A Dwindling Consensus?

From Patrick Chan at Triablogue:

In the prologue of his recent book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Stephen Meyer cites several books and articles from scholars in relevant scientific fields which "express[...] doubt about various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, and especially about its central tenet, namely, the alleged creative power of the natural selection and mutation mechanism." Meyer notes these are just a few examples. BTW, I filled out the citations a bit so people can look them up more easily (although I left out page numbers which Meyer did cite in several cases), but they're hardly to the standard one might see in a scientific journal. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but I could have made a mistake here or there (e.g. publication year). I've added links to the resources as well; I just hope they won't become broken in the future.

• Arthur, W. (2000). The Origin of Animal Body Plans: A Study in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.
• Becker, H.A., & Lönnig, W.E. (2005). Transposons: Eukaryotic.
• Carroll, R.L. (2000). Towards a New Evolutionary Synthesis. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
• Conway, M.S. (2009). Walcott, the Burgess Shale, and Rumours of a Post-Darwinian World. Current Biology.
• Davidson, E.H. (2011). Evolutionary Bioscience as Regulatory Systems Biology. Developmental Biology.
• Eldredge, N. (1995). Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory.
• Erwin, D.H. (2000). Macroevolution Is More Than Repeated Rounds of Microevolution. Evolution and Development.
• Goodwin, B. (2001). How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity.
• Kauffman, S. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.
• Kauffman, S. (1996). At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.
• Kirschner, M., Gerhart, J., & Norton, J. (2006). The Plausibility of Life.
• Koonin, E.V. (2009). The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?. Trends in Genetics.
• Lönnig, W.E., & Saedler, H. (2002). Chromosomal Rearrangements and Transposable Elements. Annual Review of Genetics.
• Lynch, M. (2007). The Origins of Genome Architecture.
• Müller, G., & Newman, S. (2003). Origination of Organismal Form: The Forgotten Cause in EvolutionaryTheory. In Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology.
• Raff, R. (1996). The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form.
• Shapiro, J. (2012). Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.
• Schwartz, J. (1999). Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species.
• Sermonti, G. (2005). Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?.
• Theißen, G. (2006). The Proper Place of Hopeful Monsters in Evolutionary Biology. Theory in Biosciences.
• Valentine, J. (2006). On the Origin of Phyla.
• Valentine, J.W., & Erwin, D.H. (1987). Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record. In Development as an Evolutionary Process.
• Wagner, G.P. (2000). What Is the Promise of Developmental Evolution? Part I: Why Is Developmental Biology Necessary to Explain Evolutionary Innovations?, Part II: A Causal Explanation of Evolutionary Innovations May Be Impossible, and Part III: The Crucible of Developmental Evolution. Journal of Experimental Zoology.
• Wagner, G.P., & Stadler, P.F. (2003). Quasi-independence, Homology and the Unity of Type. Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• Webster, G., & Goodwin, B. (2011). Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology.

Ex Nihilo

"Theistic evolution is a biblical and theological disaster." So writes Dr. Al Mohler in the latest edition of magazine of Southern Seminary. The theme of the current edition is "Ex Nihilo," or "out of nothing."

Check it out and pay special attention to the following articles:

The New Shape of the Debate by Al Mohler

The New Atheism and the Dogma of Darwinism by Al Mohler

All Things Dark and Terrible by Russell Moore

Evolution and Creation in Higher Education by Mark Coppenger

Creation and American Christianity by Gregory Wills

Can Biologos Save Christianity?

Dr. Karl Giberson has apologized to Al Mohler for his schoolyard tactics of "debate". As I mention in an earlier post, Dr. Giberson, in a piece for the Huffington Post, accused Dr. Mohler of not being interested in the truth. While I would quibble with some of the details of Giberson's apology, it is not mine to accept or reject the apology which seems to be sincere.

However, the problem still remains that Giberson and his cohorts at Biologos continue to do just exactly what Mohler and many others contend. That is, the Biologos program is inherently hostile to the doctrines of God, creation, man, sin, and redemption revealed in the Scriptures. Astonishingly, Dr. Giberson states that the work of Biologos to bring about the full embrace of Darwinism within the church is for the purpose of saving Christianity. I don't know which is worse: the ignorance or arrogance of such a statement.

Giberson writes:

Is it not here that we find the central truth of our faith? Our sinful nature is a simple reality… But is it not possible that we might have different ideas about how we came to have that nature? Does the saving power of Jesus vanish if sin becomes something that developed through natural history, rather than appeared all at once in the Garden of Eden? It seems to me that there is a conversation to have here, beyond simply drawing a line in the sand. Satisfactory answers to questions like these are truly ‘How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.’

At BioLogos we have made our peace with evolution, and it has been liberating and even faith-affirming. We encourage conversations to further that agenda and make no excuses for that. We are not destroying Christianity. We are saving it. (emphasis mine).

In related news, Al Mohler comments on an article by John Farrell in the Wall Street Journal.

The American literary critic Frederick Crews once spoke of defenders of evolutionary theory who attempt to make Darwinism appear more congenial to the Christian faith than it truly is. These defenders, Crews wrote, present a vision of Darwin and Darwinism that “is often prettified to make it safe for doctrines that he himself was sadly compelled to leave behind.” The prettifying of evolution continues, even in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Writing in the paper’s weekly “Houses of Worship” column, John Farrell argues that the 60th anniversary of the Roman Catholic Church’s encyclical Humani Generis should be cause for celebration, since that historic document, issued by Pope Pius XII, “confirmed, in broad terms, that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the scientific theory of evolution.”

However, As Dr. Mohler points out, the Catholic Church continues to maintain that any theory of evolution that denies human ascent from the man Adam and the historicity of the Fall is incompatible with Christianity. This of course is the proverbial rub. There simply is no way to be committed to Darwinian evolution and at the same time maintain belief in human ascent from a specially created Adam as well as the historical Fall which is affirmed by both Jesus and Paul.

Mohler points out that Farrell "affirms the work of the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who 're-interpreted Genesis in light of evolution, arguing that the story of Adam and Eve needed to be read metaphorically.' He also applauds John Haught at Georgetown University, who proposes 'that the new cosmology of the expanding universe and the evolution of life require a more dynamic sense of God’s role in a world that is still not complete, a work in progress.'"

But this "more dynamic sense of God's role" has profound implications.

Actually, John Haught argues that the entire structure of Christian theology should be recast in light of evolution. In his recent book Making Sense of Evolution, Haught asserts that “Darwin has altered our understanding of almost everything that concerns theology.”

Let no one doubt just how comprehensive Haught’s alteration of Christian theology will turn out to be. “Other disciplines such as geology, cosmology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, computer science, and medicine have already undergone a major retooling in the wake of Darwin’s findings,” he asserts. “Can theology realistically expect to escape a major metamorphosis?”

In Making Sense of Evolution, Haught provides ample evidence of what this “major metamorphosis” would mean. Every doctrine is brought to terms with evolutionary theory, including God. The revised deity of Haught’s evolutionary model is inseparable from his creation and stripped of sovereignty.

This kind of theological revisionism is not limited to Roman Catholic theologians, of course. John Weaver, a former Baptist minister and geologist who currently teaches at Regent’s Park College at the University of Oxford, also argues that we must surrender belief in an historical Adam and an historical Fall. Adam is a
symbolic, rather than a genetic head of humanity, he asserts. As for the Fall, he argues: “Within the movement of evolutionary development, there must have been a moment when Homo sapiens came to full moral consciousness for the first time.” He suggests that a proposed “bottleneck” in the evolutionary past probably reduced human populations to “fairly low numbers for a time,” and that this made “the significant moment of moral choice even more critical for humankind as a whole.” The historicity of Genesis 3 is just dismissed.

Read Mohler's entire article HERE.

Birds of a Feather

I noticed over the weekend that Biologos is attacking Al Mohler (once again). This is no surprise since Dr. Mohler is taking them to task for their efforts to rid the church of the doctrine of the Scripture's inerrancy. What interested me about this latest attack against Mohler, authored by Karl Giberson, was two-fold. First Dr. Giberson is almost apoplectic in his anger against Mohler. Secondly, the complaint was published in the left-wing and aggressively secular Huffington Post. But as I reflected further I concluded that it makes perfect sense for the Biologos folks to publish at the Huffington Post. What is more, it makes perfect sense for the folks at the Huffinton Post to eagerly publish the thoughts of Biologos contributors. It seems that the Huffington Post has a better understanding of the implications of Biologos' program for the historic Christian faith than does Biologos.

Over at Pyromaniacs, Phil Johnson has written a fuller reflection on this issue.

To paraphrase one of my Facebook friends: Even if they really do believe the abusive ad hominem argument they are making against Al Mohler, that's an interesting strategy. Let's air our differences at this bastion of secular humanism, and we'll invite some of the giants of discernment over at Huffpo to sort it out for us in their combox.

Dr. Karl Giberson, vice president of BioLogos, wrote the Huffington piece. The case he makes against Dr. Mohler has basically one point. Here it is: In his Ligonier lecture, Dr. Mohler claimed that Charles Darwin had a pretty good idea about what kind of "evidence" he was looking for before he ever boarded the Beagle; he was already sympathetic to evolutionary theory, and he was already hostile to biblical authority.

Not so, Dr. Giberson says. Darwin was a devout Christian and a creationist when he first set off on the Beagle. Giberson claims Darwin's very first doubts about the reliability of Scripture-as-history came as he collected his samples and observed and analyzed the biological evidence. Dr. Giberson evidently would have us believe Darwin was a typical evangelical until an honest inquiry into the scientific evidence forced him to take a more enlightened position.

I'm admittedly no Darwin scholar, but I do know for a fact that the only version of "Christianity" he ever adhered to was by no means evangelical. He was a product of that Unitarian intellectualism that dominated the established church in Georgian times. According to an 1887 article by Robert Schindler (published in Charles Spurgeon's magazine, The Sword and the Trowel):

If anyone wishes to know where the tadpole of Darwinism was hatched, we could point him to the pew of the old chapel in High Street, Shrewsbury, where Mr. Darwin, his father, and we believe his father's father, received their religious training. The chapel was built for Mr. Talents, an ejected minister [i.e., a Puritan who dissented from the established church order]; but for very many years full-blown Socinianism has been taught there. (Emphasis added.)

Furthermore, Darwin was enthralled with natural theology and (like BioLogos) held the truth-claims of Scripture to be less reliable and less authoritative than "scientific proofs." That was what prompted his interest in science to begun with. And—as Dr. Giberson himself notes in an earlier open letter to Dr. Mohler—"[Darwin] was a devotee of William Paley."

Perhaps the most succinct summary of William Paley's religious convictions comes to us from Sir Leslie Stephen, a younger contemporary of Paley's. Stephen was a respected English author and an Anglican clergyman. He described William Paley as "Socinian in all but name."

Given BioLogos's own theological trajectory (I'm thinking particularly their dismissive attitude toward key doctrines like biblical authority and original sin), they may not recognize Socinianism—or its close cousins, Unitarianism, Deism, and theological liberalism—as anti-Christian worldviews. But Dr. Mohler certainly understands that those ideas are hostile to Scripture and antithetical to every major stream of historic Christian faith.

In other words, Dr. Mohler undoubtedly disagrees with Dr. Giberson's assessment of Darwin. As difficult as this may be for Dr. Giberson to receive and as hurtful as it may be to his academic ego, Dr. Mohler no doubt found Dr. Giberson's book Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution unpersuasive.

Read the entire post HERE.

When Dawkins Doesn't Like Darwinism

Check out this good post from Creed or Chaos on Richard Dawkins' self-contradictory conundrum.