No, they don’t. Scientific explanations involve methodological naturalism. In scientific explanations, everything is natural. Theistic evolution involves supernatural events and actors for which there is no evidence and no need. Theistic evolution creates entities that add nothing–this is blatantly non-scientific.
Science says that evolution is a natural process. Theistic evolutionists reject evolution’s being a natural process and instead make it a natural/supernatural process.
Since I’m asked, I’ll try to explain, but I don’t want to hijack the thread too much. I studied evolutionary computation, so that’s really the best example I can give of how I’m thinking. It carries a lot of the concepts from evolution, but I sort of apply it back to evolution as a way of conceptualizing it. If the genes are our individuals in the population, and the fitness test is the complexities, then we can more or less look at evolution in a similar light.
The interesting thing about evolutionary computing, though, is that if you’re using a pseudorandom number generator, then if you give the same seeds on a subsequent run, you’ll get an identical output. Thus, theoretically, if one could enumerate all the possible sets of seeds and run the program for each set, then one could see all possible results of the program. But really, all we know as far as evolution goes is that some parts appear random. Are the things that appear to be random actually random? Maybe they’re simply things that appear random because we don’t fully understand the process. Maybe that is how God interacts with the universe, in that what appears to be truly random is simply God asserting a decision. Maybe we’ll find out that it’s some combination for these seemingly random values, or maybe some of them really are random.
So, really, it seems to me that, at some level, when things are broken down to the simplest model, there’s some things where we just don’t, and possibly never will understand what’s going on there. It doesn’t seem any more or less satisfying to me as an explanation that these smallest decision points are either purely random or simply beyond our understanding. And unless we can actually get to a point where we can literally produce exactly what we have without any appeals to randomness, then you might as well flip a coin about whether the existence or non-existence of God either has any more or less explanatory power than the other.
And that’s sort of where I come in on this, that I specifically don’t believe that the existence of God adds anything or takes away anything from the explanation that evolution provides. That I believe in God is almost entirely independent from my understanding and acceptance of evolution. As it is, evolution is just a natural logical extension of the application of certain constraints. I think the entire issue of evolution is completely silent either way on the issue of God.
That said, the rest of your post seems to go back to more or less the question of evil, which does kind of get away from the topic of the thread, so I’ll try to be brief. Honestly, I have trouble seeing why people get so hung up on this question because it seems like the only reason people do is because they’re sort of stuck in a particular concept of how God works. We’re generally taught, at least in western thought, that we have a personal relationship with God, and so I can see how it might seem at odds with that nature seen on an individual level. So I’ll try to illustrate with an example.
Imagine a scenario where a child touches a hot stove and burns his hand. If we look at it on cellular scale, we have to wonder why the mind decided that those thousands of cells should die, yet other cells are unharmed. On a small scale, it seems random and unjustified. On the much larger scale, realizing that all the cells are connected as part of a greater whole, we see that the child learned a valuable lesson. But one might say that the child had to suffer to learn that lesson, but in the context of his entire existence, the importance of that lesson plays out countless times, and not only saves millions of cells over that life time, but ultimately probably helps that child to grow up and live a longer and healther life because of it.
Just as mankind for so long had so little understanding of the sciences and within the last few hundred years has grown to understand so much more. Evolution is that process by which we explore a space of complex life. So it makes no more sense to me to blame God than to blame evolution. In the billions of years of life, countless variations of genetic mutation and lifeforms, and yet it has inexorably led to the existence of man. Do we judge evolution as evil for the countless failed branches or do we judge it as good for the countless beautiful examples and sustainability? Evolution is neither good nor evil, it simply is.
The ultimate judgment isn’t to focus on the small current aspects that we see now, this very moment, even in just the time that has passed, is the slightest spec of an instant, and relative to how much more time there will be, all time from the beginning to now is as much the briefest spec. How can we judge all of that by such an obviously tiny sample? And yet, even in this tiniest of samples, I see beauty and I see things only getting better in the grand scheme. Let’s reserve judgment of all life, of all of creation, until we’ve seen it all. In a few million years, chances are our descendants will not recognize us, muchless see us as anything more than a step toward them, as they are only a small step toward their descendants many years hence. If we are far from complete, how can we judge the totality of creation from it in an unfinished form?
In my view the majority of theistic evolutionists, whether they like it or not, are being anti-scientific because for god to guide the evolution is effectively to say that god alters what happens - i.e. we have survival of the lesser fit.
Sorry, that’s silly.
There is, however, a cunning loophole they can use, which I heard expounded by Simon Conway-Morris, who I namedrop because I beat him at a drinking game once. Said loophole is that of convergent evolution. The god can sit back and let everything actually happen by cahnce, because whatever occurs nature is going to come up with more or less the same solutions so god doesn’t necessarily know that humans will result, but he knows something very human like will emerge.
(At what point souls come into this doesn’t seem to be stated).
It’s beautifully silly, but that kind of goes with the territory.
These posts came up as I was drafting, since I got distracted. Probably won’t make the edit window, so I’ll just repost.
I don’t generally call myself a theistic evolutionist. I believe in God, but as I tried to explain, I don’t think God is mucking around in evolution, and I don’t think his existence adds or detracts anything from the explanation that evolution offers. The only part where God is even at all related is in setting up some state from which that process runs and, as far as evolution is concerned, it doesn’t matter if that state was randomly generated or not. All that matters is that there was some initial state and it proceeded from there. Ultimately, the nature of God is an orthogonal concept to science.
I see this sort of argument often, but I don’t really understand what point it’s trying to make. Yes, an interventionist God, as one draw from a fairly literal interpretation of the Bible, or other scriptures, does fly in the face of modern science. But you’re not going to see many people, other than perhaps intelligent design types, who would argue that evolution would proceed, but with regular intervention from God. It makes no sense. If anything, an interventionalist God not only flies in the face of science, but flies in the face of his very nature, because an all powerful, all knowing God… why would he need to keep correcting himself?
That is, nature is the way it is because that is the way it is. Science is going to tell you what the natural laws are but, as far as we know, there isn’t really a good reason why the laws of physics are the way they are and not some other way. We can tell you what they are, and draw all kinds of interesting facets and results from that, but as far as why, there’s a whole bunch of different explanations.
In my view, trying to understand the nature of God to have a better understanding of science is a fruitless endeavor, it’s like trying to understand the introduction of the dunk on revolutionizing basketball… by learning about James Naismith’s children. You can only understand those implications in that context, but you might very well get some understanding into WHY he created the game and WHY those rules were what they were when he created the game by understanding more about the man who created it.
I had always thought t.e. meant God did micro-manage the development of life, from small things like tripping a coyote when it was about to eat a promising rabbit, all the way up to tossing an asteroid at the dinosaurs.
If t.e. isn’t the right term, what would be the name for this idea, that God is intervening in a very hands-on fashion?
This is closer to what my understanding had been. God knew what he wanted, and nudged and prodded until he got it. Because it’s undetectable, it’s not falsifiable, and thus, in formal scientific parlance, is “nonsense.” (Not in the pejorative, common usage, but in the meaning of being something we can’t work with, like the teapot in orbit.) The advantage of such ideas is that no one can come out and say, “That is false.” Instead, the dismissive phrase, “That’s not even wrong” was coined for it.
Because a certain number of Fundamentalist Christians and a certain number of atheists both insist that the theory of evolution explicitly denies a god.
Theistic evolution means nothing more than that the person in question both accepts the science behind evolutionary theory and believes in God, particularly as the ultimate creator (with no attempt to claim knowledge of how or when that creative act occurred).
I never identify myself as a theistic evolutionist except when I encounter someone making the odd claim that I must either accept evolutionary theory and deny God or accept God and deny evolutionary theory. In every other context I simply note that I am a Christian who accepts the science behind evolutionary theory.
There may be people who claim to be theistic evolutionists who match your description, (Teilhard de Chardin comes to mind), but that is hardly a good description of most theistic evolutionists. Note that de Chardin is soundly repudiated by most theologians and is thoroughly ignored by scientists; his audience is composed, mostly, of people who have studied neither science nor theology.
Piffle. Making up what other people are supposed to believe is a rather silly passtime when they do not actually hold those beliefs.
It would really depend on your definition of God. If you believe in a personal God then yes I agree with your statement. If your subscribe to the notion of an impersonal God, then no, your conclusion wouldn’t be valid.