Book Information

Book ID Asin: 1433552868
Book Title: Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique
Book Author: J. P. Moreland,Stephen C. Meyer,Christopher Shaw,Ann K. Gauger,Wayne Grudem,Steve Fuller,Douglas Axe,C. John Collins,John D. Currid,Guy Prentiss Waters,Gregg R. Allison,Fred G. Zaspel,Matti Leisola,James M. Tour,Winston Ewert,Jonathan Wells,Sheena Tyler,Günter Bechly,Casey Luskin,Paul A. Nelson,Ola Hössjer,Colin R. Reeves,Stephen Dilley,Garrett J. DeWeese,Tapio Puolimatka,John G. West
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Book Format Name: Kindle
Book Format Price: $28.48
Book Format Name: Hardcover
Book Format Price: $55.20
Book Price: unknown
Book Category: Books, Christian Books & Bibles, Theology and unknown
Book Rating: 150 ratings

Book Product Detail

• Best Sellers Rank: #676,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #147 in Creationism
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• Customer Reviews:
  4.7 out of 5 stars 150 ratings

Book Review

Name: Puck Mendelssohn
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The Discovery Institute unmasks itself...
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2017
Review: This book is the latest round in the Discovery Institute's campaign promoting "Intelligent Design" creationism, and features essays by a number of the DI's principal writers on this subject. The Discovery Institute has, for some years, been engaged in a kind of Frankenstein pursuit -- to dig up the corpse of creationism, re-animate it, stuff it into a suit, and imbue it with scientific credibility. While it's been able to accomplish some of these tasks, the final stage has not gone well. Indeed, Gene Wilder's scene with Peter Boyle, singing "Puttin' on the Ritz," was a rip-roaring success by comparison. Here the DI takes another tack, and an interesting one.

Now, the difficulty with the DI's ambitions has never been hard to spot. Creationism, under its various old names and recently under the guise of "Intelligent Design Theory," was and is a pursuit of a purely religious nature, and passing it off as science isn't easy. Up until this point, the DI's strategy has generally been to promote, to some audiences, the pretense of a purely scientific mission, while promoting, to those audiences who fund it, the proposition that this is really all about preserving traditional religious beliefs. When the DI is confronted with this conflict, it denies a religious connection and expresses, in terms not-quite-credible, its entire interest in scientific integrity. Such fiascos as the publication of the infamous "Wedge Strategy" document have made that artifice hard to maintain, yet the DI has mostly stuck to script.

But that's just where the present book does something surprising. After years of insisting that the only mission of Intelligent Design is to provide a better explanation of biological phenomena, here the DI pulls off its mask and announces the religious nature of the project to the world. As the introductory essays in this work make clear, the project is to promote a fundamentalist, literal reading of the Book of Genesis. Indeed, that purpose is so very clear here that while some lip service is paid to it, it's hard even to see much compatibility with an "Old-Earth Creationism" (OEC) model; this book will warm the hearts, such as they are, of YECs everywhere. The book contains criticism of evolutionary theory, but its overall project is to combat certain versions of what is called "Theistic Evolution": the idea that evolutionary theory and Christian faith can be reconciled.

The first mystery, and one which the book does not answer, is why? Is the DI merely seeking to bring joy to its fundamentalist contributor base, by suggesting that their particular reading of the Bible is both theologically and scientifically sound? Or does the DI have its eye on expanding its audience? In making an appeal to theology, and explicitly attacking mainline theological positions, is it seeking to draw the attention of a more educated audience from the ranks of those Christians who have long been comfortable with biological evolution?

If it's the latter, then this effort comes a bit late in the day -- perhaps more than a century too late. Long ago, theologians in all of the major branches of Christian practice came to see that if a faith is seen to run aground on fact, that faith comes to be seen as absurd. As empirical study has advanced our understanding of the history of life, it has constrained the plausible reading of Genesis. While there are those who find obstinate defiance and denial of facts to be a stirring way to pay tribute to the divine, it's unlikely that the main-line churches whose theology is the target of this attack have their pews stuffed with such people.

The thesis being put forth by this book has three basic prongs: (1) that "intelligent design" creationism is a genuine scientific alternative to evolutionary biology, (2) that its complete rejection by the scientific community flows from an invalid philosophical prejudice in favor of materialism or methodological naturalism, and (3) that ID Creationism is more theologically sound than evolutionary biology. Of course, there really is no punch in (2) or (3) unless (1) can be shown to hold water; a philosophical prejudice against a theory can do no harm if there is, in fact, no empirical evidence to validate that theory, and the theological soundness of a theory can do nothing to sustain it if it is, at bottom, false.

So, is ID Creationism a sound scientific alternative to evolutionary theory?

The book begins with a variety of essays purporting to address the shortcomings of evolutionary theory and the advantages of Intelligent Design Creationism, and these essays are more or less in line with the various books published by the DI and its allies. They are typical of DI work: a reader who understands the topics they address will find himself wondering whether the authors are willfully false, or whether they simply do not know much about the subjects on which they write. Misuse and mischaracterization of scientific research tend to suggest the former, but now and then there are bits that are so ill-reasoned that they suggest the latter. Unfortunately, much of this is liable to be obscure to many readers, who will not have done the background reading required to understand how the issues are being mis-framed, how the state of biological science is being misrepresented, and how the sources cited are being misused. A review of reasonable length cannot encompass all of this, but what I will do, apart from addressing a couple of points, is provide some links, at the end, to some good resources for anyone who wishes to develop a deeper understanding of just what's wrong here. The best antidote to this is, simply, to read the relevant science itself rather than the DI's mischaracterizations of it.

The section which is likely to hold the most interest for many readers is a set of chapters attacking common descent, and particularly attacking the origin of humans amid the primates. It bears mentioning here, by the way, that the one and only actual practicing academic biologist connected to the Discovery Institute, Michael Behe (author of the ID books Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution), affirms the common descent of all living things, and his name is conspicuously absent from the list of contributors.

This set of chapters is a rather odd conglomeration. It contains two chapters by Casey Luskin on biology and paleontology, yet Luskin is neither a biologist nor a paleontologist, and the quality of the work is about what one would expect. Luskin quotes from discordant interpretations of various hominin fossils and, surprise, surprise, finds that paleontologists sometimes disagree -- but along the way his weakness at understanding modern phylogenetics, and particularly at understanding the difference between claims of direct ancestry (seldom testable) and claims of relationship (quite testable), becomes strongly evident. He holds forth at length upon the fossils of ancient hominins and pulls one of the classic creationist gambits: insisting that every one of these fossils lies plainly on the "ape" or "human" side of a clear demarcation. As anyone familiar with this particular gambit knows, the hilarious feature of this tactic is that different creationists place this ape/human demarcation at different places in the spectrum -- demonstrating by the collective "work" of creationists that it isn't easy to justify any particular sorting of the fossils into two neat categories because of the way they shade into one another.

After Luskin, though, it gets stranger. One particularly striking example of the poor quality of the scientific reasoning contained here appears in Chapter 15, by Gauger, Hossjer and Reeves, under the section "Time Enough for Change?" Here, the claim is made that the time required to obtain and fix each of the mutations which differentiate modern humans from their predecessors would vastly exceed the six million years or so which separate the human and chimp lineages, and for this proposition the authors cite three papers -- two by Durrett and Schmidt, and one by the creationist John Sanford. But none of the papers cited come remotely close to supporting this claim. Durrett and Schmidt, in fact, conclude that the mean time to generate a functioning pre-specified eight-letter binding site mutation (recognizing that a match to the specified sequence of seven letters will normally be functional) within a tiny piece of the genome is about 60,000 years -- orders of magnitude out from the range given by Gauger et al., and of course, since these can occur concurrently in many thousands of locations within the genome, this is not even close to being a "one-per-sixty-thousand-year" rate. Mutation is a constant, ongoing process and there is an ample supply of variation to account for evolutionary events.

But that's not the worst of it. Gauger et al. neglect to point out the significance of the fact that these are times for obtaining "pre-specified" binding site mutations -- clearly identified as such in these papers. They compound the error by implying that these represent the rate of overall mutation, and then further exaggerate the effect by looking at how long it would take to acquire two particular pre-specified mutations, which of course alters the probability considerably. But the mutations that led to modern humans were, of course, not pre-specified, and the combinations in which they would occur were not foreseeable. The particular course which human evolution took, down to the smallest detail, would be highly improbable viewed from the beginning point; but all other possible outcomes would, equally, had they happened, bear the same after-the-fact feature of high improbability. A specific outcome for the Lotto is unlikely; that there will be an outcome is as sure as the sun rising. The question is not how long it would take, knowing the outcome, to wait for the same outcome to occur; the question is whether the rates of change are sufficient to allow the observed outcome to occur, and they manifestly are. As Durrett and Schmidt point out, the differences between humans and chimps may be accountable to changes in regulation of as few as 1% of the 20,000 genes available.

A simple analogy illustrates the problem of looking down the wrong end of the telescope, where probability is concerned. An individual human -- call him Dave -- is a particular mix of the genes of Dave's parents, accompanied by such point mutations as may have occurred in the germ cell line in each parent prior to Dave's conception. The probability that these parents' next child will be a genetically identical individual -- in effect, a clone of Dave -- is fantastically small. The argument being made by Gauger et al. is the equivalent of arguing that the genomic evidence shows that Dave CANNOT be the child of these parents, because the probability of these parents generating Dave's specific genome is vanishingly small.

It simply isn't possible that the authors do not understand this. Many people shrink from the unpleasantness of suggesting that these types of errors are not mere mistakes but intentional; but it is hard to look at such things and reach any conclusion other than that the authors figured that none of their readers would bother to examine the cited sources or evaluate what the authors have said.

But if that chapter was unscholarly, the next is something more remarkable. The same three authors contribute Chapter 16, "An Alternative Population Genetics Model," a piece so bizarre that it would make the core of a splendid comedy sketch for presentation to a symposium of population geneticists. In this piece, they argue that all of humanity could have descended from a single male/female couple, living perhaps ten to fifty thousand years ago, created by a designer who pre-loaded them with a large amount of genetic diversity. This pre-loading even includes the female having widely diverse mitochondria which, subsequently, neatly sort themselves into lineages in her various descendants. And that's not all. All of those Neanderthal bones, from which we now have a fully sequenced genome, and whose contribution to our modern genome can now be seen? Well, they're all descendants (yes, never mind the radiometric dating...) of this original pair -- no explanation of where THAT genetic diversity came from -- who became separated and then bred back in to the main population. Simple, dimple, easy, peasy.

There are no words that are quite powerful enough for comment upon this. To simply observe that this notion is shot full of holes, doesn't even begin to work, and would get its proponent laughed out of the building at a meeting of population geneticists, really does not capture the sheer majesty of it.

Once it becomes evident that the biological case to be made by the DI is of that character, the philosophical chapters of this book come across as rather dry and listless. Methodological naturalism is attacked, to little effect; its attackers appear not to have considered very carefully what would replace it, nor do they seem to realize that the difficulty creationism has is not that its conclusions are out of order, but that its data are missing. Whatever one's philosophical standards, it's not going to be possible to make empirical inroads without empirical evidence.

In the absence of that compelling evidence, ID Creationism will remain outside of the halls of science. What it is is what it has always been: a purely theological appeal to a particular reading of scripture, unbuttressed by any evidence of a scientific character. If this assault upon "theistic evolution" is to succeed in winning converts from the main-line churches whose views are under attack here, it's hard to see this appeal to theology alone as sufficient to sustain it. Theology may supply a kind of superstructure into which scientific views fit, but few people today hold to a theology that claims that the results of empirical research are to be set aside on the authority of theology alone.

What this book signals as to the future of the Discovery Institute is another question. Its facade of scientific purpose is surely shattered, and the surreal spectacle of its staff stumping for a literal, genome-supercharged version of Adam and Eve, while trying to frame that tale in the unfriendly terms of population genetics, cannot do much good for its dignity.

For those who would like to better understand the various biological issues raised by the early chapters of this book, I will include a list of books on these subjects in the comment thread, below. The one bit of good a book like this may do is to provoke some curiosity about biological evolution, a deeply complex and fascinating subject on which, fortunately, there are many good works to read.

Name: C. H. Cobb
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A powerful case against theistic evolution
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2019
Review: Full disclosure first: I am committed to young-earth creationism, because I believe that is the best understanding of the biblical record. This book does not promote such a position. It is, rather, a tour-de-force of the best arguments of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. The ID movement leaves aside the question of the age of the earth and instead directly attacks the main vehicle of evolution: random change over time coupled to natural selection of the fittest. ID argues that the panoply of created things clearly displays the marks of design, and therefore the existence of a Designer. This is set in opposition to the notion of theistic evolution, in which it is argued that, yes, God is there, but his act of creation was limited to producing the initial cosmic conditions and the inherent properties of nature. From that point forward, God steps out of the picture and allows what he has created to coalesce randomly over time, eventually producing the world as we see it today. One of the arguments of many proponents of theistic evolution is that, other than the initial creation, any further act of God must be undetectable.

The authors of the essays in this book have compiled a compelling case, both negatively against the possibility of evolution and positively for the contention that the cosmos and all that is in it displays purpose and intention, and therefore is evidence of a Designer.

The book is composed of three major sections. The first section deals with the scientific critique of theistic evolution (and therefore evolution itself, since theistic evolution is built on it). Nine chapters virtually destroy the case for evolution, drawing from chemistry, information theory, DNA, and embryology. Seven more chapters attack the idea of universal common descent (the “amoeba to man” idea). The final chapter of the first section details how scientists are pressured to conform to prevailing theories.

Section two confronts theistic evolution from a philosophical standpoint. In nine chapters, the various authors address themselves to the philosophy of science, the inadequacies of methodological naturalism, the problem of evil, the origin of the moral conscience and more.

The last section, five chapters, addresses the failure of theistic evolution to deal with the biblical and theological data. For someone committed to Scripture, this is the best part of the book. The authors of the essays demonstrate that theistic evolution undermines twelve creation events and multiple important biblical doctrines, and does not comport with the clear statements of either the Old or New Testaments. Theistic evolution is held up against the historic positions of theologians over the last 2000 years and found wanting.

Do not expect the book to argue for young-earth creationism, because it does not. It appears that the authors of the essays (at least the majority) are more comfortable with an old-earth position (but one that clearly involves belief in an actual, historical Adam and Eve supernaturally created as the very first humans, and who fell into sin, becoming responsible for the advent of death). But young-earth creationists should not reject this book. It is a strong polemic against any form of evolution, and the arguments of the authors are, almost in their entirety, arguments that young-earth creationists will find equally useful.

Five stars, highly recommended.

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