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"Creationists, who believe in the literal truth of the Genesis story, offer scientific arguments to refute Darwinism. It is difficult for inexpert people to evaluate these arguments.

It is easier to produce theological arguments for believing that evolution gives a more satisfactory account of how a creator might have worked.

According to Genesis, the many species of living things were created separately - one species at a time presumably. This portrays the creator as an unimaginative plodder - something that a Creator of All Things can hardly be. To be our Creator would require the imagination to create one simple living form endowed with the power of evolving into many different species as circumstances dictate.

It seems to me - an outsider in these matters both as to biology (I am a chemist) and as to religion (I am a sceptic) - that to see the creator as a plodder, rather than as possessing vivid imagination, is disparaging to Him (always supposing that He exists).

If I were a Christian I would embrace Darwinism rather than accept the literal meaning of the Genesis story."

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I sent this to Carl Coon (who writes a secularist website Progressive Humanism) and he has instituted a discussion as follows:

From: Carl Coon <ccoon@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: Publ TFTW OT
Date: 3 January 2005 21:58:04 GMT
To: <stockton.sanday.orkney@zetnet.co.uk>

Dear Eric:

I passed your comment in somewhat edited form on to Fred Edwards, editor of the Humanist magazine, and received a prompt reply, as copied here. What do you think?

Carl

Carl wrote

"I have a venerable English philosopher friend named Eric Stockton who has supplied me with the germ of an idea that we might employ to lure the less ardent Biblical literalists away from their 6000-year perch. I'm not familiar with the argument but I presume it's been made before one way or another. Nevertheless, I like Eric's style and am passing this on to you for that reason.

Fred Edwards replied
 
"Thank you. However, as it turns out, the argument won't lure creationists away from creationism because creationists are already familiar with that argument and have a counter argument ready. Their counter argument goes like this: 
 
Evolution as described by evolutionists would be a terribly wasteful process where millions of individuals must die over millions of years due to harmful mutations and inadequate adaptations. Evolutionists tell us that the process of getting from there to here involved mass extinctions. But no good god would use such a cruel, wasteful, and inefficient method as evolution in order to create today's species. God, instead, used the efficient method of direct, special creation, doing his creation on a common plan. It is this common plan that evolutionists mistake for evolutionary relationships. But it was actually just divine efficiency. As for the fossils, they are of animals killed in the Great Flood that occurred as a response to human sinfulness. 
 
Of course there are counters to this counter argument, but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that liberal Christians already use the evolution-as-God's-means-of-creation argument and rather like it.
 
As far as we Humanists go, however, none of this is our problem. We don't offer theological explanations for anything nor do we take sides in theological disputes regarding which is the "best" theological argument. We thus don't argue "if I were a Christian I would believe such and such." We aren't Christians so we don't try to salvage liberal faith over conservative faith. We will, naturally, side with the liberals when their socio-political and scientific conclusions agree with ours. But we won't try to buttress their theology with arguments we don't really believe in, anyway.
 
Given all the above, I would be unable to find any use in the Humanist magazine for Eric's argument. But thanks for asking. And keep the ideas coming!
 
-- Fred".

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My Reply is that I will indeed keep the ideas coming!

 
Many intelligent Europeans regard the USA as both the land that produces a huge proportion of Nobel Laureates and which is also a world-class centre of invincible ignorance. It is this latter aspect that is relevant to US creationism. In the UK we have a few rather intelligent closet creationists; we do not have masses of intellectually debased rednecks that you seem to be burdened with.

Fred's points perhaps have less point on the European side of the Atlantic than on the US side so ......

a) "Evolution as described by evolutionists would be a terribly wasteful process ........... " seems to be very much in line with what is empirically true of the present state of the living world - irrespective of any theory (creation, evolution or a combination of these, any other theory as yet not thought of) that might be held by any observer of the ways things are.

We have only to consider our own human reproductive system. (Never mind the sheer profligate cruelty of the predator/prey relations that are so prominent in the natural world we see around us. Who, even among the most benighted believers, can think that - "But no good god would use such a cruel, wasteful, and inefficient method as evolution in order to create today's species.". The cruelty of whatever supreme being there might, hypothetically, be is manifest to the meanest intelligence whatever ideology (miis)leads it. The natural (created?) world is famously "red in tooth and claw").

A normal woman having a fertile life of, say, thirty years will produce hundreds of ova but her capacity to actually give birth is a great deal less. The record (a daunting one cited in the Guinness Book of Records) is said to be 69 babies, produced by one woman, resulting from 29 pregnancies. Talk about 'pro-life'!

Never mind world records, what a waste of viable ova even in the lives of millions of ordinary mothers. Moreover, if a woman is celibate, and has no artificially induced pregnancies. then all her hundreds of ova will be destroyed by (God's?) natural processes.

The male side of reproductive wastefulness is even more striking. One emission releases enough sperm cells to impregnate most of the world's fertile women The human species needs only one man and advanced artificial insemination technology. (As to the 'one man', an old friend who served his time in the Royal Navy always said "Never volunteer for anything!" But I digress).

Natural Selection/Evolution is indeed a model that is waste-laden. But so is the real world we actually witness.

So the NS/E model is in good correspondence with data that we all see whatever ideology we may choose. The fact of the wastefulness of nature has nothing to do with the evolution/creation issue.

The epistemology of science includes a strong adherence to the correspondence test of truth.

But it is also true that the epistemology of science includes a strong adherence to the coherence test of truth. It is incoherent to suppose that the alleged creator is both, necessarily, imaginative and also a dull, step by step, plodder.

b) "But we won't try to buttress their theology with arguments we don't really believe in, anyway".

I am not trying to do this; liberal religionists (who outnumber and outgun organised humanists by several orders of magnitude) can generate their own arguments; our assistance is not required and is not offered but it is proper for any serious philosopher to expose the incoherence of any position on any subject whatever - just as it is proper to highlight correspondence when it is there - anywhere.

In writing this reply to Fred Edwards I am not comforting religious liberalism; I am asserting the two main planks in the science platform, viz, the overriding tests of correspondence and coherence (properly disciplined by ruthless use of Occam's Razor).

c) " ........ doing his creation on a common plan". Correct me if I am wrong but I gather that the common plan - common to all known life forms - is the famous helix or perhaps it goes back further than that. I see no reference to this in the Book of Genesis. Ask the Southern Baptists to find such a reference! Never mind DNA and all that - what is the Common Plan of which tapeworm, tulip, tiger and theologian are clear instances?

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The effort to sustain correspondence and coherence as tests of truth is more important even than the evolution/creation debate - at whatever level that debate is conducted. These tests work - they generate knowhow but, to repeat myself, there is one caution. We must use Occam's Razor ruthlessly. Theory must not only be coherent and in correspondence with the data; it must also be as simple as the data permit and as complex as the data demand.

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FOOTNOTE

The more sophisticated creationists are driven, by the very sophistication they display, to neglect Occam's Razor.

There are those who actually (to quote SJ Gould, I think) 'believe in dinosaur bones but not in dinosaurs'.

Generations ago we had a naturalist (Gosse) who proclaimed that the evidence supported Darwin, but, since Genesis is literally true, God must have planted the evidence to test our faith. Gosse had evidently not read his Descartes (who dogmatised that 'God cannot be a deceiver!')

Philosophical slackness can be a dangerous thing. Fight it both in oneself and in others.

E.S.