EVOLUTION AND CREATIONISM: FINDING COMMON GROUND

OUTLINE OF TALK

· If Spirit is omnipresent, science must be a “spiritual” activity!

· A Creationist Manifesto

· Distinction between the fact of Evolution and theories as to why it occurred

· The Gaia Hypothesis --- A New View of Evolution?

SCIENCE AS “INSTITUTIONALIZED” WONDER

The best science, like the best theology, starts with the same sense of wonder that we feel looking up at a starry night

Some scientific results to set the mood:

· Estimated age of universe: » 15 billion yrs.

· Estimated size: » 10 billion light yrs. (1 light year » 6000 billion miles)

· Estimated age of earth: » 4 billion yrs.

· Est. number of living species: » 10 million

· Est. no. of cells in adult human: » 1000 billion

Note: One billion seconds is about thirty years.
SOME “SPIRITUAL LESSONS” OF SCIENCE

· Humility before the vastness of the physical universe.

· The profound impersonality of nature that, properly understood, can take us “out of ourselves”.

· The comprehensibility of natural law and the miracle of scientific genius.

· The limitations of human reason (Schrödinger’s quantum mechanical cat; logical paradoxes in mathematics, etc.)

INSTITUTIONALIZING THE WONDER: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

“Science is, foremost, a method of interrogating reality --- proposing hypotheses that seem true and then testing them; trying, almost perversely, to negate them, and elevating only the handful that survive to the status of a theory.” – NY Times, 8/15/1999

Scientific theories are not “done deals”. Cherished beliefs (like the wave theory of light) can be overturned by a falsifying experiment (blackbody radiation).
A CREATIONIST’S MANIFESTO

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of thw waters.

And God said, ‘Let there be light: and there was light.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
OR, IN THE MORE MUNDANE WORDS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:

· “Creationists say a divine being created humans and other species,” (presumably on Biblical authority).

· Evolution cannot be observed or replicated in a laboratory, so there is no evidence that it occurred.

· “If we’re just animals in a struggle for survival, … it creates a sense of purposelessness.”

· “Many creationists believe that the Bible shows life on earth cannot be more than 10,000 years old.”
AND SCIENCE TAKES THINGS ON FAITH, TOO!

· Physical laws don’t change over time (so techniques such as radiocarbon dating can be used.).

· Given two explanations for the same pheonomenon, the simpler one is more likely to be true (“Occam’s razor”)

· It is possible (and meaningful) to “explain” things in reductionist terms

Which seems to leave us completely in the dark about how life appeared on Earth!

SOMETHING’S GOING ON!

Suppose we put a monkey to work at a typewriter, pecking randomly at the keys at, say 60 words per minute. Yes, he would eventually type the entire text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (a play of about 20,000 words), but, on average, it would take him 10^180,000 years (much much longer than a billion, billion, billion universes!)

DO I THINK THAT THE EARTH WAS CREATED IN LESS THAN 10,000 YEARS?

If so, God sure has fooled lots of scientists, who think they have compiled museums full of evidence to the contrary!

Is God really that mean spirited?

It is more majestic --- and therefore probably more correct --- to believe in the equally miraculous story that the scientists tell us.

HOW DARE WE

TELL GOD HOW THE NATURAL WORLD MUST HAVE COME TO BE?

EVOLUTION IS A FACT!

Anyone who doubts that living things once existed that no longer exist should check out the lobby of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

WHAT IS AT ISSUE IS THE REASON FOR EVOLUTION “SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST”

(Darwin’s “Natural Selection”)

· Variations in “fitness” occur randomly in a population of living things.

· Fitness variations lead to variations in survival and reproductive success.

· High fitness individuals increase in abundance in population, eventually replacing all lower fitness individuals.

It was a triumph of applied mathematics to prove that even small increases in fitness could become “fixed” in this way.

OTHER EVOLUTIONARY MECHANISMS

· Neutral evolution (“genetic drift”)

· “founder effects”

· co-evolution

· geographical effects

· effects due to multiple copies of genes

· etc.

EVOLUTION AS AN OPTIMIZATION STRATEGY

· “Genetic Algorithms,” or computer programs that mimic evolving biological populations, are powerful strategies in “optimizing” organism design.

· Such programs can be shown mathematically to search for “optimal” organisms in the best way possible.

· Coevolution can occur on a much faster time scale than Darwinian selection.
THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS

· There is some scientific evidence that life on Earth is capable of planet-wide activity.

· Formal similarity between dynamics of coevolving populations and dynamics of “neural networks”.

Is it possible that the Earth as a whole is a single organism capable of development and maturation?

Is there any conceivable experiment that would cause creationists to accept a 4 billion year old Earth or the evolution of human life from a single celled ancestor?

-- N.Y. Times, 8/15/1999

CONCLUSION:

The best science, like the best theology, seeks to open minds, not close them!