Scot McKnight, at beliefnet.com, has a fairly thoughtful and irenic contribution to the creation/evolution debate. Since thoughtful and irenic contributions are rare to the point of nonexistence these days, I've made a point of avoiding the debate entirely over the last decade. I can't see that anything useful is accomplished in rehashing old arguments, and for the most part it's just a philosophical and religious disagreement ("How does God exercise supernatural agency?") pretending to be a scientific disagreement. That annoys scientists, who can't figure out why they aren't "winning" as they fight an essentially endless scientific war.
In my opinion, the scientific arguments for evolution are persuasive to the extent that you accept the premises of a naturalistic worldview. Evolutionary biology is the best we can do, subject to the boundary conditions placed on the project of natural history in secular academia. So there's nothing wrong, I think, with giving evolutionary biologists a lot of credit for being clever at playing the game they insist that everyone ought to play: How best can we explain the world, if God is a passive or absent agent?
At the same time, I think we can give a lot of credit to believers who, a priori, insist that God can't be a passive or absent agent, and feel an obligation to invent a decisive role for Him in natural history that reflects the centrality of God as Creator in Christian theology. Subject to that boundary condition on the project of natural history, I think that the modern ID movement is doing about they best they can, at devising a theory that does justice both to an active and essential role for God, while otherwise giving science a great deal of autonomy to discover truths (say, how to cure cancer) that are unconstrained by that condition.
Finally, I'd even say that fairly "pure" fundamentalist organizations (like Answers in Genesis) are doing about the best job that they can do, subject to the far more restrictive condition of a concordist reading of the Genesis creation narratives. In some respects I respect them the most, since they're attempting the hardest project. Whether it's a necessary project or not, of course, is very much a matter of debate, but once you decide it is, then I don't think you could vastly improve on catastrophism as a paradigm for understanding the past.
My own opinion is that the scientific data set is too small to usefully distinguish between these competing epistemologies, so I've given up trying. I'm not persuaded by arguments that evolution is so improbable that it becomes necessary to believe in God. But at the same time, it's impossible to prove (barring time travel) that God didn't employ some form of supernatural agency to (say) manipulate the human genetic code at some arbitrary point in the past, so really we're always just going to find ourselves debating theological assumptions rather than science. The scientific debate is a smokescreen.
Anyway, I'd like to take a stab at answering McKnight's question, speaking as both a Christian and a physics professor. What are some of my barriers to actively embracing evolution, as opposed to claiming agnosticism and opting out of the debate entirely? (Incidentally, all my points are made in favor of humble agnosticism, rather than in favor of strongly rejecting evolution.)
- The eschatology problem: Christianity demands a strong commitment to a vision of the future that involves a miraculous restoration of the entire cosmic order, not just the rescuing of human souls to an incorporeal heaven. That means that the future can't be the slow entropic death suggested by most current models of cosmology, nor the alternative of a "Big Crunch". It must be something distinctly supernatural. It's philosophically inconsistent, in my mind, to hold rigidly to a naturalistic explanation of the past, and yet have a fiercely supernaturalistic vision of the future. At some point, I fear, the commitment to the former will drive theistic evolutionists to deny the latter.
- The narrative theology problem: God's involvement in natural history, it seems to me, should be identifiably similar to God's involvement in human history. They should display a common modus operandi. In human history, God is a more hidden participant for long periods, but then steps strongly into history to accomplish decisive action. This occurs most drastically in the example of redemption from sin. I don't see any good reason to insist that God endowed the natural world with a seamless "functional integrity" from the moment of creation, capable of running itself, while at the same time having a reading of human history that involves us being totally dependent on God's periodic outside agency to rescue us from sin.
- The "we've already crossed that line" problem: Since recent divine activity (the creation of the Church, for example) has already influenced the natural world (for better or worse, since some Christians both do environmental harm, but some also work to repair it), it can be argued that God has changed history in such a way as to alter the "natural" development of speciation quite recently. The effects that humans, including Christian humans, exert on the environment, suggests that God could have allowed other beings under his direct influence to change natural history also. (Angels, or maybe even extraterrestrials from another galaxy, if you don't mind being fanciful!) This provides an inoffensive mechanism for similar interventions in natural history in the more distant past.
- The essentially relational nature of God: The Biblical record depicts a God who is constantly interested in strong communion with creation. Evangelicals, in particular, speak about God as wanting a "personal relationship" with human beings, and also a desire to bring us into conformity as bearers of the divine image. This implies a strong teleological constraint on history. If there is an ultimate purpose to creation, it does not appear sensible to me to believe that God would wait for several billion years before beginning to structure or influence history toward that end. For example, I think the emergence of intelligent life is a necessary, rather than a contingent, characteristic of the cosmos. Imposition of that constraint amounts to exclusion of many (probably infinitely many) physically possible universes. To me, exclusion of alternate states of the universe represents a very strong form of supernatural agency, regardless of the mechanism by which it is accomplished.
None of these are, to me, arguments against the idea that evolutionary biology might locally be an explanation for some features of the natural world. They are only arguments against a strong philosophical demand that
only naturalistic mechanisms are consistent with the behavior of the God of traditional Christian theology.
