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Evolution and Skepticism

November 30, 2009     Time: 00:20:45
Evolution and Skepticism

Summary

Conversation with William Lane Craig.

Transcript Evolution and Skepticism

 

Kevin Harris: Michael writes,

Dr. Craig, I am a Continentally trained philosophy student. I am also a big fan of yours, but ultimately my allegiance is with the skeptics of both Christianity and existence of God. I have two unrelated questions for you. First, my question is, where do I stand in the eyes of Jesus? If Christianity is true, and I was to die tomorrow, then what would be my status? Because I’ve given good effort to come to an intellectual conclusion, and my efforts led me to disbelief. If I die now, then am I to be deprived of God?

In other words, is God going to still hold him to blame even though he has done his best to come to the conclusion that God exists?

Dr. Craig: Well, the New Testament is pretty clear about this, Kevin. Paul says in his first chapter to the church in Rome that from nature alone God’s existence is evident to all persons everywhere in any time in history. So he says that people are without excuse for their unbelief. He says what can be known about God is evident to them, because God has shown it to them. Therefore, no one has a just excuse before God for not believing in him and repenting of sin and turning to God for forgiveness. Jesus said something similar. He said if any man’s will is to do God’s will then he will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I am just speaking on my own authority. Here Jesus says that it is the orientation of a person’s will that will ultimately determine his belief. If a person’s will is genuinely to seek God, to find God, that person will recognize that Jesus is from God and that he is not just speaking on his own.

So I take it that God, through his Holy Spirit and his witness in nature, has provided ample grounds for people to respond affirmatively to the revelation of God that he has given to them. Therefore everyone is without excuse who turns his back on that revelation no matter how diligently they may think they have tried. In other words, human beings are incredibly capable of self-deception and self-rationalization. Studies have shown this over and over again how we rationalize things and deceive ourselves. I imagine that many unbelievers fancy themselves to have diligently and sincerely sought God and then turned away from him and therefore imagine themselves excused before God for their unbelief. The message of the New Testament is that is simply not true. They have turned away from him because their hearts do not truly seek him. Their hearts are oriented toward some other good rather than the ultimate good – toward God. That is why they don’t believe.

Now, if this person is sincerely seeking God then I think that God will lead that person to faith in Christ. It is not as though that person’s life is going to end tomorrow. If God knew that by prolonging this person’s life a little longer, that person would come to faith, I think God would let that person live a little longer. Because God says “if you seek me you will find me.” Jesus promised the same thing: if you seek, you will fine. So if this person is seeking sincerely and honestly, I want to encourage him to keep on seeking, keep on looking, and I think he will find, he will come to faith, if he will do so sincerely with an open heart and mind.

Kevin Harris: I think this is very important. I have heard it referred to just keeping God up on the blackboard. You can always examine and re-examine and wait for more evidence to come in. [1]Discount that evidence. Bring this evidence in. Standards of evidence change from person to person and from era to era. They keep God as kind of an intellectual game. But that is not how we do personal relationships. It certainly is not how we do faith, you’ve said.

Dr. Craig: That is absolutely right. Paul Moser has really emphasized this very well in his work on theism and religious epistemology. Moser has just emphasized over and over again that it is matters of the heart and disposition of the will – whether one is willing to approach God with humility and contrition and to come to God on his terms rather than to come to God on your own terms or to come to him on the standards that the skeptic sets. I suspect that a great many people have simply deceived themselves into thinking that they are seeking God in an appropriate way. In fact, they are seeking God in a kind of idolatrous way that seeks to make God conform to their standards and their image rather than seeking him in genuine humility and contrition. If we will seek him in that way then I think we will come to faith.

Kevin Harris: He asks an unrelated question,

Within your apologetics you often refer to authoritative opinion to support your arguments. Nothing wrong with that, right? Examples of such references can be found within your writings concerning the cosmological, teleological, or resurrection arguments. Yet, when it comes to biological evolution, you side with the very small minority of scientists. In fact, you side with the faction that is largely determined to be pseudoscience, that is, intelligent design. So my question is this: if there are sufficient grounds to believe in the four to five facts you expound concerning Jesus’ resurrection merely because the bulk of New Testament scholars affirm its historical veracity, then why not the same with biological evolution?

Dr. Craig: Alright, there are a number of issues that are intertwined here. First of all, I do not advocate believing in these four facts pertinent to Jesus’ resurrection simply because this is the majority opinion of New Testament scholarship. I give reasons for each of those facts, multiple lines of evidence in support of those facts. Then summarizing what I will say is, in fact, these facts or this evidence is found convincing by the majority of New Testament scholars today.

Kevin Harris: So there is a proper appeal to authority and an improper appeal to authority.

Dr. Craig: Certainly. With respect to the resurrection, there is in no way a simple appeal to authority on which it ends. At least not in my published work. Now, sometimes in a talk that is very true that one will have to give summary statements. But if you look, for example, at my book Assessing the New Testament Evidence of the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus you will see these multiple lines of evidence laid out. They are also laid out in Reasonable Faith on a more popular level. What I try to do is to communicate to students that these are not just my peculiar opinions. It is not just Bill Craig who finds this evidence convincing. It is the majority of New Testament scholars today that find this convincing. So it is simply an attempt to show students who aren’t themselves familiar with the evidence that this evidence has convinced more than just me personally. It has convinced the majority of scholars.

Now, when it comes to biological evolution, what we have to ask ourselves is: what do you mean by biological evolution? Francisco Ayala, who is an eminent evolutionary biologist, distinguishes three aspects of evolutionary theory in this regard. First is what he calls evolution. By that he simply means descent with modification. Living organisms are descended with changes from early organisms. He says it is in that sense that biologists say evolution is an incontrovertible fact. Of course, virtually everyone agrees with mere descent by modification. Secondly, though, he talks about what he calls evolutionary history. This would be tracing the lineages of biological organisms back in time to construct a universal tree of life that goes back to a primordial ancestor. That assumes the thesis of common ancestry – that all living life forms are descended from a common ancestor. That is much more controversial than the simple fact of evolution. The third aspect of evolutionary theory that he distinguishes is the mechanisms of evolution. [2] That is to say what explains evolution. This is genetic mutation and natural selection. This is what he calls Darwinism. This is Darwin’s discovery.

Ayala says that point 1 is beyond dispute. Everyone, he says, agrees with evolution so defined. But when it comes to point 2 and point 3 he says these are matters of open scientific investigation, and he says with regard to the third in particular he says although some things are known many things are unknown, many are merely conjectural and he says many we have no idea about whatsoever. So that puts a very different spin on the situation.

My skepticism about evolutionary theory, or my openness to alternatives like intelligent design, is primarily focused on the third element. I am simply not convinced that it has been demonstrated that random genetic mutation coupled with natural selection is sufficient to produce this amount of biological complexity today. I am very open to the evidence. If I can be shown the evidence that it could do that then I would embrace that. I have no theological ax to grind here whatsoever. So I think when you properly understand the term, skepticism about point 3 is not at all pseudoscience. On the contrary, this is an open scientific question and a good many evolutionary theorists themselves think that we don’t have the complete story, and that there is a lot more going on to explain evolution and common descent than mere random genetic mutation and natural selection. Those mechanisms in fact are not sufficient.

Kevin Harris: Let’s revisit then quickly a proper appeal to authority and an improper appeal. When you argue for the resurrection, you give this evidence and then bring in as part of that evidence, or in support of that evidence, the consensus of scholarship. You wouldn’t hold to the consensus of naturalistic scientists on matters of theology because you have other arguments that you think negate their naturalistic assumptions?

Dr. Craig: Well, with respect to, say, that third point about Darwinism, there one could appeal to authority and say, “Look, the majority of biologists believe in these Darwinian mechanisms.” What I would want to do is say what are their supporting arguments for this? Just as someone would say, “Oh, the majority of scholars believe in the empty tomb? What are the supporting arguments on which they form this view?” Then one would be able to share those arguments. But you see my difficulty is that when you ask evolutionary biologists, “Really? Darwinism is sufficient to explain evolution? What is the evidence for that?” What you get are things like the peppered moth and Darwin’s finches.

Kevin Harris: The Stanley Miller experiment.

Dr. Craig: Things that simply don’t provide adequate foundation for this enormous extrapolation that common descent and evolution is adequately explained by these mechanisms. So that makes one suspect that the consensus on that point is not based on the evidence but upon some sort of prior philosophical disposition. So I am agnostic with respect to that third point at least. As Ayala himself admits, this is a matter of open scientific investigation. There are lots of authorities who don’t think these mechanisms are adequate.

Kevin Harris: What about when he says a small minority of scientists – the intelligent design community – are largely determined to be pseudoscience. First of all, who is it that is largely considering them to be pseudoscience and, well, are they?

Dr. Craig: That is really just name calling. We have to be very careful about that. What you want to see is why are their arguments mistaken, not simply to provide labels of them. I have found in this debate that all too often it is merely a matter of calling names or labeling one’s opponents. It is silly to say that people like Michael Behe and Michael Denton and Guillermo Gonzalez are not scientists. These men publish in peer reviewed journals, they are professors in various scientific departments at universities. It is silly to say that what they are doing is pseudoscience, unless you have some sort of argument here, some kind of demarcation argument as to what counts as science and what doesn’t count as science. [3] But philosophers of science know that those kind of demarcation arguments are just largely regarded as failures. Nobody has been able to provide a sort of clear set of criteria as to what counts as science and what doesn’t count as science. So, again, those kinds of labels presuppose criteria that, well, need to be demanded. You need to give us then what are the forthcoming reasons on which you make this judgment.

Kevin Harris: In conclusion, Dr. Craig, I want to revisit something he said earlier in his question. He just says his allegiance is with the skeptics, and often people think that if you are skeptical of everything that that somehow is more intellectually honest or intellectually rigorous, but it leads to an infinite regress of skepticism – you have to be skeptical of that and that and skeptical of the criteria for skepticism.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. Why isn’t the skeptic skeptical of his own skepticism? How does he know that he doesn’t know anything?

Kevin Harris: So why just be skeptical? If you want to be bohemian and cool, well, I guess so, but that has nothing to do with truth quite often.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. It doesn’t take any brains to not believe something.

Kevin Harris: He says something that I just disagree with – he says, “It just seems to me the skeptics put forth a better case than the apologists.” I think that is just ridiculous, but I certainly don’t think that in my years of it, and neither do you.

Dr. Craig: You need to ask him again what case are you referring to, whose case? I am not aware of any such case.

Kevin Harris: It is a broad brush stroke, but it does bring up the issue – what if you are a person who encountered brilliant skeptics throughout a certain formative period of your life and very dumb or unintelligent or inarticulate Christians? Would that mean that God therefore doesn’t exist because you run into more articulate skeptics?

Dr. Craig: Or more importantly, clearly that would not imply that God does not exist because his existence is an objective fact or not independent of your historical circumstances – but the difficult question that it would raise and I think this is his question: would your being in such a situation exonerate your unbelief? Would it excuse you for your unbelief? Suppose you were raised in the Soviet Union during the 1950s where all you heard at the university was Marxist propaganda and the only Christians you met were idiots in the local church in your village. Would you be excused from not believing in God? I think that what the New Testament teaches is that God is too loving and too powerful to allow people’s eternal destiny to hinge in that way on the accidents of history and geography. If you are in a difficult situation like that, then he is going to provide an internal witness of the Holy Spirit that will be so powerful for those who genuinely seek him, that it will simply overpower the arguments of skepticism that you hear from your supposedly brilliant professors.

Kevin Harris: This is anecdotal but I have heard so many stories that support what you just said. Stories of a girl in atheistic Russian, hardcore atheist, who God was able to penetrate that atheist culture with some profound things that led her to Christ and led her eventually to an underground church. Stories of Muslims who are so isolated from the Gospel yet God penetrates that. Again, they are anecdotal but I hear so many from reliable sources on how – you are not going to keep God out just because of your geography.

Dr. Craig: Isn’t an all-powerful and all-loving God who wants you to be saved capable of overcoming the disadvantages of your historical and geographical situation? Of course he is. This is hardly surprising that he would be able to provide such an internal conviction of his truth that would overwhelm the arguments that you’ve heard against it for those who are dispositionally oriented to seek his will and to seek his face. [4]