'Turtles all the way down:' Have liberal religion scholars been bamboozled by Darwinism?

This article by Robert Shedinger of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, confirms a great deal of which I became convinced while a student at Wartburg Theological Seminary and a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the denomination which sponsors both institutions.

Naive subscription to "theistic evolution" by theologians is, on one level, sort of understandable. To reject evolution is to simply not be taken seriously in the academy; besides, since science, by definition, encompasses only that which can be directly observed (or at least for which quantifiable evidence can be inferred), science must necessarily dismiss what cannot be empirically verified. And frankly, the rhetoric, arguments, and logic of the creationist movement are often embarrassingly weak. They've mostly been argued before other creationists who, more inclined to accept than to challenge them, have come to overestimate their strength. In academic debate and the rough-and-tumble of public discourse, they generally don't fare very well. People who encounter them for the first time tend to be hostile and therefore resistant to them, but they're also often ill-conceived, illogical, and simply not very convincing.

All of this causes a problem for people of faith, and especially those who desire to be in dialog with the wider intellectual community. So many respond by trying to find some way to accommodate Darwin to Christian theology. As Prof. Shedinger observes, they've largely been bamboozled; it simply can't be done.

I commend the article to you. As he shows, there are some pretty fundamental assertions of traditional Christian dogma which simply cannot survive Darwin. For starters, St. Paul and Christian tradition affirm that death came into the world through sin and in no sense was the invention of the life-giving and life-affirming Creator. Paul draws a direct parallel between the First Adam, through whose trespass death came into the world,  and the Second Adam- Christ- in Whom it was overcome.

But if evolution is true, not only was death a part of finite reality since the very beginning, but it's the driving force of evolution itself. Rather than being God's enemy, it would then be one of His chief tools. If there is a God, then, death would have to be God's idea! Natural selection implies selection, and to be selected means to survive where less-fit organisms perish because they are less well equipped to survive. To deal with this and other practical difficulties, the biblical witness is often set aside and the Christian proclamation deformed. But the theologians and believing scientists who do so seem unable to fully acknowledge the consequences for the Faith.

But there is one decisive consequence in particular regarding which they are in patent, abject denial. Darwinian evolution is, by its very nature, random. It is of the essence of the idea that it occurs by sheer, blind chance. By its very character, it excludes the possibility of an intelligent Creator and declares one to be unnecessary. To the extent that a theory of evolution is theistic, it is not only un-Darwinian but anti-Darwinian. There is simply no accommodation possible between Christianity (or theism of any kind) and Darwin, because any synthesis between theism and Darwinism must, by definition, cease to be either theistic or to be Darwinism at all!

And that basic fact the theologians and scholars of the ELCA and the other mainline churches (as well as those of the Roman Catholic church, which also seems to have convinced itself that it has embraced Darwinism despite denying the random character of evolution) utterly ignore. They simply refuse to acknowledge the basic fact that one cannot be both a theist and a Darwinian. Theoretically, I suppose, one could believe in a kind of deistic First Cause, which created the universe and then totally withdrew to watch from the sidelines without influencing the totally random course events that followed. But such a god would bear no resemblance whatsoever to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It simply is not the Holy Trinity, and cannot be. The whole nature of the arrangement argues against an Incarnation, much less a redemption of fallen creation through the suffering and death of the God-Man.

That matter of randomness points to what I've always seen as an inherent weakness of Darwinism. In the original television series Cosmos, Carl Sagan describes the Battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185 A.D.,  a naval engagement in which the six-year-old Emperor Antouko was drowned and his forces virtually wiped out, many choosing suicide by drowning rather than capture. The battle resulted in the establishment of the first Shogunate and the birth of a curious legend.

The sea bed of the Shimonoseki Straits, where the battle took place, is home to a species of crab whose shell resembles the face of a samurai warrior. These crabs, naturally, feasted on the bodies of the drowned samurai who died in the battle. The inhabitants of the region refuse to eat these heikegani crabs (also known as "ghost crabs") because they believe them to contain the souls of those samurai whose bodies their ancestors feasted on and whose faces their shells resemble.

Sagan pointed to this as an evolutionary mechanism. The crabs whose shells resembled the faces of samurai, if caught by fishermen, were thrown back; the crabs whose shells did not were harvested by the fishermen and eaten. Having a shell resembling a human face became an evolutionary advantage. The crabs which lacked that advantage died out; those who possessed it thrived, and now all the crabs of that species in the Shimonoseki Straits look like samurai.

But from the moment I heard the argument, I perceived a problem with it. As vivid an example of natural selection as Sagan's story is, it fails to answer the question of why any of the crabs in the Shimonoseki Straits should have shells which resemble the faces of samurai warriors in the first place! It's not the kind of thing which would seem likely to occur by sheer chance. Ironically, Sagan's story implicitly suggests that perhaps those fortunate crabs might have had some outside help in achieving their evolutionary advantage.

There is, of course, an obvious answer for the problem of how the surviving crabs could have obtained their evolutionary edge by sheer, dumb luck. It's the same answer Darwinism gives to any suggestion of design or at least fortuitous order in the universe: the law of large numbers. In a universe as vast as ours, it is said, operating on pure chance, almost any incredible coincidence and even set of coincidences are statistically bound to happen somewhere. And why not in the Shimonoseki Straights, just as well as anywhere else? And why not this coincidence, as well as any other?

Why should the untold number of insane coincidences necessary for conditions under which life could potentially evolve not occur, and occur on the third planet orbiting the star Sol in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way, just as well as anywhere else?

Why should the absurd number of random accidents required to happen in the correct order and the correct way for the simplest form of life to come into existence not happen somewhere in a universe so vast and so very, very random, and, occurring somewhere, not occur here?

Why should the insane number of clusters of insane numbers of accidents necessary for increasingly complex life-forms, ecosystems, and environments- each step up the scale exponentially multiplying the complexity and therefore the improbability of it occurring by chance anywhere- not also happen by chance, and happen on the very same planet in the very same obscure point in the vastness of the universe, and happen in the proper order and the proper manner, if the universe is so big that anything is likely to happen somewhere?

Why- by sheer, dumb luck- should aspirin not relieve headaches, and antibiotics (at least until recently) not cure infections?

At one level, this makes sense. It is a logical, coherent explanation of how a universe like ours could come into existence by blind chance. But logically admissible as it may be as an abstract possibility, a valid question remains as to how believable it is. For the universe we live in to have come into being exactly as it is by random chance would require such a multiplication of absurdly impossible coincidences that even the vastness of the universe doesn't change the fact that random development makes a hash of Occam's Razor and staggers common sense. When all is said and done, it boils down to the equally valid observation that if one gathers a large enough number of chimpanzees in a large enough room banging away at a large enough number of word processors (I'll simplify the problem by not making them typewriters and introducing the complication of paper, but only because I'm in a generous mood) for a long enough time, eventually one of them will, by pure chance, produce a perfect copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare!

Yes, it's logically possible. But how probable is it? I, like the vast majority of human beings who have lived in this allegedly random universe, intuitively sense that it just isn't very probable at all and that it would take a great deal more blind faith to believe that it is true than to believe in a Creator.

And it would take even more blind faith to answer the prior question: why should matter exist at all? Why should there be anything to evolve, or to suddenly become "alive-" a process we're learning more and more about as time goes on, but still cannot replicate?

There are religions and philosophies- Buddhism comes to mind- which suggest that matter has always existed. Even the late Dr. Sagan conceded that something has simply "always been." It could be God. Or it could be matter itself. In support of the latter possibility, Sagan invoked Occam's Razor, the Principle of Logical Economy, which states that the most valid explanation of any phenomenon is the simplest one which accounts for all the known facts. Why not save a step, he asked? Instead of an eternal God Who created matter,  why should matter, itself, not have always existed?

The answer isn't difficult. One will examine the observable universe in vain for things which abide forever.  The law of entropy seems to be universal. The weakness of Dr. Sagan's argument is that the eternity of matter does not fit all the known facts if it is conceded that the law of entropy is one of those facts. In looking for something- or Someone- which defies it, we would seem less likely to find it the material universe itself than outside it. Since any explanation for the existence of the universe must necessarily involve an exception to the law of entropy, it would seem to require that such an exception exist!

Of late, another alternative to an intelligent designer has become popular in some circles. I won't even respond to it. I'll simply let it stand on its own, to be judged based on its own inherent plausibility- or lack of it.

It has been suggested that nothingness is inherently unstable; that if you leave "nothing" alone, "something" will- for unexplained reasons- always simply pop into existence of its own accord.

Think about it.

I remember once hearing a story about a scientist giving a lecture on cosmology who was interrupted by a man who had another theory. The universe, the man said, rested on the back of a great turtle.

"And what is beneath that turtle?" the scientist asked. "Yet another, even greater turtle." "And beneath that?" "A third, still greater turtle."

After this went on for a while, the man became exasperated. "It won't do you any good, Professor," he told the scientist. "Ask that question as many times as you want, but it's turtles all the way down."

In a sense, any account of the origins of the universe is like that. Observation and deduction are the only tools science has; when we begin to theorize, we cease to deal in science, and the fact is that observation and deduction will only take us so far. I can see no valid objection to granting the validity of observation in the pursuit of truth, as far as it goes. But in the last analysis, our answer to ultimate questions will always amount to "It's turtles all the way down." Whether it's positing a Creator, which atheists see as lazy and intellectually dishonest, or arguing for an almost infinite number of increasingly complex and increasingly improbable accidents and coincidences as the best explanation of the universe we live in, each of us ultimately has to decide for himself or herself which explanation is the more credible. 

Any answer considering only what can be observed and measured will only take us so far, and to pretend that it's definitive or to ridicule an alternative answer as if observation could give us any more than tentative hints is intellectually dishonest. The question of origins may well be informed by science, but it will ultimately always be answered by each of us through intuition.

Or, if you will, of faith. And that is as true of a purely random and materialistic universe as of a created one.

And just maybe, the scholars of the ELCA, the other mainline denominations, the Catholic church, and other religious groups which try to make their peace with a theory which on its own terms excludes the possibility of a creator or a supernatural order would do well to honestly confront their own naivete and gullibility about what it actually is with which they are trying to make peace, and admit to themselves that while one may have either Darwin or God, by Darwinism's very definition it is impossible to have both.