean view of the Creative Power.

Divine providence could engage in the noble activity of impressing laws upon matter, but not grovel in the muck of nature.

Alfred Wallace agreed. Evolution’s cofounder argued that the universe was self-regulating according to its general laws and in no need of continual supervision and rearrangement of details. “As a matter of feeling and religion,” concluded Wallace, “I hold this to be a far higher conception of the Creator of the Universe than that which may be called the ‘continual interference hypothesis’.”

Darwin, for his part, was keen to the implications of this modern gnosticism. If God was not intimately involved in the world, then was He involved at all? In a letter Darwin challenged his American friend Asa Gray to think this through:

I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? … If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.

Many argue about whether Darwin believed in God, but Darwin certainly held strongly to the popular beliefs about God. It was reasonable for Darwin to argue that God would not be personally involved in the swallow’s attack on the gnat and then leverage his theological principle to conclude that all of biology arose on its own. Evolution is the right conclusion given a gnostic starting point. God and matter don’t mix, so life wasn’t created. If Archimedes needed only a place to stand to move the world, Darwin needed only a theological ledge.

Not surprisingly Darwin also used gnostic ideas to defend his theory against the problem of complexity. Darwin pointed out that while it is tempting to see God as the master engineer who crafted complex organs such as the eye, this would make God too much like man.

Darwin agreed that the perfection of the eye reminds us of the telescope which resulted from the highest of human intellect. Was it not right to conclude that the eye was also the product of a great intellect? This may seem the obvious answer but Darwin warned against it, for we should not “assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man.” Better to imagine the eye as the result of natural selection’s perfecting powers rather than having God too much involved in the world.

The Victorians could not believe that the boy Jesus actually labored in his earthly father’s carpentry shop. Likewise, it was reasonable for Darwin to argue that complex organs were not likely shaped by God because that would mean he works as man does.

These Gnostic tendencies remain with us today. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, for example, admiringly recounted the Darwin-Gray correspondences. The problem, according to Gould, is not the religious motivation in Darwin’s supposedly scientific theory, but rather that Darwin’s position can be depressing. Gould wrote a book on how we are supposed to understand this new gnosticism. He believed that science and religion do not overlap and are non-overlapping magisteria.

Likewise Niles Eldredge takes the position that “religion and science are two utterly different domains of human experience” and Bruce Alberts, writing for the National Academy of Sciences, informs us that:

Scientists, like many others, are touched with awe at the order and complexity of nature. Indeed, many scientists are deeply religious. But science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each.

Similarly Salman Khan at the Khan Academy explains that an all-powerful God would not design the particular. God, if there is one, would use simple laws to create a complex world. Khan concludes:

That to me is a better design.

And isn’t that all that matters?

These are just a few of the many examples of modern gnosticism within evolutionary thought. God must be disjoint from creation and any attempt to force-fit them together is bound to be awkward. Or again, how is it that God could create the universe but have nothing to do with science? The answer of course is that God did not create the world, at least not directly—the world evolved. The historian’s assessment of gnosticism could just as easily apply to evolution:

The cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and world … The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis … the world is the work of lowly powers. [Hans Jonas, quoted in: Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, p. 16, Oxford University Press, 1987.]

The gnostic’s hope in “lowly powers” was fulfilled in evolution’s natural selection. And the acceptance of evolution, in turn, reinforced gnosticism in modern thought. Darwin gave form to the gnostic’s vision, but that brought with it a movement towards gnosticism. The influence of gnostic thought today is not often acknowledged or understood. It is, according to Harold Bloom, the most common thread of religious thought in America. He calls it the American Religion, and he finds it “pervasive and overwhelming, however it is masked, and even our secularists, indeed even our professed atheists, are more Gnostic than humanist in their ultimate presuppositions.”

It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God. Evolution may breed skepticism, but its adherents have continued to make religious proclamations. Indeed, those proclamations are really no different than those made by Darwin and his fellow Victorians.

Religion drives science, and it matters.