Over at Why Evolution is True Jerry Coyne posted an article (yesterday, 21 February) about the mindlessness of evolution. He quotes the following from the text he is using, Evolution, by Douglas Futuyma:
[Darwin's] alternative to intelligent design was design by the completely mindless process of natural selection, according to which organisms possessing variations that enhance survival or reproduction replace those less suitably endowed, which therefore survive or reproduce in lesser degree. This process cannot have a goal, any more than erosion has the goal of forming canyons, for the future cannot cause material events in the present. Thus the concepts of goals or purposes have no place in biology.
But of course they don’t! Job could have told you that. And this is why the theological shenanigans over at the National Center for Science Education are really way out of line. For, try as they might, theologians had to give up on a strong teleology a long time ago. Rabbi Harold Kushner, after the death of his son, had to rationalise it by saying that God really doesn’t have the power to influence outcomes. Others try different expedients, but only the blind can think that the evils of the world express a good purpose. No one, with an ounce of sense, can look at the world and say that it was designed for a purpose. On the one hand, it’s practically impossible to keep our teleological fingers off things; but on the other, life has a tendency to go so badly that supposing there is a purpose to the things that happen stretches credulity so far that anyone who tries to do it literally has to have a bad intellectual conscience.
Earthquake in Christchurch
Think for a moment about the earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, while we in North America were sleeping last night. Look at the picture to your left. Does this look like it has a purpose? One can only hold on to the idea that there is a purpose behind everything by cancelling through by all the completely pointless things that happen, or, as very often happens, by simply ignoring the miseries that beset other people.
Some years ago I was on a trip to the UK. While I was there a plane crashed on a motorway. There were some survivors, but many people were killed. One suvivor told a reporter that now she knew that there was a god. After all, she survived, didn’t she? There must have been a reason. It is very hard for us not to think in this way, as though good things were simply destined to happen in the way that they do.
When bad things happen, though, it’s a different story. Then we have to begin making excuses. This is when theologians begin saying things like — “what seems to be a disaster might have happened for any number of reasons. And, besides, think of how much you have learned about yourself from this tragedy. So, it’s not all loss, is it? While we may not be able to understand fully, at least we have been given glimpses of divine purpose.”
We can imagine the people of Christchurch reflecting on the disaster, and out of the anger and the sorrow and the pain of loss something good will almost inevitably come. We know this, because we too have been through disasters, have watched loved ones die, have ourselves suffered, and we are still here, still going on with life, still goal oriented, full of purpose. We have an almost unlimited ability to rationalise, to excuse, to see signs of meaning and purpose where there are none.
I spent years wrestling with the so-called Problem of Evil. People in the congregations that I served over the years often asked me to explain how it is possible to go on believing in God’s goodness when there is so much pain and suffering. I did many Bible studies on the book of Job. Job, it always seemed to me, was proof against the doubts that suffering raises for faith. If someone like Job, a good man who suffers for no assignable reason, can continue in faithfulness, then surely we, who suffer less, should be able to maintain faith in the face of the changes and chances of the world. Towards the end of the book, after having suffered so much, God himself makes an appearance, and then, we are told, after the great theophany in which Job is challenged by God himself to explain the fathomless purposes of the world, Job repents in dust and ashes. How little he can know of God’s purposes:
Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways: and how small a whisper do we hear of him! but the thunder of his power who can understand? [Job 26.14]
All we can know is such a small part of the whole. How can we then understand why things happen as they do? Better simply to fall back on the faith that, though we cannot understand, surely the one who has purposed all this wondrous universe in which we find ourselves will not, in the end, forget us, but will bear us up in worse than this.
Then I read Darwin’s Origin, and it was impossible to continue to see things in this way. I tried, but there was no going back. I’m not sure now what year it was, but it must have been around 2002 that I read the Origin for the first time. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that no one should be able to finish high school, let alone university, without having read one of the seminal works of the age. But few have read it. Not one person in the parish where I worked had read it. Not one. There were doctors and lawyers and teachers in the congregation, but not one had read anything by Darwin, and yet Darwin opened my eyes for the first time to the world around me in a way that nothing else had done. Soon after Darwin, I read Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and after that faith had only a short time to live.
It is simply impossible to read Darwin and come away with the idea that the process of evolution is directed or supervised. The completely contingent character of the world is fully revealed, and it’s hard to understand how one did not see this before. It should have been obvious! But not only is contingency obvious; it becomes obvious that, if the way the world is is contingent, then knowledge itself, if not contingent, must be a fully human project, the product of millennia of trial and error. And then, it becomes pellucidly clear that morality itself is human, that goodness is a purely human product, and very fragile, not something simply built into the process by which we came to be, but an extrapolation from that process, and, to the extent possible, a determination to bend the process to ensure better outcomes.
Job was right. There is no justice in human suffering. There was no reason why he suffered. And the story does not show a man who bows down in abject submission to a power that he cannot understand. The God of Job is the cruelty of nature, and all he can do in response to it is to surrender and tremble. The great poetic part of Job — subverted later by a true believer — recognises fully that human life is a tissue of contingencies, God is a mindless process, and we are froth on the sea of fate (not faith). But it can be made better. We do not simply need to submit. We can make the worse work for the best. If God is in the cruelty, then humanity is in the goodness. That’s a good reason to give up on gods.
Anne Elizabeth Darwin
This is something, I believe, that Darwin realised, not as a scientific conclusion so much as a personal recognition. It was something that I was coming to realise too, that the joy that I knew, quite wondrously and fortuitously, in having met someone with whom I was bonded more closely than I had ever thought possible, was the product of chance, and would come to an end by chance, just as it had begun. Darwin realised, as he tried everything then possible to help his 10-year-old daughter Anne, weakened by scarlet fever and suffering from consumption, that he was watching a completely contingent process at work. Darwin was a modern Job. All he could do in the end was to submit to the forces that were at work in Anne’s body. Anne was struggling for survival, just as every living organism does, and she lost. She died without leaving any descendents. In the struggle to survive and propagate, she lost. By all accounts, Anne was a bright, happy child. Certainly Darwin’s memorial to Anne tells us that she was. But however happy she may have been, her death spelled the end of faith for Darwin. After that he could not really even pretend, and ceased going to church with the family. I can understand that.
Faith can’t survive the realisation that the whole of the life world is built on struggle and failure, with a glacially slow accumulation of small successes. It is a constant struggle, a struggle that has been going on for billions and billions of years, in which organisms come into being, struggle for survival, and then die, many of them, perhaps most, not leaving any issue, only a favoured few — those selected by a completely indifferent process — surviving to pass on their genes to the next generation. And in that process, billions and billions of living creatures struggle to pass on their genes, and fail. What is the sum of all that suffering, struggling multitude? Can faith in a god survive the knowledge that we are the product of all that misery and affliction? In the Epic of Gilgamesh even the gods do not know why so many had to suffer. That there is no reason should make us much more sensitive and caring, but it should spell the end of gods.
For those who are interested, I have added a brilliant analysis of Job by the philosopher (onetime at the University of Calgary, I believe) Herman Herman Tønnessen — here.
This was a good read. I always like reading stories of reasons priests (and others) losing their faith. There is hope.
I will say however, that when I am unfortunate enough to fall into the trap of discussing faith and suffering with my friend who is a priest, it usually ends with him saying something like “Well, God reveals himself trough time”. Apparently this “insight” is satisfactory for him.
Just knowing someone finds that convincing is depressing.
p.s. Sorry for the bad English.
Argument from incomplete devastation is one of the weakest of all of the apologetics.
It didn’t kill ME, therefore someone is watching over me.
That other fellow lying crushed under the rubble — well, he was just put here on the planet to teach ME a lesson.
Egad, the egocentricity and narcissism of the theist.
Me Me MEEEEEEE!!!!
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When one realizes that science really does work, then the whole idea of divine intervention becomes passé. To keep clinging to this possibility in the face of all the evidence is almost pathological. On the one hand, the NCSE is trying to remove religious disclaimers from high school textbooks while on the other it is trying to add them to definitions of evolution by science organizations.
SO you look at the colapsed building and you see a plane crash and you say that they have no purpose, that evolution/biology does not seek goals or purposes.
Most biological beings/people look at that colapsed building and think, ‘we need to make better buildings!’ The purpose of failure is to learn from those mistakes and create better buildings, airplanes, world.
The goal of mankind is to use the highest mental faculties and functions to improve himself and his world, otherwise why do we posess such abilities? So as NOT to use them? No.
Evolutionary advancements, not adaptations, only take place on life’s highest and most advanced levels – that’s us. Evolution does have a nomogenesic quality that progresses mankind with the goal of advancing to a higher status of being, which means evolution is part of intelligent design.
As for your understanding good and evil – http://is.gd/jEBk6
I was very pleased to read the Book of Job, not in church, but as part of my high school western civ class. No one ever mentioned the Book of Job in church, at least, not that I can recall. And upon reading it, I could see why. I never understood why people felt that it explained anything about why we suffer. I found it to be one of the most profoundly anti-God books I’ve ever read, since Job suffers because of the flippant whim of God, not because he is evil, or even because he is misguided, but *because* he is good. And when he questions his fate, God speaks down to him, and commands him to be silent because He knows better. Would Job not have damned God had he known that God killed his children and servants for a bet? I highly doubt it.
And I think that is the crux of why they don’t use it much in church, since the God of the Book of Job is more like the Greek gods than how Christianity typically likes to show him. No one would want to worship that God, and He is even more obviously an anthropomorphism, a man in the sky with easily graspable (and even childish) motives. Its clear that Job’s God is something that is easy to invent, like the Greek gods.
I’ve always wondered if ‘god moves in a mysterious way’ is an acceptable excuse for disasters and suffering, you shouldn’t also discount the nice stuff as ‘god moves in a mysterious way’ too.
I think this is a sort of religious ratchet effect – claim the good stuff to be of divine origin, and ignore all the bad stuff (or blame our ‘imperfections’). In my opinion this is a poisonous way of looking at the world.
to kxar:
Please read the book “101 Theory Drive” by Terry McDermott. If you are open to considering the effects of large numbers, you can only be astonished by the inconceivably large number of processes occurring in each of our human brains. Page 251: “Seth Grant, a neuroscientist at the Sanger Institute outside London, has counted more than one thousand proteins present at the average synapse. If only half that number were actually doing something, isolating and understanding the behavior of each of them would be a herculean undertaking. (Gary) Lynch (who this book is about) was prosaic about the complexity. “It’s a bitch and two-thirds,” he said. “And stupid too.”
My aside here> Please note that the number of synapses in the human brain is nearly beyond comprehension. If each human synapse was a dinner plate, it would cover the entire US state of Texas, every square foot, seven times over.
“Even within this convoluted, multivariant world, LTP (that is, the formation of memory<<< which defines us as individuals) is a preposterous idea. It is a fabulously complicated process involving hundreds of individual proteins interacting within a space far, far smaller than the head of a pin every time it occurs, which is to say, hundreds of proteins are engaged by the second. To think that the whole point of that whirlwind of activity is to slightly alter the shape of a tiny protein of a tiny cell (aside here…stack 24 neurons on top of each other: it equals the thickness of a piece of copy paper), to relax its surface and thus allow room for more molecules of a very particular type to emerge from within the cell–and that's how memory occurs? If you were not a biologist, the whole notion might seem a seriously crackpot idea. Ingenious, yes, but crackpot. It is actually more evidence of the degree to which human biology is the result of millions of years of evolution and random mutations, some of which have served useful purposes and some of which haven't. Evolution has a direction, Lynch liked to say, and it isn't toward perfection. Over time, the useful mutations have survived. The process is far from elegant, and the resulting organism is a magnificent contraption, a sackful of accidents stuffed with extra parts and sometimes contradictory actions that nonetheless work. Well, much of the time.
Brain scientists, better than almost anyone, see in their experiments the routine evidence of biological complications. The mammalian brain is a very much not how you would have designed the thing if you had started out with a clean slate. If you could, it is highly unlikely you would use the molecules that heal scratches on you arm to secure your memories, but no one was in charge of the process." (end of page 252).
In short, kxar, the multi-trillion sodium ions and calcium ions that allow you to read this page, remember where your cars keys are, and recite the names of famous authors are going nowhere when you die. No copies floated off in a disembodied homunculus. You will be ended, not ascended (regardless of your wish for an ego floating in eternity).
Before one decides humans are somehow the “crown of creation” take a look at what a humble, brainless, single-celled organism can do:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/01/21/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network/
I think kxar has completely missed the point of what Eric has written here, and I can’t follow his comments about evolution, they just seem so confused. Perhaps he would benefit from reading Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True and see how Darwin really did blow ID out of the water!
As regards his other comments, I would say that in my experience most compassionate individuals react in the first instance to the report of violent events like earthquakes and plane crashes with enormous sympathy for the victims and their families. Most right thinking people see that there is no purpose whatsoever in the unfolding of such tragic events. Even those who hold on to their faith in God struggle to understand such events, and many are willing to admit to some degree of agnosticism about how a “loving God” could allow such things to happen.
kxar is wrong – there is no “purpose of failure”, people may find the strength within themselves to rise above their grief with a renewed determination to make better planning laws, and design and build more safely in the future if it is at all possible. It is a wonderful human response to bring something positive out of tragedy.
I’m sorry, kxar, I think you are very confused. I took a quick glance at the reference you provide, and that all seems very confused too. For example, the following is really off the wall:
Quite aside from the strange idea about what scientific research this refers to, what do you think it means? Sorry, these are “wild and whirling words”, I fear. Sad stuff!
Ah, well, Job has always been fascinating to me, since childhood. But I did not find it nearly so anti-religious as Ecclesiastes, for example, and the poetry provides one of the most eloquent expressions of human suffering ever recorded. However, having said that, one of the best analyses of Job that I have ever read is Herman Tønnessen’s, “A Masterpiece of Existential Blasphemy.” It shows God to be what gods must be: primitive and cruel. Since it is from a long since defunct periodical, I have included it under the Recommended tab.
Many Bible commentators say, as you do, that “Job [is] a good man who suffers for no assignable reason,….”
This not correct.
In Job, unlike real life, we know exactly why Job suffers. In the prologue to that great work of literary irony, God makes a bet with the Satan, and Job and his wife are chosen for suffering (and their ten children and many of their servants killed) specifically because he is does not deserve suffering.
Speaking to Satan, God says “‘Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a wholehearted and an upright man, one that feareth God, and shunneth evil? and he still holdeth fast his integrity, although thou [Satan] didst move Me against him, to destroy him without cause.’” Chapter 2, verse 3, and elsewhere are similar remarks.
God “destroy[ed]” Job “without cause,” and the reason He did so was that He had made an idle bet with a companion.
Of course, this does not undermine the powerful reasoning of your essay.
For more about Job, see http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/10_may_jun/Leikind.html
Of course, that is strictly correct. However, the truth is that, though the story tells us why Job suffers, the text itself is a conflation of independent texts. The poetry of suffering is quite independent of the prologue, and we, like Job, have no idea why he should suffer so. The supposition in the prologue, that this is a test of Job’s faith, is a later construction put on the poetry of suffering, to provide a religious context for the meaninglessness that Job expresses so eloquently. So, I do not ignore the book as a whole, as it has come down to us, canonically, but I cannot in conscience accept the gloss that the prologue puts on Job’s suffering. We do not know why he suffers, just as we do not know why we suffer. (At the same time, thank you Bernard, for the link to your article.)
“Anne was struggling for survival, just as every living organism does, and she lost. She died without leaving any descendents.”
Yet because we have culture, not just genes, she lives on in ways that she could surely never have imagined: in posts like this, and in her father’s work. And she will continue to be remembered, probably long after the children of most of the readers of this post have been forgotten. Just like another Anne – Anne Frank.
Well done! But he/she, most probably, still won’t get it.
I should add, too, as I know from long experience, that the book of Job is almost impossible to “teach” to Christians, because they will always say, “But ‘all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God’.” So, the point of the prologue is quite lost on most Christians, because, in some sense, from the Christian point of view, all people deserve whatever suffering may come their way!
The scene is Christchurch is pretty bad, the death toll has risen to 75, though there is some good news, 15 people were found and rescued alive from the CTV building which collapsed. But still hundreds are missing and their families are waiting anxiously for news. If you wish to read more about the latest Christchurch earthquake follow this link.
It is human nature to look for patterns in natural events, it is part of the way our brains work. People look for a reason why terrible things happen, but often there is no reason other nature taking its course (in this case plate tectonics).
But if anyone wishes to help: the New Zealand Red Cross is taking donations.
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Evolution in action… if you’re interested.
Note that it makes no sense to attribute something in the future to cause material events in the present… or, in your suggestion, that the human intellectual capacity has evolved to make adjustments in some purpose you attribute to its interactions with events today. This doesn’t make any sense.
If we’re dwelling on the book of Job, could we also dwell on the absence of the book of Job’s Children And Servants? In the story of Job 1, God explicitly okays Satan to destroy everything Job has, including his seven sons and three daughters and an unspecified number of servants. In terms of morality, here, God is Don Corleone and Satan is Luca Brasi.
In a hyper-patriarchal culture, maybe this doesn’t seem weird, but no modern reader ought to be able to get past the first chapter of Job with any illusions that this God-entity it describes is in any way good. There’s an unfortunate tendency to skip onwards to all the lengthy poetic stuff and the behemoth and the dust and ashes, which is fine in its way, but it means we’re focussing on the suffering of Job and eliding the horrible deaths of many people; which is exactly the same problem as the argument from incomplete devastation.
Eric, did you find when discussing Job with your parishioners that anybody ever raised this problem or considered Job’s family in any detail?
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Ah, the family!! Surely, one of the biggest problems in the book. Obviously substitutable “goods”, so that, at the end Job turns out to be favoured with daughters even more beautiful than before (going by memory here). The beginning and the end of Job are obviously by a different writer with different axes to grind. I don’t find them very interesting. The poetry of suffering is the most eloquent testimony in the book. God is (as Tonnessen says) something of a cosmic cave dweller. The biggest problem in discussing Job with Christians is that they continue to think that, since all have sinned, Job couldn’t have been good and deserving of better than he received.
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‘What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin’s Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a zygote. Of the millions of zygotes that are produced, only a few ever reach maturity. On current estimates 95 per cent of the DNA that an organism contains has no function. Certain organic systems are marvels of engineering, others are little more than contraptions. When the eggs that cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch, the cuckoo proceeds to push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest. The queens of a particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a serrated appendage which they use to saw off the head of the host queen. To quote Darwin, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars”. Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.’
- David Lee Hull (1935 – 2010), The God of the Galapagos, Nature 1991 352 485-486
Quite so. I made two attempts to discuss Job with my preacher dad. It was futile, just as Eric says. To my dad, clearly Job was a ‘sinner’, and God had every right to do what he did. He refused to even consider the author’s declarations about Job’s character – they were irrelevant. I was at the point in my ‘faith-journey’ of really objecting to the picture of God portrayed here, truly a ‘cosmic cave dweller.’
Incomplete post above – sorry! …truly a cosmic cave dweller. I read the book several times, drawn by the horrid theologic drivel expressed in some of the most towering, flowing language in all of English. But your analysis of the difficulty in trying to discuss it with a ‘true Christian’ is bang on.
Ha! I thought that was a deliberate end of the sentence… “… the picture of God portrayed here, trully a ‘cosmic c***’.”
The idea of being guilty just by being born is one of the great power moves of all time. Something that the individual has no control over sentences him or her to eternal punishment unless he or she submits to authority. It really is a great scam if one can convince others to believe it. Sort of the ultimate blame the victim ploy.
I added the missing letters to your last post. I’m glad to hear of your confirmation of my experience. It was extremely frustrating. One group, I remember, back in 1990, simply could not even entertain the idea ‘for the sake of argument,’ insisting that Job, like any man, was sinful and in need of redemption. Thus, all his suffering was deserved. As Michael says, it’s a scam, but it’s dead effective.