Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Evolution and Creationism: A Continuum or a Taxonomy?

Steve Martin over at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution has some thoughts about the NCSE Creation—Evolution "Continuum." This comes originally from an article written in the late 1990s by Eugenie Scott called Antievolution and Creationism in the United States1The NCSE has modified it over time to give ID more prominence. Dr. Scott views the continuum as being a beneficial heuristic in getting students of all ages to understand how complex the controversy really is. Steve is not convinced:
Pointing out these intermediary positions is a good way to help people understand that there is some complexity to this discussion. However, it is my view that this model may actually be counter-productive, particularly when promoting evolution in various faith communities. I believe that those of us that support the coexistence and coherence of evolution and an Evangelical expression of the Christian faith need a much better model if we are to make any progress on this issue within the Evangelical community.
The problem relates to how the continuum is put together in the first place. As Steve points out, Scott assumes a priori that if you are on the bottom of the continuum at the evolution end, you have no faith in God, whereas if you are at the top, you interpret the Bible literally. I am reminded by what Jerry Coyne had to say in his review of Ken Miller's book Only a Theory:
The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.
Steve and others, including myself, would disagree. This is why TEs walk a very thin line. We are castigated by the YEC crowd as having fatally compromised our faith in the acceptance of an old earth and evolutionary theory and yet we are pilloried by the philosophical naturalism crowd who assume we either have to check in our brains at the door when we go to church or that we don't think the Bible is the word of God (Jesus Seminar, anyone?). Steve also suggests that the scientific criterium is incorrect as well, in that it assumes an inverse of the religious criterium. There are other things. It assumes that there is a difference between Theistic evolution and evoutionary creationism, a difference that has certainly never been made clear to me. Also, placing evolutionary creationism right smack against progressive creationism is sort of like sitting in row 6 on an airplane where smoking is permitted in rows 1-5.

In response to the continuum, Steve has devised a new model that sees three positions
  1. theistic evolution
  2. non-evolutionary creation
  3. naturalistic, or materialistic evolution
This is reductionist almost to the extreme. Several benefits and disadvantages become evident. The obvious benefit to those of us that are TEs is that we can take our Bibles and walk toward the back of the plane, away from the non-evolutionary rows. The problem is that the non-evolutionary positions now take up to row 22! Mixing my metaphors here, this is truly "big tent" creationism. The non-evolutionary creation sphere includes everybody from Reasons to Believe, an old earth non-evolutionary site to the folks at fixedearth.com who truly, honestly believe that the earth is fixed and is in the center of the universe (Or maybe I've been had and it is like the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division). In that mix is the Discovery Institute and the ICR who are allies in much the same way that Churchill and Stalin were allies during the Second World War. I posit that the question can be looked at in a different way.

Being a biologist by training, I would suggest that a taxonomic tree is, perhaps, more appropriate for this question. It might look something like this:


Here, those who espouse the YEC viewpoint and those that are TEs can be traced back to a "common ancestor," belief in God. The disadvantage of this model is that it is subject to pigeon-holing people and has, currently, no place for agnostics, although in practice, agnostics split out to the right at the very top. I do not know of a single agnostic that accepts a young earth or progressive creationism. Its strength is that it does show elements of commonality and distinction (plesiomorphic and apomorphic traits, if you will). In this case, acceptance of evolution is convergent in both the "Yes" and "No" camp from the "belief in God" node. Help! I'm starting to sound like a cladist!!

No model will be completely satisfactory and this one has its problems, I am sure. I completely agree with Steve that Eugenie Scott's diagram makes unwarranted assumptions. I also think, though, that his model does not make enough distinctions between different lines of thought. This is by no means a finished product and I invite any and all discussion of this.

9 comments:

  1. As you point out, so many of the public expressions of the "sides" concerning creation and evolution end up clouding instead of clarifying the issues involved. I think a taxonomy as you've described would go a long way in clearing up some of the confusion over whether belief in evolutionary biology/cosmology is ipso facto contradictory to belief in God. I do wonder however, how would ID fit into your taxonomic paradigm? Would they be a sub-set of the progressive creation view?

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  2. Good point. I consider ID a subset of progressive creationism because most of the people who espouse ID are old earth creationists. But here is the problem: people like Michael Behe accepts evolution including common ancestry. He also accepts ID in certain circumstances. Where does he fit? With the YEC crowd, it is very clear-cut. No evolution, no way, ever and no old earth, either. I might modify the "progressive creation, no evolution" box to include ID and also the "theistic evolution" box to include something like "Some ID supporters." The thing I like about the taxonomy is that there are nodes of derived thought and nodes of commonality (technically in cladospeak, it is "primitive"). "I believe in God like they do, but I don't think the earth was created in 6 days, 6 000 years ago." That kind of thing.

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  3. Hi Jim,
    First point: You changed my "Theistic Evolution" to "Evolutionary Creation" ... for someone with "Evolutionary Creationist" in the title of his blog, don't you think that a wee bit ironic :-).

    Your taxonomic diagram makes a lot of sense (although I think you should add an "evolution" yes-no decision after OEC for clarity). I agree this is how some (maybe most?) people make decisions. I guess though someone could be convinced by the evidence for evolution much before having to make the "God" decision. In which case, your tree may still be correct but would not map chronologically from root to leaf - as does the biological tree of life.

    Why our models will look different is that we have different messages to convey. I want to make the evolution question to be the salient question (and I think it is for a host of reasons) and so group all the non-evolutionary creationists into one box – which I confess, as you point out, is a tad unfair to the PC’s. More on this over on my original post - it is probably salient to all my readers as well.

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  4. Steve, Touche. You are correct. I did switch the terms. This is the problem: at one time, it was fashionable to use the term theistic evolutionist for someone who accepted evolution and yet had a Christ-centered belief. Then people objected to the fact that creation wasn't emphasized so out came "evolutionary creationist." I tend to interchange them these days. The other problem, pointed out by Irenicum, is that I have no idea where to stick the ID folks, who seem to be all over the map!

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  5. How's this for a taxonomy that gets us some room from the smoking section? First, divide folks between Concordists and Accomodationists. Concordists think that the science found in the Bible must concord with modern science, or else it is a useless assortment of scribblings. Accomodationists prefer to read the Bible as a book of theology, and accept that where it touches on science, it presents the scientific worldview of the time and place the passage in question was written. Right now we'll assume the Phylum Accomodatia has a single species: Evolutionary Creationist. Here's my taxonomy for the Phylum Concordata:

    Is the earth flat? --[Yes]--> Flat EartherIs the earth in
    the center of --[Yes]--> Geocentristthe universe?

    Is the earth between
    6,000 and 15,000 --[Yes]--> YECyears old?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Do the "days" of
    Genesis represent --[Yes]--> Gap OEC24-hour days?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Did God specially
    create each species? --[Yes]--> Day-Age OEC |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Can the science in the
    Bible be reconciled --[Yes]--> Teleological
    with thetheory of Evolutionist
    evolution?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Atheist

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  6. Shoot! I forgot ID! Here's a revised version:

    Is the earth flat? --[Yes]--> Flat Earther |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Is the earth in
    the center of --[Yes]--> Geocentristthe universe?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Is the earth between
    6,000 and 15,000 --[Yes]--> YECyears old?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Do the "days" of
    Genesis represent --[Yes]--> Gap OEC24-hour days?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Did God specially
    create each species? --[Yes]--> Day-Age OEC |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Are there some bio-
    logical mysteries
    that evolution --[Yes]--> Intelligent
    can't solve, even Designin principle?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Can the science in the
    Bible be reconciled --[Yes]--> Teleological
    with the theory of Evolutionist
    evolution?
    |
    [No]
    |
    V
    Atheist

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  7. "Concordata," I love it. My principle objection is that I am not sure that you necessarily have to arrive at "atheist" at the bottom of that vulgate.I followed myself all the way to that point. What you might end up with is not "concordata" but "accomodata." I am not a concordist because the match between what we see from the fossil record and the days of Genesis don't match up very well. I am, however, anything but an atheist.

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  8. Accomodata is a whole different phylum. That's what gives you breathing room from all those smokers. Atheist isn't at the bottom of Accomodata.

    Also, it appears I've got some major formatting problems above. Preview promised it would look right!

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  9. My understanding of ID is that in theory it is not confined to any specific camp such as YEC, progressive creationism, theistic evolutionist, etc.

    Rather, an ID proponent could fall into any of these camps. What distinguishes ID proponents is the belief that the necessity of an intelligent agent can be empirically verified through scientific discovery (or at least shown to be highly probable). The observed data is considered in light of statistical representations of information theory and complexity. Non-ID evolutionary creationists agree that there is an intelligent creator, but do not believe that this can be established scientifically (God's activity is not to be relegated to the "special" events outside of normal natural processes).

    In practice, it seems that most ID proponents are anti-evolution. Even Behe seems to be wavering in his acceptance of common descent. Whether this is due to pressure from within the ID movement or truly his own wrestling with the evidence is open for debate.

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