Creator God, Evolving World

Chapter 2

19 ChaPtEr 2 Evolving World: regularity and Probability a s a member of the Tennessee Trail Association, I (Cynthia) join a number of avid hikers once a month for a stroll around “The Domain” of the University of the South: thirteen thousand acres on top of the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee. On one particularly spectacular winter day, I struck up a conversation with a retired gentleman as we walked. I explained that my academic work involves the relation between science and religion, particularly with regard to issues of creation and evolution. “Well, I am pretty sure what I think about that,” my walking companion offered congenially. When queried further he threw out his arm in a wide arch, pointing to all the beauty of the woods, mountains, and valleys: “This can’t all have been an accident.” While he did not elucidate on what he did think was responsible for the wonders around us, it was clear that he was in awe of creation, but also that he assumed there were only two alternatives: either it was “all an accident” or someone or something had intentionally created it. This assumption, made easily enough by a well-educated retired gentleman in Tennessee, is one that a large proportion of the population shares. Either the world has come about “by accident” or there is a purposefulness embedded in it by an intentional being—usually articulated as “God,” whatever one’s conception of the deity might be. Paul Davies alludes to this commonly assumed polarity in an Atlantic article entitled “E.T. and God,”1 citing Jacques Monod as illustrating the classic position of the scientist who believes that evolution has now shown the universe to be meaningless: “Man at last creator god, evolving world 20 knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.”2 In contrast, Davies writes about scientists who believe they have found order and purpose in the universe. Many such scientists refer to the unlikely coincidence of events that would be necessary for the emergence of life on earth. As Davies puts it: “Many scientists believe that life is not a freakish phenomenon (the odds of life’s starting by chance, the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle once suggested, are comparable to the odds of a whirlwind’s blowing through a junkyard and assembling a functioning Boeing 747) but instead is written into the laws of nature.”3 Davies goes on to add the theological component. Generally, those who would agree with Monod about the purposelessness of the universe exclude the notion of a creator God—hence, the “alone in the universe” mantra. Those who might agree with Davies or Cynthia’s hiking companion about order being written into the universe tend to be more sympathetic to a theological worldview. Davies contrasts “sheer chance” with “lawlike certitude”: “The theological battle line in relation to the formation of life is not, therefore, between the natural and the miraculous, but between sheer chance and lawlike certitude. Atheists tend to take the first side, and theists line up behind the second; but these divisions are general and are by no means absolute.”4 The objective of this chapter is to unpack these options of “sheer chance” and “lawlike certitude.” Our position is that these two options do not exhaust the possibilities for our attempts to explain the world around us. Indeed, such a polarity is falsely grounded, such that the problems that it raises can be resolved once underlying misconceptions are cleared up. Later chapters will deal with questions of God, creation, and purpose or design. The main point in this chapter is that the introduction of chance into our understanding of how the world unfolds (or has unfolded) does not pose as much of a threat to an intelligible, ordered, even purposeful universe as has been supposed. Chance is not opposed to order and regularity; rather, the two interact in an intelligible, albeit complex, manner that has contributed to the intricacy and magnificence of creation. two Ways of Making sense: Classical and statistical science Since the work of Charles Darwin we have come to realize that certain phenomena in the natural world are not as inevitable and predictable as had been Evolving World: regularity and Probability 21 previously assumed. In the world Darwin inherited—that is, the world of Isaac Newton and his newly found laws of...