Darwin, Design, and Divine Providence

Most theologians today would say no, but the more intimately the idea of Providence is tied to that of “intelligent design,” the more difficult becomes the task of reconciling theology w

12 Darwin, Design, and Divine Providence

John F Haught

To the theist, a central question after Darwin is whether evolution renders implausible the notion of divine Providence Do the rough and ragged fea-tures of the new story of life place in question the idea of a personal God who cares for the world? Most theologians today would say no, but the more intimately the idea of Providence is tied to that of “intelligent design,” the more difficult becomes the task of reconciling theology with evolutionary biology I suspect that much of the energy underlying so-called Intelligent Design (ID) theory, in spite of explicit denials by some of its advocates, is

an achingly religious need to protect the classical theistic belief in divine Providence from potential ruination by ideas associated with Darwinian sci-ence It is impossible not to notice that the advocates of IDT are themselves almost always devout Christian, Muslim, and occasionally Jewish theists It is difficult, therefore, for most scientists and theologians to accept the claim that no theological agenda is at work in the ID movement

It is highly significant, moreover, that scientific proponents of ID, al-though often themselves experts in mathematics and specific areas of sci-ence, are generally hostile to evolutionary theory (Behe 1996; Dembski,

1998, 1999; Johnson, 1991, 1995) The justification they usually give for re-jecting what most scientists take as central to biology is that Darwinism, or neo-Darwinism, is simply a naturalist belief system and not science at all Evolution, they claim, is so permeated with materialist metaphysics that it does not qualify as legitimate science in the first place ( Johnson 1991, 1999) This protest is indicative of a religious sensitivity that recognizes materialism

to be inherently incompatible with theism

Although, as I shall illustrate more extensively, it is clearly the case that contemporary presentations of evolution are often interlaced with a heavy dose of materialist ideology, it is not likely that a concern for science’s methodological purity is the driving force behind ID’s energetic protests against Darwinism Rather, I would suggest, the flight from Darwin is rooted quite simply in an anxiety that his evolutionary ideas may be incompatible

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with any coherent notion of God or divine Providence And the suspicion that Darwinism conflicts with the doctrine of Providence is ultimately rooted

in the ID judgment that Darwinism, if true, would render the notion of intel-ligent design unbelievable Hence the way to defend Providence – by which

I mean here the “general” doctrine that God cares or “provides” for the uni-verse – is to defend design.1Quite candidly, it seems to me that beneath all

of the complex logical and mathematical argumentation generated by the

ID movement there lies a deeply human and passionately religious concern about whether the universe resides in the bosom of a loving, caring God or

is instead perched over an abyss of ultimate meaninglessness

What may add some credibility to the ID preoccupations, rendering them less specious than they might at first seem, is the fact that many evolution-ary biologists (and philosophers of biology) agree that Darwin’s “dangerous idea” does indeed destroy the classical argument from design and that in

so doing it exorcizes from scientifically enlightened consciousness the last remaining traces of cosmic teleology and supernaturalism Since religion,

as the renowned American philosopher W T Stace pointed out long ago, stands or falls with the question of cosmic purpose (Stace 1948, 54), the Darwinian debunking of design – and with it the apparent undoing of cosmic teleology as well – strikes right at the heart of the most prized religious intu-itions of humans, now and always Darwinism seems to many Darwinians – and not just to IDT advocates such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski – to entail a materialist and even anti-theistic philosophy

of nature Michael Ruse even refers to Darwinism as “the apotheosis of a ma-terialist theory” (Ruse 2001, 77) Consequently, it seems to many theists as

well as to many scientists that we must choose between Darwinism and divine

Providence

A straightforward example of this either/or thinking is Gary Cziko’s book

Without Miracles (1995), a work that from beginning to end explicitly places

“providential” in opposition to “selectionist” explanations for all the vari-ous features of life For Cziko, as for many other Darwinians, there isn’t enough room in the same human mind to hold both scientific and theolog-ical explanations simultaneously, so we must choose one over the other In her discussion of sociobiology, Ullica Segerstr˚ale (2000, 399–400) insight-fully comments that Richard Dawkins likewise assumes that in accounting for living phenomena there can be only one “explanatory slot.” And so, if Darwinism now completely fills that single aperture, there can be no room for any theological explanation to exist alongside it

In my own reading of contemporary works on evolution, I have observed time and again a tacitly monocausal or univalent logic (laced with curt ap-peals to Occam’s razor) that inevitably puts biological and providential ar-guments into a competitive relationship To give just one of many possible

examples, in Darwin’s Spectre, Michael R Rose illustrates the widespread be-lief that accounting for life must be the job either of theology or of Darwinism,

but not of both “Without Darwinism,” he claims, “biological science would need one or more deities to explain the marvelous contrivances of life Physics and chemistry are not enough And so without Darwinism science would remain theistic, in whole or in part” (Rose 1998, 211) Clearly, the assumption here is that evolutionary science has now assumed occupancy

of the same explanatory alcove that was formerly the dwelling place of the

gods And now that Darwin has expelled the deities from this niche, there

is no longer any plausible explanatory place left for religion or theology Historically, it is true, religious ideas have often played a quasi-scientific

or prescientific explanatory role, even while also providing ultimate expla-nations But science has now – providentially, we may say – liberated the-ology from the work of satisfying the more mundane forms of inquiry Yet even today, scriptural literalists want religious ideas to fill explanatory spaces that have been assigned more appropriately to science Not everyone em-braces the distinction that mainstream Western theology has made between scientific and theological levels of explanation Cziko’s and Rose’s books, along with the better-known works of Richard Dawkins (1986, 1995, 1996), Daniel Dennett (1995), and E O Wilson (1998), demonstrate that today’s biblical literalists are not alone in assuming that religious and theological readings of the world lie at essentially the same explanatory level as natural science

Only this assumption could have led to the forced option between Provi-dence, on the one hand, and natural selection, on the other Thus, for many evolutionists there is no legitimate cognitive role left for religion or theol-ogy after Darwin, only (at best) an emotive or evaluative one For them, as Rose’s book lushly exemplifies, Darwinism goes best with materialism (Rose

1998, 211) It is not entirely surprising, then, that religiously sensitive souls would balk at evolution if they were persuaded by the words of evolution-ists themselves that Darwinism is indeed inseparable from “materialism” –

a philosophy that is logically irreconcilable not only with intelligent design but also with each and every religious interpretation of reality

If the appeal by biologists to “materialism” were simply methodological, then the ID community would have no cause for complaint By its very na-ture, science is obliged to leave out any appeal to the supernatural, and so its explanations will always sound naturalistic and purely physicalist In many cases, I believe that ID advocates unnecessarily mistake methodological nat-uralism/materialism for metaphysical explanation Alvin Plantinga (1997) even argues that there can be no sharp distinction between methodological and metaphysical naturalism Practicing the latter, he thinks, is a slippery slope to the former But even aside from Plantinga’s questionable proposal, the ID intuition that Darwinians often illegitimately conflate science with materialist ideology is completely accurate The problem is that, like their Darwinian opponents, ID theorists typically accept the assumption that only one “explanatory slot” is available and that if we fill it up completely with

naturalistic explanations, there will be no room left anywhere for theological explanations

Consequently, if the contemporary discussion of the question of Darwinism and design is ever going to penetrate beneath surface accusa-tions, it must consider two questions First, is Darwinian biology unintelligi-ble apart from a philosophical commitment to materialism – a philosophy

of nature that theists everywhere and of all stripes will take to be inher-ently atheistic? That is, does the information gathered by the various sci-ences tributary to evolutionary theory (geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, radiometric dating, biogeography, genetics, etc.) remain unintel-ligible unless it is contextualized within a materialist philosophy of nature? And, second, would the elimination of the notion of “intelligent design”

in scientific explanations of life’s organized complexity logically entail the downfall of a credible doctrine of divine Providence, as both ID theorists and their evolutionary antagonists generally seem to agree would be the case? In the interest of fairness, we owe the IDT advocates a careful consideration of their suspicion that Darwinism is materialist atheism in disguise But for the sake of giving a fair hearing to the full spectrum of theological reflection after Darwin, we should also look at the question of just how vital the notion

of “intelligent design” is to a religiously robust notion of Providence I will now consider each of these two questions in turn

I. is dar winism inherently materialistic?

It is not without interest to our inquiry that in the intellectual world today, critics of theism are increasingly turning for support to Charles Darwin Many skeptics who seek to ground their suspicions about the existence of God in science no longer look as fervently to Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre,

or Derrida as they do to Darwin Especially for those already convinced that science is essentially ruinous to religion, Darwin has become more appeal-ing than ever His portrait of nature’s apparent indifference seems to of-fer more compelling reasons than ever for scientific atheism In fact, for some critics today natural selection provides much more secure grounds for atheism than do the impersonal laws of physics, which had already ren-dered the idea of divine action apparently superfluous several centuries ago Even the renowned physicist Steven Weinberg considers Darwinism to be a much more potent challenge to theism than his own discipline (Weinberg

1992, 246) He singles out the ID enthusiast Phillip Johnson as the most sophisticated example of a theological alternative to Darwin and then pro-ceeds to shred theism by destroying the arguments of one who, at least to Weinberg, speaks most eloquently for belief in God after Darwin (247–8) For many others among the scientific elite today, the ways of evolution are so coarse that even if the universe appears on the surface to be an expression

of design, beneath this deceptive veneer there lurks a long and tortuous

process in which an intelligent Deity could not conceivably have played any role

It is not only the waste, struggle, suffering, and indifference of the evolu-tionary process that place in question the idea of a benevolent providential Deity The three main evolutionary ingredients – randomness, the imper-sonal law of selection, and the immensity of cosmic time – seem to be enough

to account causally for all the phenomena we associate with life, including design The apparent completeness of the evolutionary recipe makes us wonder whether the universe requires any additional explanatory elements, including the creativity of a truly “interested” God We may easily wonder, then, whether we can reconcile the ragged new picture of life not only with the idea of an intelligent Designer but also with any broader notion of divine Providence Darwin himself, reflecting on the randomness, pain, and im-personality of evolution, abandoned the idea that nature could have been ordered in its particulars by a designing Deity It is doubtful that he ever completely renounced the idea of God, since he often seems to have settled for a very distant divine law maker But he gradually became convinced that the design in living beings could be accounted for in a purely naturalistic way After Darwin, many others, including a number of the most promi-nent neo-Darwinian biologists writing today, have come close to equating Darwin’s science with atheism Sensitive to the conflation of Darwin’s sci-ence with philosophical materialism that prominent biologists often make,

ID proponents have drawn the conclusion that Darwinian biology, as evi-denced in the publications of Darwinians themselves, is simply incapable of being reconciled with theistic belief In order to save theism, then, Darwin must be directly refuted

Not only scientific skeptics but also other intellectuals are now making the figurative pilgrimage to Down House in order to nourish their mate-rialist leanings A good example is the noted critic Frederick Crews, who recently published a titillating two-part essay, “Saving God from Darwin,” in

The New York Review of Books (October 4 and 18, 2001) Crews is best known

for his constant pummelling of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas he considers blatantly unscientific But in all of his blasting of psychoanalysis he has never challenged Freud’s materialist metaphysics Crews clearly shares with Freud the unshakable belief that beneath life, consciousness, and culture there

lies ultimately only mindless and meaningless material stuff.

In Crews’s opinion, Darwin has uncovered the ultimate truth to which all intelligent and courageous humans must now resign themselves Referring

to Daniel Dennett’s radically materialist interpretation of Darwin, Crews is convinced that Dennett has “trenchantly shown” that Darwin’s ideas lead logically to “a satisfyingly materialistic reduction of mind and soul” and that evolutionary theory entails a “naturalistic account of life’s beginning” (Crews, October 4, p 24) Even though the materialism and naturalism he

is referring to are really examples of metaphysics and not pure science, for

Crews they have become part and parcel of biology itself Crews, of course,

is not a biologist, but he could easily point to many ideological associates

in the scientific community who share his view that the ultimate “truth” of Darwinism is a materialist and Godless cosmos

This, of course, is exactly the same not-so-subtle message that proponents

of ID have detected in contemporary evolutionary thought Crews upbraids the ID literature for sneaking theology into an explanatory slot that sci-ence alone should inhabit But interestingly, his own comprehension of Darwinism – a conflation of science with materialist metaphysics – is iden-tical to that of his ID opponents In both instances, the idea of evolution

is understood to be inseparable from the nonscientific belief that matter is

all there is and that the universe is inherently pointless – an assumption that is inherently antithetical to theism of any kind For Crews, as well as for numerous biologists and philosophers today, evolution and materialism come as a package deal (see also Dennett 1995) And so the only difference between them and ID disciples is that the latter throw the package away, whereas the former hold onto it tightly Both evolutionary materialists and

ID advocates discern at the bottom of Darwinism a fundamentally pointless universe

We may have good reason to wonder, then, whether the evolutionist alloy

of scientific information and philosophically materialist belief is any closer

to pure science than the conflation of biology with Intelligent Design that

is now the object of so much scientific scorn If ID is advised to keep the-ological explanation (under the guise of an abstract notion of “Intelligent Design”) from intruding into biology, are not Darwinians also obliged to keep whatever philosophical biases they may have from invading their pub-lic presentations of evolutionary science?

Strictly speaking, after all, it is no more appropriate to say that Darwinism

is a materialist theory than it is to say that the theory of relativity is All

science must be methodologically materialist – in the sense that it is not

permissible when doing science to invoke nonphysical causes It is one thing

to hold that evolutionary science provides a picture of nature that supports

a purely materialist philosophy of life, if you happen to have one But it is quite another to claim – as Rose, Cziko, Dawkins, Dennett, and many others

do – that the facts of evolution do not make sense outside of a materialist

philosophical landscape How would we ever know for sure that this is the case? Such a claim is based as much on belief as on research, and it is one that will forever remain logically unsupportable by scientific evidence as such Moreover, there is always the possibility that alternative metaphysical frameworks may turn out to be no less illuminating settings for interpreting evolutionary information (Haught 2000)

For now, however, it is sufficient to note that, strictly speaking, nei-ther Darwinians nor their ID adversaries can logically claim that evolution-ary biology is an expression of materialism Like all other applications of

scientific method, evolutionary biology remains methodologically

natural-istic As such, it makes no formal appeal to the idea of God, purpose, or

intelligence in its own self-restricting mode of explanation But likewise, any inferences that a scientist might make from doing the work of pure science to materialist conclusions about that work is not itself an exercise intrinsic to science The energizing force behind scientism and materialism

is never the purely scientific desire to know, but something quite extrinsic

to science The slippage from methodological naturalism into metaphysical materialism is not justifiable by scientific method itself Logically speaking, therefore, we must conclude that it is not at all evident that evolution nec-essarily entails philosophical materialism

II. is design essential to the idea of providence?

The more intimately the idea of God or “Providence” is associated with “In-telligent Design,” as is implicit in the theological assumptions underlying most of the ID movement, the more it seems that the most efficient way to oppose materialist “Darwinism” is to shore up arguments from design But just how closely do we have to connect Providence with Intelligent Design

in the first place? I shall propose here that the two ideas are quite distinct and that evolutionary biology may cohere quite nicely with a theologically grounded notion of Providence, even if it does not fit a simplistic under-standing of divine design If such a case can be made, then there should

be no reason for theists to oppose evolutionary biology, even if they must oppose Darwinian materialism

There is no denying, however, that to many scientists and philosophers,

as well as to devotees of ID, Darwinian biology connotes a universe empty

of any conceivable divine governance, compassion, or care In view of the obvious challenges that so many sincere skeptics and religiously devout peo-ple perceive to be inherent in evolution, can the idea of Providence now have any plausibility at all? Responses to this question fall roughly into three distinct classes Evolutionary materialism and ID fall together as one, since they both view Darwinian accounts of evolution as incompatible with Provi-dence But there are two distinct kinds of theological response that have no difficulty embracing both conventional biological science and, at the same time, a biblically grounded notion of divine Providence Let us consider each of these in turn

A Theological Response I

Evolutionary science, though perhaps disturbing to a superficial theism,

is no more threatening to theistic faith than is any other development in modern science Science and religion, after all, are radically distinct ways of understanding, and they should be kept completely apart from each other.2

Science answers one set of questions, religion an entirely different one Science asks about physical causes, while religion looks for ultimate expla-nations and meanings If we keep science and religion separate, there can

be no conflict The ugly disputes between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church, and later between Darwin and Christianity, could have been avoided

if theologians had never intruded into the world of science and if certain highly visible evolutionists had refrained from making sweeping metaphys-ical claims about evolution as though they were scientific statements Thus Darwin’s ideas – which may be quite accurate, scientifically speak-ing – carry not even the slightest threat to theism The apparent contradic-tion arises not from the scientific theory of evolucontradic-tion itself, but from the confusion of the biblical accounts of creation with “science” in the case of biblical literalists, the confusion of Providence with intelligent design in the case of ID theorists, and the equally misbegotten confusion of evolutionary data with metaphysical materialism in the case of some evolutionary

scien-tists and philosophers There is no squabble here with the purely scientific

aspects of evolution What is objectionable is the uncritical mixing of evo-lutionary science with nonscientific beliefs, whatever these beliefs may be The “danger” of Darwinism to theism, then, is not so much Darwin’s own ideas but the way in which they get captured by materialist ideologies that are indeed incompatible with theism but that have nothing inherently to do

with scientific truth.

At some point, of course, if we dig toward the deepest roots of life’s designs, we will have to yield to metaphysical explanations But both evolu-tionary materialism and ID move prematurely into metaphysical discourse They reach for ultimate explanations at a point when there is still plenty

of room left for more subtle scientific inquiry into the proximate causes

of the complex patterns evident in living phenomena Darwinian material-ists, therefore, cannot credibly object that ID theorists turn prematurely to metaphysics, since materialism – as a worldview and not just as a method – permeates their own inquiry from the outset, even tacitly helping them to decide what are and are not worthwhile research projects Their materialist metaphysics consists of the controlling belief that mindless “matter” is the ultimately real stuff underlying everything – even if contemporary physics has shown this “stuff” to be much more subtle than was previously thought (One may use the term “physicalist” here if the term “materialist” seems too harsh.) In any case, many evolutionists commit themselves to a physicalist

or materialist creed, and not just to methodological naturalism, long before they ever embark on their “purely scientific” explorations of life So the fact that ID would want to propose a metaphysical framework of its own as

the setting for explaining living design does not, as such, make it any more

objectionable than evolutionary materialism

The real problem, however, is that both ID and evolutionary

material-ism take flight into ultimate metaphysical explanations too early in their

explanations of life One of the lessons that a more seasoned theology has learned from modern science is that we must all postpone metaphysical grat-ification To introduce ideas about God or intelligence as the direct “cause”

of design would be theologically as well as scientifically ruinous A mature theology allows natural science to carry its own methods and explanations

as far as they can possibly go This reserve does not entail, however, that theology is irrelevant at every level of a rich explanation of life Theology

is now freed from moonlighting in the explanatory domain that science now occupies, so that it may now gravitate toward its more natural setting –

at levels of depth to which science cannot reach Theology can now de-vote its full attention to the truly big questions that constitute its proper domain Theology, after all, assumes that there is more than one level of explanation for everything It endorses the idea of a plurality of explana-tions, perhaps hierarchically arranged, such that no discipline can give an exhaustive account of anything whatsoever Any particular explanation, in-cluding the Darwinian explanation, is inevitably an abstraction and needs to

be complemented by a luxuriant explanatory pluralism When it comes to living beings, for example, there is more than one explanatory slot available, though it is entirely appropriate to push scientific explanations (physical, chemical, biological) as far as they can possibly go at their own proper lev-els within the many explanatory layers The main problem with ID is that, ironically, it shares with evolutionary materialism the unfounded belief that only one authoritative kind of explanation is available to us today – namely, the scientific – and so feels compelled to push impatiently a metaphysically and theologically loaded notion of “intelligent design” into a logical space that is entirely too small for it

If there is anything like a providential significance to the historical ar-rival of the scientific method, it may lie in the fact that science has now distanced the divine from any immediate grasp or human cognitional con-trol Darwin’s science, in particular, has removed easy religious access to an

ultimate explanation of design that formerly seemed to lurk just beneath

the surface of living complexity By allowing for purely scientific inquiries into living design, theology can now function at a deeper level of explana-tion, addressing questions such as why there is any order at all, rather than just chaos; or why there is anything at all, rather than nothing; or why the universe is intelligible; or why we should bother to do science at all Today,

as a result of science, the long path from surface design down to nature’s ultimate depths turns out to be much less direct than ID theorists seem to crave

Postponing metaphysics, however, calls for an asceticism that neither ID nor evolutionary materialism is disciplined enough to practice They both try

to arrive at the ultimate foundations of design too soon, pretending to have reached the basement level before even commencing the long journey down the stairs One way of manifesting this metaphysical impatience is to fasten

the phenomenon of living complexity directly onto the cozy idea of divine intelligent design without first looking into nature’s own self-organizing, emergent spontaneity But no less impatient, and prematurely metaphysical, are assertions that design is “nothing but” the outcome of blind natural selection of inheritable variation ID is a “science stopper,” since it appeals

to a God-of-the-gaps explanation at a point in inquiry when there is still plenty of room for further scientific elucidation But invoking the idea of

“natural selection” as though it were an incomparably deep explanation of

life’s design could be called a “depth suppressor.” Evolutionist materialism, not unlike ID, capitulates to the craving for ultimate explanations of life

at a point when the journey into the depth of design may have just barely started

It seems to me that “dreams of a final theory” are as conspicuous among Darwinians today as they are among physicist-philosophers The fantasies of categorical finality among some evolutionary thinkers exhibit a dogmatism

as rigid as that of any creationist Science can have a future, however, only

if its devotees retain a tacit sense of the unfathomable depth beneath na-ture’s surface And this is why any premature appeal to either theological

or naturalistic metaphysics blunts our native intuition of nature’s endless depths, supposing as it does that human inquiry has already arrived at the bottom of it all The deadening thud of metaphysical finality is audible on both sides of the ID versus evolution debate An appropriate theology of di-vine Providence and its relation to nature, on the other hand, abhors such premature metaphysical gratification It sets forth a vision of the world in which science has an interminable future, since nature has an inexhaustible depth Accordingly, the unwillingness of either ID or evolutionary materi-alism to dig very deep into the explanatory roots of life’s organized com-plexity is an insult to the human mind’s need for an endless horizon of intelligibility

If there are still any doubts about the conflation of materialist ideology with biological science, then the following words of Stephen Jay Gould, one

of the most eloquent interpreters of Darwin, should dispel them:

I believe that the stumbling block to [the acceptance of Darwin’s theory] does not

lie in any scientific difficulty, but rather in the philosophical content of Darwin’s

mes-sage – in its challenge to a set of entrenched Western attitudes that we are not yet ready to abandon First, Darwin argues that evolution has no purpose Individuals struggle to increase the representation of their genes in future generations, and that is all. Second, Darwin maintained that evolution has no direction; it does

not lead inevitably to higher things Organisms become better adapted to their local environments, and that is all The “degeneracy” of a parasite is as perfect as the gait of a gazelle Third, Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity (Gould 1977, 12–13, emphasis added)