Shadow of Oz - Pay no Attention to That Scientist/Theologian Behind the Curtain

Wayne Rossiter followed an interesting path, from Christianity to Darwinism to a vocal atheism, to crisis and back to Christianity.   While he remains a practicing scientist, he found himself troubled by the path chosen by many Christian intellectuals in attempting to maintain a purely Darwinian view of origins while claiming to hold to Christian beliefs.   He begins the book with the troubling tale of a young college student who was so devastated by the destruction of his faith through Darwinism that he committed suicide.   While extreme, this brief story sets the stage for the discussion of the uneasy marriage of two contradictory worldviews.   (More)

Rossiter is clear from the beginning that the primary concern he has with Theistic Evolution is that it is an entire worldview that ultimately negates its own claims to being Christian or even theistic.   In essence the theistic evolutionist adopts the posture of the non-theist, pure naturalism in the laboratory – an approach that enthrones the natural processes of cause and effect, pure unguided random processes acted upon by natural law and natural selection with no activity from outside the sphere of nature.   Then in a sweeping sleight of hand, God is asserted back into the picture in a contradictory fashion where before it all began, God’s purpose was to use this very purposeless chain of events to produce human beings with a spiritual nature.

What is troubling to Rossiter is that when push comes to shove in the inevitable conflict of two opposite sets of ideas, the theistic Evolutionists virtually always choose to maintain the views of evolutionary naturalism and mold their theism to fit around it.   Darwin always wins, Christianity always loses.

He quotes William Provine to point out the difficulty of marrying theism with random and purposeless naturalism. 

“It starts by giving up an active Deity, then it gives up the hope that there’s any life after death.  When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily.  You give up the hope that there’s an immanent morality.  And final, there’s no human free will.  If you believe in evolution, you can’t hope for there being any free will.   There’s no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in life:  We live, we die, we’re absolutely gone when we die.”

This is the worldview that theistic evolution attempt so marry with believe in God somehow.   And predictably it leads to contradictions and irrational trains of thought.

Rossiter identifies three key intellectual moves that theistic evolutionist typically make. 

“1) they adjust Christian claims so that they fit snuggly around an unharmed evolutionary core, 2) they create artificial firewalls between their scientific and theological beliefs, or 3) they push God into the distant and undetectable cosmic background so that the universe only looks random (but isn’t).

Naturalistic evolution claims that all events in the history of the cosmos can be explained as the result of purely natural processes of cause and effect.   In fact, non-theistic origins demands that this be so.   Rossiter finds that theistic evolution is schizophrenic in that it accepts that everything can be explained by natural processes, but still asserts that somehow God is working behind it all, in a way that is entirely undetectable to observation.   The contradiction is that if God is working (purpose) then the processes are by definition not purely natural and not unguided.  The Theistic Evolutionis cannot have it both ways.  A process cannot be unguided and intended at the same time.   And the claim that God is somehow “purposeful” in His use of natural processes is a pure blind assertion that has the flaw of not needing proof and the benefit of being beyond falsification.

By pushing God to the realms of the undetectable, the theistic evolutionist shields himself from critique.  While routinely throwing broadsides at Intelligent Design and Creationism for being contrary to the “scientific consensus”, the theistic evolutionist hides his God behind a curtain where He cannot be seen, heard, touched or subjected to scrutiny.

The contradictions are many.   Naming names such as John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller and others, Rossiter identifies the irrational intellectual moves.  How does one go from insisting God is outside of the processes of nature altogether and still hold to miraculous events at the center of Christianity such as the virgin birth and the resurrection?   Questions about the historicity of Adam, and the possibility of the virgin birth come to the fore as the "universal acid" of Darwinism eat away at central doctrines.   Beyond doctrine, Rossiter cites problems with the concept of pure naturalism and the inevitable denial of free will.   And he discusses the problem of finding meaning and purpose in a universe that the naturalistic consensus says can have no guiding purpose and must be purely random.   In every case, the theistic evolutionist merely asserts an invisible, undetectable God to the background of a purely naturalistic worldview and claims victory.

Rossiter is a scientist and he also takes issue with the science behind theistic evolution, arguing that the theistic evolutionists are defending ideas that the cutting edge of science has been slowly abandoning.  His chapter on the recent advances in Evolutionary biology is tough sledding fo the non-scientist, but makes the point that the usual random change plus natural selection leads to an undisputed tree of life narrative is increasingly untenable.  Advances in genetics question the tree of life, epigenetics complicates previously held mechanisms for evolutionary advancement.  Population statistics question previously held views of lineages.   In short, the Theistic Evolutionist is marrying theism to views that are far from current and claiming to be on secure intellectual footing. 

Rossiter briefly mentions that he is not a young-earth creationist, though he seems to sympathize with those who are for the mistreatment heaped on them over the years.   He seems to have strong leanings toward intelligent design but does not specifically discuss his own views on origins.  For this book, his purpose is purely to discuss the problems with theistic evolution.

In the end, while holding a fairly nebulous Christianity in one hand and a commitment to naturalism in the other, the theistic evolutionist eventually finds that naturalism gobbles up the theism and nothing distinctly Christian is left.