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Episode 303: How Theistic Evolution Impacts Our Understanding of God with Dr. Tricia Scribner Part One
00:58:51
Jesus said to the Jews of His day that if they really believed in Moses they would believe in Him...
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Daniel Ray
Helping the body of Christ proclaim the truth of Christ in a post Christian world. This is Apologetics Profile. Here is your host Watchman staff apologist Daniel Ray.
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Host/Interviewer
You have problems. Probably heard it said or have seen it written somewhere that evolution by means of natural selection, a theory about the development and diversification of biological species proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, is a thoroughly documented scientific fact. Those who might question this fact, however, are often derisively labeled as fundamentalist creationists or science deniers. Their questions and concerns are not often taken seriously. The belief, for example, that the Book of Genesis is an actual historical account of God's creation of the heavens and the earth and of the first human beings is anathema to modern scientific sensibilities. But it is not just those who identify as non religious evolutionary naturalists who look with an incredulous eye upon the.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
First few chapters of the Genesis There.
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Host/Interviewer
Are many who identify themselves as Christians who embrace evolution by means of natural selection as a fact, and yet who also believe Genesis should not be interpreted literally. Theistic evolution is a term used to describe the confluence of Christian theology and neo Darwinian evolution. The topic we will be examining this week and next on Apologetics Profile is how evolutionary theory conjoined with traditional Christian theology impacts our understanding of God himself. And we want to be clear up front, though, that these episodes will not be questioning the salvation of someone who identifies as a Christian who also accepts evolution. We are not suggesting that if a Christian accepts evolution as a viable scientific paradigm, that their salvation is in jeopardy, or that they are in some sort of cult. But we do want to draw attention to the fact that, increasingly, science holds a great deal of authoritative cultural influence over our lives, to the extent that many attempts have been made to reinterpret the Genesis account of creation to align with contemporary scientific conclusions. As Christian philosopher J.P. moreland notes, Theistic evolution reinforces the authority of science, what Moreland calls scientism, by constantly revising biblical teachings and interpretations because science says so. Thus, by adopting this unbiblical epistemological outlook, theistic evolutionists weaken the rational authority of biblical teaching among Christians and non Christians. As a result, the Bible is no longer regarded by many as a genuine source of knowledge, and fewer and fewer people take the Bible seriously. Moreland's essay can be found on page 633 in the 2017 Crossway publication Theistic Evolution A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. One of the leading proponents of theistic evolution is Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health under President Obama and the overseer of the 15 year project of mapping the human genome, completed in 2003. Collins, in his popular book the Language of God, is suspicious about a literal reading of Genesis. He claims that there is an uncertainty of interpretation regarding the creation account and then asks his readers, is it sensible for sincere believers to rest the entirety of their position in the evolutionary debate, their views on the trustworthiness of science and the very foundation of their religious faith on a literalist interpretation? Even if other equally sincere believers disagree and have disagreed even long before Darwin and his Origin of Species first appeared, I do not believe that the God who created all the universe and who communes with his people through prayer and spiritual insight would expect us to deny the obvious truths of the natural world that science has revealed to us in order to prove our love for him. Note that for Collins, it is the sincere believers who should be suspicious of a literal interpretation of Genesis and that evolution is an obvious truth which no sincere believer ought to deny. But it is not just, Dr. Collins. Consider also the thoughts of physicist Dr. Carl Gibberson, who speaks publicly as a professing Christian on the topics of religion and science. Gibson, like Collins, accepts evolution as a scientific fact, but he also believes the story of Adam and Eve is simply a Myth. In his 2008 book, Saving how to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, Gibberson tells the story of how he went from accepting Genesis as literal history to believing such an interpretation to be ridiculous. The Genesis story of creation loses all contact with natural history and starts to look strangely like an old fashioned fairy tale that might teach a lesson, but certainly makes no claim to history. The literalist interpretation I had formally embraced and defended so vigorously began to look ridiculous. Clearly, the history of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace are hard to reconcile with natural history.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
End quote.
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Host/Interviewer
Professor of biology At Brown University, Dr. Kenneth Miller, a professed Catholic, also accepts evolution. In his 1999 book, Finding Darwin's A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, Miller claims that, quote, evolutionary biology is not at all the obstacle we often believe it to be. In many respects, evolution is the key to understanding our relationship with God. One is left to wonder if evolution is the key to understanding our relationship with God, how every believer up until Darwin's time was supposed to think about God.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Evolution, however, is finally not the key to understanding our relationship with God.
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Host/Interviewer
The Bible is, and the word of God begins with the first five books of Moses, which include the Genesis account.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Of creation and the creation of the first man.
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Host/Interviewer
And woman, Adam and Eve.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
In John, chapter 5, verses 46 and 47, for example, Jesus makes it plain.
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Host/Interviewer
To the Jews of His day of.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
The centrality of Moses witness and authority pertaining to himself.
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Host/Interviewer
For if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
But if you do not believe his.
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Host/Interviewer
Writings, how will you believe my works? We cannot then discard Adam and Eve as mere myth.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
If we finally do not believe what.
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Host/Interviewer
Moses wrote, we are inevitably not going.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
To believe what Jesus says.
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Host/Interviewer
While there are many variations of theistic evolution, as we will see in the episodes this week and next, many who hold to theistic evolution believe that God works through the alleged randomness of nature. In other words, theistic evolution allows nature to have some kind of autonomy from God. Nature has its own powers, forces, and interactions that are somehow independent of God's sovereignty, but that somehow God nevertheless uses these random interactions to bring about his divine will. But this idea of nature having any kind of autonomy from God, that nature acts randomly, unguided on its own, subject to chance and the undirected forces described by natural laws, is anathema to traditional orthodox Christian theology. As theologian Greg R. Allison summarizes, not only did God initially create all things in heaven and earth, both visible and invisible, he also exercises providential care and control over all created things. Such meticulous, exhaustive providence does not allow for randomness, accident, chance, fortune, luck, or fate. On the contrary, while using secondary means to accomplish his eternal purpose, God directs all things teleologically, ruling out all notions of undirected processes at work in this world. Greg's essay can also be found in the 2017 Crossway publication Theistic Evolution. This week and next on Apologetics Profile, we will be talking with Dr. Tricia Scribner, author, former nurse, and Nana to 10 grandchildren. Tricia completed her PhD dissertation later in life, and her thesis examined the philosophical and theological implications of theistic evolution. You can find out more about Trisha and her work by following the link in the notes of this episode. At the outset of our conversation, Trisha made sure to clarify that in examining and critiquing the philosophical and theological issues surrounding theistic evolution that she is not questioning the salvation or sincerity of those Christians who accept accept evolution as a viable scientific paradigm.
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
I'm not questioning that they are a believer, but whether they are consistent. And so that's the issue that all of us have to ask ourselves as we go along in different false teachings morph and can find innocuous seeming ways to enter into the discussion as valid Christian thought, whether it's oneness, theology or, or anything else. So it's just, I, I have the same approach as you, just to remind people that I'm not questioning Christianity and do not desire to hurt or harm my brothers and sisters who hold to this view. Just for us all to consider the implications of what we think and whether we were really thinking like Christ with a, a, an overarching view that is Christian in nature, you know, and basically it's true. That's the thing.
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Host/Interviewer
As we begin part one, I asked Tricia how she became interested in the topic of theistic evolution. Here is Trisha Scribner.
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
I was raised in a Christian, what many people would call theologically fundamentalist family. And so young earth creationism wasn't just taught, it was just assumed. I don't, I didn't know of any other options. I knew something about this evolution idea that we came from monkeys, and that's how it's framed, you know, in the 50s and 60s when I grew up. So I really didn't take any of that seriously. And when I got into college, I was in nursing school and I began to question a lot of things about my faith. Well, fast forward many years to leaving nursing and going into seminary studies. And I was teaching apologetics for 10 years at a Christian high school. And a colleague teacher of mine said that he believed that God created the universe. He just used evolution to do it. So now we have theistic evolutionary model. I'd already been exposed to old Earth creationism. I remember one of my early days in seminary in the early 2000s, that I walked into the class and the professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary said, I'm an old earth creationist. And I thought, oh my goodness, he's an evolutionist. I wonder if his, his leadership knows this. I bet he'd be fired. So you can see that this has been a journey of misunderstanding a lot of things about origins. And still I have so to learn. And I think that we all have to confess that that is the case because we're exploring the actions of the imminent being, so we will always be on a learning curve. And it may be that when I come to join in the presence of the Lord and I ask him about this, he said, trisha, you were all wrong. So that that is possible. And it's possible that others who, who hold to these differing views may also know the Lord as Savior. And we want to make that clear that I'm not questioning whether they are Christians or not, except in the case where there are lines of demarcation that I think cannot be crossed on essential doctrines of the faith. And we'll get into that a little bit more. So after I talked with my colleague many years later and he mentioned theistic evolution, now I have old earth creationism, I have young earth creationism, and I have theistic evolution as an option. And so I began to question some of the ways that I had thought about things and at least ask, you know, is my thinking clear and valid? Is it, Is it, Am I reasoning well about this? And that was one reason I went on to seminary and then eventually entered the PhD program where I decided to pursue this question because I had already had biophilosophical concerns about evolution, that is how things with certain natures change in reality. And I had stumbled. I don't say stumbled in, just in my own effort, but the school that I went to being Southern Evangelical Seminary, is evangelical to the core. And yet for their philosophy of nature, their philosophy of man, of God and their metaphysics, what does it mean to be a thing in the world? That they held to aquinas's view because Dr. Norman Geisler had studied him and found that though we differ with him theologically on several important issues, his philosophy of nature and his metaphysics explained reality, the notion that there is stuff outside the mind that really exists, it's not created by the mind, and gave us categories and ways to study reality that no one else had done, even though it's grounded in Aristotle. And Aristotle's physics was pretty much wrong. He was a man of his times. But his metaphysics served as grounding for. For Aquinas. And then he took that into the Christian in the Christian conversation and, and explored it from there and was a great thinker, in my opinion, one of the greatest thinkers ever to live about the nature of reality. We get so much information. So I studied this in my dissertation. What. What are my concerns about theistic evolution? What are the question that I have about it? And not merely hermeneutically. I had seen a lot of that and we'll touch on that today and not scientifically. I came out of a master of science program, so I'm not a scientist, but I'm a person of science who values the scientific evidence and believe that as a nurse or a nurse practitioner, that when one practices in those capacities, it's founded in. Grounded in scientific findings. So that would be my goal. So I am a person of science who loves theology and also respects the scriptures as inerrant. And so we have to reconcile all this and, and that becomes very anxiety provoking as you struggle through this, especially during your college years. So later when I came into my dissertation work, I studied this and I, I was just excited to find that Aquinas's take on the different ways that living things exist and change and how things, natures enable them to be classified into groups or kinds of things with the same nature. These metaphysical realities, such as things have matter and they have a form and actualizing organizing principle that makes them what those kinds of thinkings of a quote Aquinas I found extremely helpful to give me a framework to deal with my questions about origins. And then I had a question like not only what are the. The biophilosophical concerns, the hermeneutical, the scientific, but what kind of God would use this method to create, use secondary causes, what we might call instrumental causes, living things to cause all things, not just things of their own kind, through normal generation, reproductive, natural, reproductive mechanisms. But also what kind of God uses secondary mechanisms to create all the different kinds of things? Is it consistent with Scripture? Is it consistent with what general revelation reveals to us about this God? So that's how I got to this point of dealing with it in my dissertation. And since I finished my PhD work, I have found increasing numbers of conversations opening up to me because dealing with the questions from a theo philosophical point of view is a little bit different. It's a little bit new, especially in the evangelical circles. In Catholic circles the conversation has been pretty robust. But having this kind of conversation is new to most of us in evangelical circles, at least in the popular world, where we discuss things on podcasts.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Right, right. And so it's interesting because Summa Theologica was 13th century. He was Catholic before there was the Catholic Protestant split, of course, but he is renowned by Catholic thinkers. And yet I just ran across this this morning in preparation for our our chat. And we can build on this a little bit. Pope John Paul II in 1996 said that a half a century after the appearance of the encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. In fact, it is remarkable that this theory has progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers following a discovery in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies, which was neither planned nor sought, constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. So. But officially the Catholic Church is not opposed to.
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Host/Interviewer
But nor do they.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
They're not opposed to it. They don't officially embrace it, but the door is wide open if you're a Catholic, it seems that at least John Paul and even today affirm a confluence of theism, of Christian theism and natural selection. So it's interesting though, that with your approach with Thomas Aquinas and his philosophical position on ontology and divine attributes, how the church is kind of accepting it. But akinus through a kindness, the philosophy of a kindness, you're arguing that theistic evolution is incompatible with traditional orthodox theology. So why don't we start? Trish, you can comment about that. And I wanted to read this quote really quickly from Darwin's autobiography. I've never read this before. I started reading this a couple of weeks ago. In the opening chapter and the opening chapter of his autobiography, Darwin confesses quote. As a little boy, I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. I'd never read that quote. And I thought, I wonder how much that propensity influenced him for the rest of his life. Why don't we start off a little bit, back up and talk about, just briefly, give some clear definitions of what we mean by naturalistic evolution and, you know, theistic evolution and something that I learned from your talk with Fuzzy, the different positions within theistic evolution. Why don't we go from there?
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
Yes, very good. Whenever you talk to evolutionists, most often what I hear initially is that evolutionists just change over time. So that's the most unclear statement I could possibly think of because I want to go, well, what do you mean by change? Because I'm sort of changing over time. I guess I'm evolving. So most of us don't disagree with the notion that things change over time or that that through reproduction there are variations that occ occur. And in fact, intelligent breeders. And when I say intelligent, I mean by that as opposed to naturalistic natural selection. Intelligent breeders have used these variations to produce all kinds of things within a certain kind, but they've not been able to exceed certain genetic limits. So what do you mean by change over time? And if they mean adaptations across generations that make organisms, certain kinds of organisms, more fit for a certain environment, then we don't disagree. No one really disagrees with that. Generally, it's called microevolution, which is really a misnomer if we connect it with the neo Darwinian view, because actually it just means adaptations to specific environments and that over generations these, these genetic features that make organisms more fit for that environment will be reproduced because those organisms will live long enough to reproduce in that environment. So microevolution in my view is just really a misnomer and can add to the confusion since we're just talking about adaptation and variation. There's no real novel or innovative information in the genetic code being passed on. But the real central tenet to evolutionary theory in the Darwinian form. He wasn't the first person to talk about evolution, he was the first person to talk about the specific mechanism. But the central tenet is common ancestry or common descendancy or what he came to call descent with modification. Note now again, this word with modification implies that living organism is just being modified. A certain kind is just being modified. This is what, what Aquinas would call an accidental change. Not like, oh, that occurred on accident, but in a philosophical sense a change to an organism that doesn't change its n. Nature. And so there are a lot of things that happen to organisms that are variations that don't change the nature of what it is. If we have a baby born with syndactyly or polydactyly that fused fingers or digits or an extra, that doesn't make them not a human because we add some accidental, that's an accidental change, a change to the organism that doesn't affect the, the baby's nature at all. The baby's still a human. And in fact many of us have some of these unusual accidental changes within our bodies. And there, there are quite a variety of them actually. So the second tenet, though, beyond common ancestry, that everything descended from this one common organism that probably originated in that primordial soup somehow. The, the second tenet is the mechanism. And of course this is where Darwin's innovation came in. He's the one who first proposed the mechanism. How does it happen? Well, he says, well nature can so called select just like intelligent breeders do. And he and nature select based on random variation. And then once Mendel came in, we recognized and began to see that a lot of these variations that we're talking about, these are connected to the genetic code. And so genetic mutations, genetic variations, and nature selects the ones that are best suited to the environment. And those organisms in that kind live to reproduce. And then the final piece of the mechanism is the genetic mutation itself, which occur. These changes in the genetic code modifications, not addition, not new DNA added, but whatever is already there get shuffled around. Okay, and these mutations then are what natural selection supposedly acts upon. And now notice the verbiage that Darwin effectively uses. Nature acts. And now mother Nature is personified like a human intelligent breeder, see. And so he makes it very usable and digestible. By his audience. Now, I don't know that he's intended to do anything evil. He's just a very effective communicator in explaining his view. And, and I re, I respect that, although I think that it caused a great deal of confusion for those who don't understand genetics, and especially during his time when that wasn't even in the discussion. So now we have neo Darwinism version of evolution which includes the genetic component as part of the variation. Then final tenet of evolution is gradualism. And like Dawkins says, without gradualism, it, it won't work. This has to be over billions of years. Some scientists would even argue that the billions of years we argue for the sum 14.3 for the universe are not enough. So this gradualism also includes not just time, but these step by step, tiny, imperceptible incremental changes that occur over these vast eons. And so we have the, the notion of change, the notion of what kind of change would be not only quantum quantitative in numbers, accumulation of changes, but changes in kind across what most would call species. I think it's more likely at the family level in the Linnaean taxonomy for most of them. But we have common ancestry, natural selection acting on random mutations as the means, and gradualism for the time by which it. Over which it occurred.
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Daniel Ray
You can help support Apologetics profile by becoming a patron of the podcast@patreon.com watchmanfellowship that's patreon.com watchman fellowship.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
I learned something from Richard Dawkins. In preparing for a conversation I wanted to. It was fascinating to me. Dawkins quotes Darwin, but he notes, he makes a little side note here. And he says that in the original Origin of Species, Darwin omitted or did not use the word metaphorically in the following quote. So Dawkins quotes to your point about personification of nature, Darwin says, it may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world the slightest variations, rejecting those that are bad and preserving and adding up all that.
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Host/Interviewer
Are good, silently, insensibly, working whenever and.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. But in subsequent editions after 1859, Darwin said it may be metaphorically said. Apparently that was added to assange some of Darwin's critics who were accusing Darwin of attributing too much in the sense of personification of nature. But I think that's, that's really at the heart of this, Trish, is the, if you, if you leave God out. If nature has some autonomy, nature still requires some kind of power, some kind of mechanism in order to, to progress in, in the sense that Darwin suggested. But so building on what you've just said there, why don't we fairly represent. And I didn't know this until I listened to your broadcast with fuzz, that there are actually nuances within what we would call theistic evolution or evolutionary creationism, as sometimes it's called. And you got these From Gerald Rao's 2012 book Mapping the Origins Debate, which I started reading. It's very helpful, immensely helpful in separating without polemics, just giving a, a clear and concise view of these things. So why don't we talk about the different kinds of theistic evolution that exist? And this is basically, as I understand it, the general umbrella of it all is that God is somewhere in this process. Though there are differing views on whether or not this God has a purpose or how much he is involved or is not involved. So why don't you lay out those distinctions for us?
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
Theistic evolution, as you point out, isn't a monolithic view. And that was something new to me as well. And of course it makes it far more complicated. So how do you divide up a view? Think of, think of progressive creationism or what we call Old Earth creationism. There are subcategories under that. You could have the gap theory. You could have. There's an intermittent theory where the Creation occurs in 24 hour time slots, but there are great eons between them. There is the progressive day age view which is held by reasons to believe in Hugh Roth. So there are different categories and one Old Earth creationist will disagree with another Old Earth creationist. While all of them hold to the geological timetable and certain features that they would hold in common that would allow them to be grouped under old Earth creation. Now I find younger creationism to be a little bit more homogeneous than old Earth. Now then we come to theistic evolution and the same thing happens. That is, first of all we have to make a, a clear demarcation between naturalistic evolution and theistic. Right. The one of the challenges for theistic evolution is simply the fact that to tackle God to this notion of evolution implies there's some organized directedness, teleology we would call it, to this evolutionary process which is a random process. So at least the genetic variations and mutations are randomly occurring. And actually nature isn't scrutinizing. The things in nature are simply responsive. They're not directing anything or choosing anything. Whatever is most fit survives, period. The End. That's the whole story. It's not headed anywhere. In fact, it's not done with humans. Okay, so that's the notion of evolution. And so one of the most fundamental arguments about it is that you, you can't grant teleology by adding God onto this mechanism that is random, so purposeful and random. That is an oxymoron. So some would argue that. However, we do know, even Aquinas would concede that God works through chance. It's just that the, the possibilities that are possibilities or random to us are not to God. And so there's a distinction there between how we experience the world and how God acts. So when you ask the average Christian what they mean by theistic evolution, they just say, I believe God created the universe, I just believe he used evolution to do it. They seem to think that saying those two together, that I just believe God used evolution to do it, has no more import to it than the plain statement, well, God just could use this other way. And in fact, I'm in a dialogue on reasons to believe. The comments section of my presentation I did with them a few weeks ago on theistic evolution. And that's one thing the guy keeps coming back to. Well, there's no reason God can't. Well, I just told you the reason that it can't be that way. If this is true, then this cannot be true. So we have to, we have to dig into the way that we are thinking and be willing to scrutinize it and study a little bit. So three categories are what Rao Rau, who is a biologist, identified, but others, like the harmas of biologos, which is the flagship organization for theistic evolution or what they call evolutionary creation. So the horseman, Deborah Harzma, has, and her husband have identified several categories. So you don't have to just use routes. But I found his useful for me. And so that's the one that I used. And that categorizes the views into three different models, so to speak. The first one being planned evolution. People like Dennis Lamar, Francis Collins, Carl Gibberson all hold to planned evolution, which would mean that God embedded in the initial instantiation, whatever those initial conditions were, all the information that is needed to produce all living things from the beginning to now. Now we know that, yes, if I.
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Host/Interviewer
Can just interject really quickly with a.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Simple example in my own head just to make sure I'm clear with the planned evolution, maybe a simple analogy, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but as I was reading about this, it seemed like this argument is, you have a pair of dice, you roll the dice. It seems like everybody at the table who's watching this, it seems like your role is random, but you've made cheat dice, you've made the dice to come out to turn up sevens or something like that. So it looks random to us, but, but the one who made the dice loaded the dice so that it, it turns up in the way that I wanted them to turn up. But to the audience it looks random. Is that a planned evolution?
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
So, so you're, you're talking about the distinction between and what we mean by random. Some people who are open theists think God doesn't know either. Okay. Process theologians would go even further and say he's caught up in the evolutionary process and he's changing along with it. But yes, generally speaking, what we're saying is we are. We don't even have to deny that what God works through random processes, but what appears as random to us in his eternality. If you hold the classical attributes of God, that he exists apart from space, time and matter aren't random to him. Now for planet for planned evolution, what they would to get to that and not stay with the notion of randomness so much. But planned evolutionists believe God did plan everything out. Okay. And it may appear random to us, that's true. But the main point here is that he, he instantiated all that's needed in the initial conditions, all the information that would just play out in the evolutionary process over billions of years, and then he left it to run solely on the natural mechanisms. Now for many then this leads toward the criticism of being a deistic point of view, not a theistic one. If it's just running, all of natural history is accomplished to date by the natural unfolding through natural mechanisms, because God embedded all the information in initial reality. If you read the book Theistic Evolution where Stephen Meyer speaks on this, he will give you a good explanation, which I can't and won't, on why that's not even possible information wise, that it can't be preloaded like that. I'll leave that discussion to his expertise because what we want to see is that in the planned evolutionary view there are certain consequences and we'll want to talk about those in just a minute. The problems we see with it. But let's just make sure that we're talking about it's all the initial information is embedded in the initial condition by God and then it plays out all the major transitions and most would even say to the point of the first living things, even though Darwin didn't deal with that per se. Across the major transitions, Buzz talks about the emergence of eukaryotes at the cellular level and then at the emergence of humans with the image of God. All of this occurred through natural mechanisms. Okay. That's the planned evolutionary view.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
So you could say, you could say.
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Host/Interviewer
God had a purpose.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Yes, but he did not intervene.
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
And no, I think so. You're almost there. But I just want to be careful that I don't misconstrue there. They're saying, they're saying God governs all of that. He's the one who planned it. And unfailingly his will is accomplished. So I want to make sure that when we say he, he, what they would say is he's not a tinkering meddler. He didn't interfere to create certain kinds. They would consider that an interference and that actually his intelligence is better revealed through the fact that he didn't interfere to tweak it.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Okay, so there is a deistic, as you said a minute ago, a deistic superintendence, but not divine intervention in creating deer and turtles and salamanders and giraffes.
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
Yes, direct. Direct.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Gotcha.
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
Because he did so. He so beautifully orchestrated it from the beginning. That's how they would word it. So I just, I, I agree and I'm seeing your point. I just want to make sure I don't misconstrue what they're saying because see it as magnifying God, God's glory, not obscuring it, as I see that. Right.
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Co-Host/Interviewer
Francis Collins says that God's intelligence is more clearly glorified because he chose, he chose nature to run itself, basically. That shows expertise and genius, like Henry Ford making Model Ts that reproduce themselves, you know, sans any intelligent agency. So that, that is a, that is often, probably, would you say Trish, the most common theistic evolutionary position, at least the most widely known.
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Dr. Tricia Scribner
I would have thought so years ago, but now I'm noticing more and more moving to directed evolution. And I could be wrong about that. So my, my perception of this may be wrong, but it seems to me more and more as we realize the problems with planned evolution. They're, they're, they are invoking God at certain points. But there was one other I wanted to make sure.
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Host/Interviewer
Oh, sure.
- [41:46]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
The deistic question for planned evolution. We might say they are deistic leaning. They wouldn't say that in, in the Natural History. But planned evolutionists like Dennis Lemaru will say they. I'm an evolutionist. I believe in Jesus. I do not question their actual conversion and faith in Christ and, and their love of the Lord. For those who, who hold that, I think that they're wrong. But, but they are sincere in, in this belief.
- [42:21]
Host/Interviewer
Sure.
- [42:21]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
Don't think they've examined it. So they wouldn't be deistic in human history. Many of them affirm, in fact all the ones I know affirm Christ's resurrection. So let's just be careful to clarify that for me. The problem I see is that for evolution, where is the demarcation line between natural history and human history confluent? So especially if you think that, then like Carl Gibson says, and I'm not attributing certain beliefs to all planned evolutionists, you know, as we study, we make more nuanced.
- [42:59]
Host/Interviewer
Sure.
- [43:00]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
Inroads into our thinking. But, but I, but I am saying Carl Gibson says sin arose mysteriously. The fall never happened. Sin has never not been. There's no necessary historical adamant Eve, you know, so how did. And yet we supposedly are image bearers, but that happened materialistically. How in the world do you even reconcile materialistic occurrence or emergence of the image of God? So these to me are huge problems with planned evolution if you don't allow that God intervened at any point. Which gets us to the second view. Directed evolutionists. Directed evolutionists believe that God intervened at some point in the evolutionary process. So they hold a common ancestry or they allow for common ancestry and don't have a problem with it. So sort of like Pope Pius did and then Pope Benedict held another council, I believe in 2006, on the. After John Paul II did what you were talking about, which allowed for evolution, he doesn't see any conflict in it.
- [44:14]
Host/Interviewer
So right.
- [44:15]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
Where God intervened is the main distinguishing factor that I found. Michael Behe, for instance, who was open to common ancestry, never thought of him as a theistic evolutionist per se, but he's open to common ancestry. But he would argue on his irreducibly irreducible complexity argument that God had to have intervened to make certain genetic mutations occur that would not have otherwise occurred through natural mechanisms. So that would be, we might say it in a philosophical way, actualizing certain low probability events.
- [44:52]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [44:52]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
In the genetic mutations. That might be how he worded it. And Darwin's black box, he talks about the things Darwin didn't know. So he very much thinks that God had to have intervened. And he does this from a scientific standpoint because the, the it's not possible. It's so highly improbable. That it could possibly occur through natural mechanisms. Others would argue that God intervened at the occurrence of what they call first life. And I like to be careful in my wording here. We're not talking about first life, we're talking about first living things. Life never exists in reality. Living things exist in reality. So what you're saying is if you believe that living things emerge from chemical things naturally, then you have a natural listic view which would be called abiogenesis. If you believe that God did it, then that's a theistic evolutionary view which would say that God caused this to happen and, and it couldn't have otherwise happened this chemical to biological transition without God's direct intervention. And then others would argue that God's direct intervention is most clearly seen or may be confined to the instilling of the image of God into hominins. And so some of them believe in a historical Adam and Eve that are drawn from a larger population precursors. And God instills in that couple or that group his image, the human soul. Okay. And this would be the juncture for them that God intervenes. So you can see for directed evolutionists there's, it's kind of a catch all for anyone who believes God intervened at any point. And Rao admits this in my conversation with him, that this is a catch all group. And so he may have done some refining on it since then, but, but anyone who believes that God at certain points did directly intervene, and when I say directly, I can only think supernaturally immediately, maybe those would be good synonyms. But then my question arises, okay, then why is it a big deal to think that he intervened supernaturally to create? Maybe, maybe at the family level or somewhere thereabouts. It might vary. I don't think there's a tight, a tight comparison between the Linnaean taxonomy and what we refer to as kinds in the Bible. But intuitively we know kinds. Dogs, cats, we can figure that out. But why not? What's the big deal then to say that God intervened at those junctures? So to me the directed evolution is actually undercut his own thesis and planned evolutionists do not believe directed evolutionists are true theistic evolutionists.
- [47:54]
Daniel Ray
Be sure to check out Watchman Fellowship's comprehensive profile notebook, a continually updated resource containing all of Watchmen's four page profiles on new religious movements, the cult cults, new age spirituality and relational non Christian doctrines and practices. Visit watchman.orgbookbook for more information.
- [48:20]
Co-Host/Interviewer
As with all of these Trish, there is a lot of nuanced in house debate among the natural evolutionists and among the theistic evolutionists. I actually had an opportunity to talk to Deborah Harzma several years ago. We conversed about this line of demarcation, as you said a minute ago, and I found it difficult to comprehend. I'm not saying, to be fair to Deborah and her husband, I'm not. It was, it was very difficult for me to understand. To the points you're making here, what does God's intervention look like? And why is it okay over here? Not over, not okay over here. Is there some kind of natural law that prevents God from intervening in his own affairs? You know, these, these kind of distinctions create, as you, as we'll talk about here in a minute, a lot of philosophical and theological difficulties. Now this third one was really interesting to me. Non teleological evolution, which in a nutshell suggests that God is involved somehow but without any particular purpose or intervention. And it's hard for me to conceptualize God doing something and then saying, well, God didn't have a purpose in doing that. Maybe like I tripped over or slipped on a sock in my bedroom, I didn't intend to do it, but I did it. And maybe that's something like what non teleological evolution is. Why don't you explain that a little bit more than I, better than I could.
- [49:47]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
Okay. Teleology, of course, for our listeners who aren't familiar with this language, and many of yours are because you discuss these topics, but we're talking about purpose, directedness, and all things in the world have a directedness about them. Even the grass growing an acorn grows into an oak tree, nothing else. So, and, and we would, in our understanding of God, as Christians say, that throughout history, through the Gospels, through the Scriptures, all of us have believed that God is purposeful in everything that he does. In fact, we know how history is going to culminate. He gives us a, a good, not, not the details, but he gives. He. We know how it's going to end, okay, because it's already prophesied how it's going to end and how we should live in light of how it's going to end and that God's will is going to be fulfilled unfailingly. He is sovereign. So this notion is very alien. And I would argue that this is not even the theistic God, although someone like John Haught, you would read him, and he would argue that he is a Christian, but he wouldn't see it as a weakness of God. He would see it as God is more of the future pulling us along. But if you're a panentheist in thinking you believe that God had. Has only not a. An infinite aspect of his being, but also a finite aspect. And many process theologians kind of hold to this more panentheistic view of God. Not that God is the universe, but he has the finite aspect to his being. And that aspect is caught up in the evolutionary process, sort of just pulling things along. But if you ever use the word pulling, it still events is this notion of drawing toward what you know. So. So I struggle with that view and I did not. I don't usually even include it in my discussion. So. Because it is so far afield, and I do think that someone holds to that view, not only does not hold to the essential core doctrines of the Christian faith, but not even to theism. Yeah, because let's be honest here, we're talking about theistic evolution, but there are at least three major world views, world religions that are theistic, Islam, Christianity, and orthodox Judaism. So we're focusing on the Christians, you know, the. The Christians. That's what I'm concerned with. So it's not even just theistic evolution. It's the Christian version of theistic evolution I'm concerned with because I'm talking to Christians and asking them to think through their thoughts and commitments on origins and where the line of orthodoxy is. And I personally am convinced that it is at this notion that God used evolutionary processes for hermeneutical reasons, scientific reasons, theological reasons, and philosophical reasons.
- [52:58]
Co-Host/Interviewer
Well, let's get into Trish. Now you've outlined. We've got a nice working summary of what evolution is, what theistic evolution is, and the nuances within that and the complexities of those discussions. Let's get into some of the problems that you believe and have seen in your research that have been engendered by a sort of confluence of Darwin thinking and of traditional orthodox Christian theology. I know when Darwin was on the beagle in the 1830s, he read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. And I know from a private letter that is often quoted by people who are anti evolution that Lyell, in his own words, hoped to free the sciences, specifically geology, to free the science from Moses. And so it wasn't like Lyell or Darwin had actually discovered something new. More like what they did was just try to presuppose or create a new presupposition for how to look at rocks and living things. And so it seems like, I mean, I know it's hard to delve into the motives of men who lived 200 years ago. But it does seem like at the outset, Trish, that this has got a theological basis to it, even if it's anti theology. The theology is intricately wrapped up up in this discussion. And so I think it's pertinent for us to discuss some of the theological implications and issues that exist in terms of this. I heard a quote recently from somebody that said, you know, well, you hear it often in apologetics in Christian circles, the Bible's not a science textbook. And of course not, it's not. But then what usually follows is well, it's not a science textbook, so we shouldn't use the Bible for or against evolution. It doesn't say so we shouldn't use it. But then when you say that, then that just kind of opens the door for well, any scientific theory is, is acceptable. There's no particular theological ramifications we need to worry about. The Genesis is silent on natural selection. So it's okay if you want to.
- [55:10]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
Believe that what you've done then is divorced your faith from science from then reason and from reality if you take it to its limits. How I respond to that, when someone says that the Bible is not a science book, I would agree with them that it's not a science textbook because that is not its purpose, but in all scientific claims it makes, it is true. The Bible is not a history book, but in all historical claims that it makes it is true. So that's where I go with that. And in fact, in my dialogue in the comments section on my interview with rtb, that's exactly my dialogue with someone who's commenting on there because he said exactly that the Bible is not a science book. But to say it's not a science textbook because that's not its purpose, or that it's not a history book because that's not its purpose is accurate because both of those are theologically motivated. In other words, science began as a means to understand the ordered world as God created it. Without Christians, science wouldn't have even gotten his foot off the ground. The scientific revolution so we as Christians, and I'm going to say evangelical Christians, believe that the science, the the word of God is inerrant in all that it claims, not all that it records because it describes some, it describes lies. It also uses figurative language. We don't deny that for portions of Genesis 1:3 that figurative language being used does not require that it be mythical or mythological. Those are two different things. I can say my husband's hair is as white as snow and it is. And I don't. I'm using metaphorical language, figurative language. But I have a real husband and he has real hair, and it really is white. Okay, so I'm saying something about reality using figurative language. My husband isn't figurative. See the distinction?
- [57:39]
Co-Host/Interviewer
Yeah. CS Lewis makes this point. He says the best way, you get.
- [57:43]
Host/Interviewer
Closer to the heart.
- [57:43]
Co-Host/Interviewer
I'm paraphrasing him. But you get closer to the heart of the heart or the truth of the nature of reality by using metaphors that are accurate.
- [57:52]
Dr. Tricia Scribner
Yes.
- [57:53]
Co-Host/Interviewer
The more your metaphors can be all over the place. But, but, but that's how we get this is like that. This is like that. And that seems to be what Jesus's teachings are. His parables. The seed is like this. The kingdom of heaven is like, you know, and so. So the best we get closer to the heart of the truth about reality when we're. We're using good metaphors. So white is. Snow is one of those common ones. Oh, we get that because snow is blindingly white when the sun is out. So yeah, I totally agree with you.
- [58:27]
Daniel Ray
Apologetics Profile is a production of Watchmen Fellowship, a non profit Christian apologetics ministry focused on interfaith evangelism and discernment. For more information, visit our website@watchman.org that's watchmen.org.