The believer

A lot of scientists say religious faith is irrational. Your fellow biologist Richard Dawkins calls it "the great cop-out." How do you respond to these critics of religion?

Certainly this has been one of the more troubling developments in the last several decades. I think that commits an enormous act of hubris, to say -- because we're now so wise about evolution and how life forms are related to each other -- that we have no more need of God. Science investigates the natural world. If God has any meaning at all, God is outside of the natural world. It is a complete misuse of the tools of science to apply them to this discussion.

So God is outside of space and time?

I would say so. And God is certainly outside of nature. So for a scientist to say, "I know for sure there is no God," seems to commit a very serious logical fallacy. Frankly, I think many of the current battles between atheists and fundamentalists have really been started by the scientific community. This is an enormous tragedy of our present time, that we've given the stage to the extremists.

Why do you say those arguments have been started by scientists? Because some of these scientists -- like Dawkins -- have said the theory of evolution leads to atheism?

That's been a very scary statement coming back towards the religious community, where people have felt they can't just leave that hanging in the air. There has to be a response. If you look at the history of the intelligent design movement, which is now only 15 or 16 years old, you will see that it was a direct response to claims coming from people like Dawkins. They could not leave this claim unchallenged -- that evolution alone can explain all of life's complexity. It sounded like a godless outcome.

So, one response then is simply to dismiss evolution -- to say it doesn't hold up as science.

I think that's what many well-intentioned, sincere believers have done. The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept. Evolution is about as solid a theory as one will ever see.

Obviously, you're saying you should not read the Bible literally, especially the story of Genesis.

That also seems very threatening to many believers who have been led to believe that if you start watering down any part of the Bible, including a literal interpretation of Genesis One, then pretty soon you'll lose your faith and you won't believe that Christ died and was resurrected. But you cannot claim that the earth is less than 10,000 years old unless you're ready to reject all of the fundamental findings of geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry and biology. You really have to throw out all of the sciences in order to draw that conclusion.

Intelligent design is a more sophisticated critique of evolution. And the core argument is that certain natural phenomena, such as human blood clotting and the eye, are irreducibly complex; you can't get these through incremental genetic mutations. What's wrong with this argument?

It's a very interesting argument, but I fear there's a flaw. The intelligent design argument presumes that these complicated, multi-component systems -- the most widely described one is the bacterial flagellum, a little outboard motor that allows bacteria to zip around in a liquid solution -- that you couldn't get there unless you could simultaneously evolve about 30 different proteins. And until you had all 30 together, you would gain no advantage. The problem is it makes an assumption that's turning out to be wrong. All of those multi-component machines, including the flagellum, do not come forth out of nothingness. They come forth very gradually by the recruitment of one component that does one fairly modest thing. And then another component that was doing something else gets recruited in and causes a slightly different kind of function. And over the course of long periods of time, one can in fact come up with very plausible models to develop these molecular machines solely through the process of evolution as Darwin envisaged it. So intelligent design is already showing serious cracks. It is not subject to actual scientific testing.

This is what's often called "the God of the gaps." You use God to explain certain things that science can't explain. You're saying these arguments end up hurting religious people because once science does explain these things, it discredits religion.

And that has happened down through time. When God is inserted in a place where science can't currently provide enough information, then sooner or later, it does. My God is bigger than that. He's not threatened by our puny minds trying to understand how the universe works. And He didn't design evolution so that it had flaws and had to be fixed all along the way. My God is this amazing creator who at the very moment that the Big Bang occurred, already had designed how evolution would come into place to result in this marvelous diversity of living things.

Well, this gets at what I think is actually the more serious challenge that evolution poses to religious faith -- the whole business of random genetic mutations. Certainly, many evolutionists have argued that there is no inherent meaning to the course of evolution. It could end up any which way, and the fact that human beings ever evolved was blind luck. Without the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, it seems unlikely that large mammals, and eventually humans, would have ever evolved. Isn't this a problem for religion?

I don't think so. I can see the arguments that you just voiced and why they trouble people. But they are based upon the idea that God has the same limitations that we do. We cannot contemplate what it is like to be able to affect the future, the present and the past all at once. But God is not so limited. What appears random to us -- such as an asteroid hitting the earth -- need not have been random to Him at all. And in that very moment of creation, being as He is, outside of the time limitations, he knew everything, including our having this conversation. As soon as you accept the idea of God as creator, then the randomness argument essentially goes out the window.

Are you saying that God set the natural laws in motion so that somehow, billions of years later, humans would evolve? There was intent, there was purpose to humans evolving, and God made it so?

That is part of my faith -- to believe that God did have an interest in the appearance, somewhere in the universe, of creatures with intelligence, with free will, with the Moral Law, with the desire to seek Him.

Is this to say that God set in motion the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs so that human beings could eventually evolve?

Oh goodness, that's getting into more specific details than I would dare to imagine. But I would say that God had a plan for creatures like us. Need they have looked exactly like us? Does "in His image" mean that God looks like us and has toenails and a belly button? Or is "in His image" an indication of the spirit, the Moral Law, the sense of who we are, the consciousness? In which case perhaps it didn't matter so much whether that ended up occurring in mammals or some other life form.

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