Evolution and Intelligent Design

[josephbfischer]

Intelligent Design Questions

James:

Your article, "Who's Afraid of Evolutionary Biology?" is great.
www.bede.org.uk/Evolution.htm

Perhaps you should be the one to write the books that defend the theistic view of science. Have you considered expanding this article into book form? You mention in passing that at least one Christian author's book is not particularly well written. I sadly agree that we are in need of better writers. The theistic side of the argument needs writers like you who are as enjoyable to read as Dawkins.

In your "Who's Afraid of Evolutionary Biology?" article, you state that you are not convinced by Michael Behe's "Irreducibly Complex" argument. I would like to see more of your thoughts on this, since I find the argument to be fairly strong. (And I am surprised the Dr. Behe hasn't more firmly responded to his critics.)

The term "Irreducibly Complex" may be a poor description, since a system can meet the definition and have only three, or even two parts.

As I understand it, the issue is better described as "pulling yourself up by your own boot straps," or perhaps, "what came first, the chicken or the egg?"

The core of the argument is that natural selection needs a functioning body part that has a survival and reproductive benefit, before it can be fine-tuned by "survival of the fittest." But how then does the body part arise in the first place? The first few cells of an arm, or a liver, etc. would have no benefit. Natural Selection can't plan ahead, foresee the future and start to grow the pieces that will eventually become eyes or digestive systems.

Everyone from Dawkins, back to Darwin himself, have tried to answer that argument by pointing to the evolution of the eye. To answer the question, "what good is half an eye?" they answer that the single celled animal's light sensitive spot developed into the marine animal's "pin hole camera" eye, on up to the complex cornea/iris/retina we have today. But they don't say how having a few extra cells in front of a "pin hole camera" eye would be a reproductive benefit, let alone how the complex lens of our eye could have arisen, a step at a time.

Dr. Behe uses the example of a mouse trap. If you take away any of the parts, it won't catch mice. So how could all the parts have come to be? A mouse trap without a spring doesn't work. A system that doesn't work has no advantage, so if this were a biological system, natural selection wouldn't have anything to select.

Our American Catholic friend, Kenneth Miller, argues that complex systems are made up of spare parts that evolved for other purposes. Since these component parts did have some purpose, natural selection could have acted on them. A tie clip and a paper weight could be combined together to make a mouse trap. Dr. Miller also points out that some of Dr. Behe's examples of "irreducible" complexity can in fact be reduced by a part or two. Parts of a mouse trap could bent in such a way that a piece could be eliminated. But those quibbles just move the problem back a step. If a complex system is made up of spare parts that had already evolved, how did those spare parts arise, since they are also complex? Yes, perhaps Dr. Behe was wrong to say a mouse trap needs 4 pieces. Perhaps it could sort of catch mice if the trap only had three pieces. But then we are back at the same argument. How did those three pieces come together?

Of course, even if it could be demonstrated on biological or logical/philosophical grounds that Natural Selection is an insufficient mechanism for Evolution, that doesn't mean that it had to be an Intelligent Designer. Perhaps there are other influences at work. And Dr. Behe writes that he believes Evolution has happened.

Yes we need to beware of the "God of the gaps." But that doesn't mean that God didn't intervene in nature and in history at some point or even at every point.

What is your personal view of God's level of intervention in history? I'm inferring that you tend toward a God who wound up the clock work and then left it to run on its own when it comes to the Universe as a whole. Is this accurate? What about God's involvement in our personal lives and thoughts? Another way of asking this would be, "what is your take on miracles?"

Intelligent Design has been criticized because Dr. Behe hasn't come up with any step by step lists of how God intervened and created any biological systems. Does your theology allow for, or rule out, God directly intervening?

[josephbfischer]

Evolution and Genetic Information Content

Critics of Evolution have asked if mutation and natural selection can create new information.

With the famous evolutionary examples of finch beaks and moth coloration, the gene pools contained variation at the beginning. There were genes for big finch beaks and for small finch beaks. There were genes for light colored moth wings and other genes for dark colored moth wings. Due to changing conditions some variations increased in the populations. Later, these decreased and other variations increased. But at the end, the populations contained the same genes that were there at the beginning. The amount of genetic information in the gene pools had not changed.

However, if there is progress in Evolution, we would expect newer species to be more advanced, more complex and therefore to contain more information in their genes.

James, in your links to Scientific Web Sites,
www.bede.org.uk/science.htm#dawkins
you mention an article by Richard Dawkins that you commend as being particularly well written and provide the link:
www.skeptics.com.au/journal/dawkins1.htm

I agree that Dr. Dawkins is a good writer and I also have enjoyed his books. However, even in his science books, I think his reasoning is sloppy at times. Of course that might be partly because I disagree with him at times!

Dr. Dawkins is writing about a question he was asked by some Creationist movie producers (perhaps deceptively). The question was whether Dr. Dawkins could think of a single example of a species in which the genetic information content has gone up, as a result of evolution.

Those familiar with the Evolution debates would realize they were asking if there was a specific example where we know at a genetic level that Evolution added something new. This would be beyond the variations in finch beaks and moth colorations.

During the interview, Dr. Dawkins did not answer the question. He later says this was because he suddenly realized he was being questioned by a Creationist and was too angry to say anything. However, he eventually wrote this article.

Interestingly, after having a lot of time to think over the question, he still doesn't give a single example of increased information. What he does finally say is that Natural Selection BY DEFINITION increases genetic information.

If something is true by definition, isn't that a tautology? Doesn't that mean there is no scientific experiment that can be done that could possibly falsify that "something?" Doesn't the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, say that therefore this can't be science?

Is Dr. Dawkins making a basic scientific error here? Is it possible that the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University doesn't understand what constitutes science?

(Or is it possible that Evolution is not science. Apparently, this was the conclusion that Karl Popper originally came to, before he was "re-educated" by the thought police. But that is a discussion for another day.)

[unkleE]

My problem with ID is not whether it happened or not (i.e. whether God has helped evolution along from time to time) but that I can't see how it can be proved, for two reasons.

1. How would God's action be identifiable? It would just look like a random event.

2. Once science defines natural selection as orthodoxy, any difficulty will be met with the answer that there is a natural process, we just haven't discovered it yet. Moreover, it will be enough to show that a process is feasible or plausible for it to be accepted, at least until a more plausible process is found.

I have come to the faith conclusion (not a scientific conclusion) that God has set up the balance of this universe and this world so that belief in him will always be reasonable, but never provable. Both belief and disbelief are possible and are separated by a knife-edge, so that our faith depends not on our cleverness, but on our attitude.

What is your personal view of God's level of intervention in history?

I know you asked James, but here's my idea ..... I think God is involved in all sorts of little ways (from individual answers to prayer, through to intervening in history via prophets and Jesus and maybe evolutionary steps), but I think he rarely gets involved in a big enough way in evolution to be measured by science. Since I speculate, as many others do, that God is "outside" of time, all his actions are in an eternal now (I can say that, but I can hardly begin to imagine it!), and whether he set it up at the beginning and let it run, or interferes all the way are neither here nor there for him, but of course we can distinguish between them.

I'm not sure that this speculation adds up to much, but that's how I tend to see it.

[humphreyclarke]

Leaving aside the science, I think it is bad theology to posit this kind of dual naturalistic universe in which God pokes around intermittently in order to guide a natural process to the required conclusion. In its most extreme form we get what I like to call the God of 'The Far Side' who sits in his cosmic workshop making species after species of beetle, including by the way, all those nasty tropical parasites which so appalled Darwin. I think what we actually have is a creative process which is far smarter than the popular theology.

I think it is blindingly obvious that evolution is not a random process in any meaningful sense. The randomness of the mutations is something of a red herring that leads many people to think that the evolutionary process is contingent and unpredictable. Instead what we see is progress towards greater complexity and the filling up of 'design space'. We also see that the number of forms are highly constrained and that evolution follows what might be termed as law like processes. Five fingered Homo Sapiens are not inevitable but something like us is. I think that is more exciting than something that is completely deterministic. Is there anything that is blindingly theistic rather than being merely compatible?. Well we should remind ourselves just how odd the emergence of conciousness is, we should also reflect on the eerie perfection of the genetic code and life's ability to navigate to brilliant solutions. There is also the starting conditions themselves. To get this remarkably ordered creative process you need a universe which is conducive to rational order and which has precisely tuned mathematical laws which allow the emergence of matter, organic materials and finally biological complexity. Now that's an intelligent design!.

[unkleE]

I think it is bad theology to posit this kind of dual naturalistic universe in which God pokes around intermittently in order to guide a natural process to the required conclusion.

I don't feel comfortable with the categories you seem to be implying here. If we imagine a continuum of God's involvement in the world, from none (a deistic God) to all the time (the God of superstition?), I can't see any christian can be at either extreme. And once we admit God is involved sometimes, e.g. the examples I gave of answering prayers, inspiring prophets or incarnating himself, I can't see how we can draw a line around the evolution of the universe or earth and say it is in principle different to those other things. Can we imagine God interacting and suddenly correcting himself and saying "Rats! Can't do that - that's evolution."? In which case, while I am happy to accept that evolution is true and ID is not helpful, I can't see we can make the statement you have made. Or have I missed the point?

[James Hannam]

Dear Joseph,

Thank you for your kind words. My experience of getting a book published hasn’t been terribly encouraging to date and, until I’ve got God’s Philosophers out, I’m afraid I won’t be attempting any more.

You raise a number of points. I largely agree with the posts from Humphrey and Unklee about God’s action in the world and how it is largely undetectable through scientific means. When God answers a pray of mine, he usually does so in a way that is not really open to claiming a miracle. I accept that he can and has performed miracles and that these still occasionally happen today. But in practice, one doesn’t come across them and I am automatically very sceptical about claims of he miraculous.

Humphrey raises the interesting questions about how constrained evolution is and how likely it is that the process would always have produced something like us. It is miraculous that any arrangement of matter can produce a conscious, free-willed and moral creature. We may not be the endpoint of nature, but I’m pretty confidant we are an important step forward. Life’s Solution by Simon Conway-Morris, a Cambridge biology professor and evangelical, is an important statement of this kind of thinking.

I am also unconvinced that any living thing or part of any living thing is irreducibly complex. Millar is essentially right to say that evolution can co-opt parts intended for other things if they turn out to be remotely helpful. With bacteria in the primal oceans, the sheer number of organisms, reproducing every few seconds over two billion years or so means that almost any combination of parts could have been tried.

It is true that the moth and finch examples are of natural selection only, not of mutation followed by selection. It is an important part of evolutions armoury that it can keep characteristics on the shelf when the conditions are wrong and bring them out again later. The recombining of DNA through sexual reproduction is another way to speed up the process. But mutations do also occur and they can be beneficial.
In summary, I’d say that I am theologically averse to ID for similar reasons to Humphrey’s. So I will tend to require a high standard of proof to believe something is irreducibly complex (rather than that we can’t figure it out now). ID is, I think, a god-of-the-gaps argument.

Best wishes

James

[Al Moritz]

Joseph,

the answer to the increase of genetic information is simple. Most of it lies in the phenomenon of gene duplication.

Suppose you have gene A' that encodes for protein A. The gene duplicates upon reproduction; this is a fairly uncontroversial event:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication

Then you have two copies that code for protein A. However, one copy mutates into gene B', encoding for protein B, while the other copy remains unchanged. What do we now have? A genome that encodes for protein A *and* B.

Is this an enrichment of information over the original genome that encoded for protein A only? You bet it is.

***

As for "irreducible complexity", here is a good article that counters the argument:

talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ICsilly.html

The stone bridge example should speak for itself.

Al

[Al Moritz]

Jul 8, 2008 11:42:09 GMT humphreyclarke said:

Leaving aside the science, I think it is bad theology to posit this kind of dual naturalistic universe in which God pokes around intermittently in order to guide a natural process to the required conclusion. In its most extreme form we get what I like to call the God of 'The Far Side' who sits in his cosmic workshop making species after species of beetle, including by the way, all those nasty tropical parasites which so appalled Darwin. I think what we actually have is a creative process which is far smarter than the popular theology.

Exactly.

I am also a non-interventionist guy when it comes to evolution: Here is what I wrote in my essay on the origin of life:

www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

"The issue of chirality, among others, has been touted by creationists as a "huge problem" for the concept of an origin of life by natural causes. Allegedly, only a miraculous intervention by God could have solved the problem. Yet the above findings are a typical example for why the "God-of-the-gaps" concept does not work: science rapidly closes the gaps that previously might have been thought to be reserved for miraculous intervention.

"This is exactly what should be expected if either the material world is all there is, or if the world was created by a God who, as primary cause, chose to create through secondary causes – precisely those natural causes that science studies. In fact, creationists should seriously ask themselves if their concept of God is not a belittling one: the Intelligent Designer as "tinkerer" who is forced to break his own created laws of nature once in a while because they are insufficient to achieve certain stages in the development of the material world. From a theistic philosophical perspective, the actual findings of science suggest a much grander idea of God: the Designer who laid out an elegant and self-sufficient set of laws of nature that accomplish the unfolding of his creation by inducing self-organization of the material world. This idea is easily compatible with the concept of God of many mainstream religions, including most Christian ones." (End of quote.)

In short, I prefer to believe in a God who performs miracles when He wants to, not when he has to.


***

As to the question of God's "lack of intervention" in evolution, this is what I once wrote elsewhere (unpublished):

God has many ways to act in the world, and the individual creation of a soul for each human being alone makes Him an active God, as does personal interaction with those humans who seek it – even though He may let nature take its course in the process of evolution, He is not the God of deism. Most importantly too, there is an ongoing encompassing relationship between God and His creation. According to general Christian doctrine, God not only created but continuously sustains His creation and all its natural causes – obviously, including those that lead to evolution. Howard van Till outlines this in his excellent article “Is the Universe Capable of Evolving?” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, p. 313 f. (emphasis in original):

[…] “the universe is a Creation not merely because God acted as its Creator at some first moment of time, but because the universe is equally dependent on God’s function as its Creator at all times. I have often suggested that the historic Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation is better summarized by saying that the universe is God’s Creation than by saying that the universe was created by God. The Creator/Creation relationship is equally important at every moment in time.”

Some appear to be concerned that God’s special providence, an active involvement in the world beyond just maintenance of creation, seems to be diminished by the idea that God may have let nature take its course during evolution. There would have been no or little special providence for billions of years. Only recently, all of the sudden, when humans appeared, God would have acted in the world with special providence in an intense manner – an unsatisfying temporal disjunction in God’s involvement in His creation.

However, could it not be that these concerns are based on a naïve anthropomorphic projection of our own perception of time onto God’s works? As pointed out above, God lives outside space and time. From God’s perspective the temporal aspect of creation may look entirely different than for us, since everything can exist for Him in an instant. God can intervene with special providence whenever He chooses, with the “whenever” not necessarily related to our own experience of time as a sequence of events.

[element771]

The problem I have with the whole Evolution / ID debate is separating the garbage from the real deal. With ID / Darwin opponents hurling insults and accusations like there is no tomorrow ....it really gets frustrating.

As a side note, being a Catholic I have no dog in the fight. It could have happened by ID or evolution and it would make no difference to me. Although I do view ID as sometime limiting God's ability to set up things like he wants them and having to intervene from time to time.

How do you guys separate the rhetoric from the science without having to resort to looking up every paper and judging the content for yourselves. I already have enough trouble keeping up with the literature in my own field much less following the seemingly ever present cycle of claim / rebut / rebut of rebut / rebut of rebut of rebut / etc.

It almost seems that ID + Darwinian Evolution = Theistic Evolution.

[humphreyclarke]

As well as an excellent scientific theory evolution was arguably the most powerful idea of the 19th century and possibly even the 20th. It is also one of the most exploited theories of all time and has been used to justify pretty much any 'ism' you care to mention including (off the top of my head), atheism, capitalism, communism, racism and vegetarianism. The fact that a lot of these are mutually incompatible shows we should be suspicious when any group tries to use evolution to shore up their particular ideology; it fits pretty snugly into any worldview you care to mention.

The problem is the most powerful scientific theories go through a certain life cycle, whereby after they are published and become successful, they are quickly snapped up by interest groups and imbued with non-scientific and metaphysical meaning. Besides making a literal meaning of Genesis problematic, and lets face it, even the simple fact that the moon doesn't have its own light makes a literal reading of Genesis problematic, it is hard to see how evolution poses any serious issues for religious belief. The points it does raise have been dealt with time and time again over the hundred years since the Origin of Species.

And yet, as can be seen here, the evolution-creation debate shows no sign of dying down.

timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2008/08/darwin-dawkins.html

[element771]

*Disclaimer : I have no dog in the fight between ID and Evolution as stated above. I am perfectly happy with being a Theistic Evolutionist if that is where the science takes me.*

Do you think that "macroevolution" will ever be proven without a shadow of doubt, or is this too much to ask?

I used to think that all opposed to macroevolution were a bunch of nuts who could not get a job anywhere but I have found that this is far from the case. There are some brilliant people out there who deny that macroevolution has been shown to be a viable mechanism for speciation. The weird thing is that they are not all religious people with an agenda.

I used to think that it was a slam dunk for Darwin but I now am not exactly sure.....at least I am suspicious of the Neo Darwins behavior. They defend this theory like some defend the Bible. I guess I cannot blame them, if someone were to prove that Darwinism is wrong then what would that do to their worldview.

[humphreyclarke]

I think the problem for the Theist is that they have come to the conclusion God exists, usually from their personal experience, religious tradition or from some other area of science, then they come to evolution which has been ‘dressed up’ as strongly atheistic, and the response for many has been to deny it or buy into some form of intelligent design. Remember that what is atheistic is the materialist account of evolution, not the science itself. It is perfectly possible to come up with a theistic interpretation which is not only compatible with religious belief but also offers a more compelling account than the ‘it all just happened’ thesis. So I don’t think there is any need to deny macro-evolution. Darwin is the theist’s friend in disguise. As a matter of fact I ditched atheism after reading a numbers of books on evolutionary theory in particular the writings of Simon Conway Morris, so it clearly works both ways.

I would recommend all the lectures on evolution here, particularly Kevin Miller, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, Jeff Schloss and Simon Conway Morris.

www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Multimedia.php

Polkinghorne does an FAQ here that is quite good.

www.starcourse.org/jcp/qanda.html

[element771]

Thanks HC, I have listened to most of those Faraday Institute lectures and they are awesome.

[humphreyclarke]

Perhaps as a fun little exercise we could tackle some of the comments on Libby Purves's blog because they seem to crop up again and again amongst the Dawkinsia. (Haha, just noticed that one of them is Stephen Carr from the Internet Infidels, that guy gets everywhere)

timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2008/08/darwin-dawkins.html


Care to explain how Christianity is compatible with evolutionary theory as outlined by science? I can understand how believing that modern animals are descendant from a common ancestor some four billion years ago is. I have trouble understanding how the mechanism of natural selection and spontaneous genetic mutation is in any meaningful way. This completely rules out theism. In order to make it compatible with a theistic world view you must reject this mechanism, and opt to believe that evolution was guided by a form of selection that was not merely natural and random forced, but purposeful, and intentional ones. This makes theism wholly incompatible with neo-Darwinism, in it's current form.

Posted by: Wosret | 9 Aug 2008 01:14:27

If god is controlling natural selection as some christians suggest,then god has made a bit of a mess of it. 99.9% of all species have become extinct.Darwinian evolution has changed our views and places us in the natural world.Martin Luther said "reason should be destroyed in all christians" not much has changed over the years.

Posted by: iain rae | 9 Aug 2008 15:59:00

Libby seems to be confusing her alleged god with Dr. Josef Mengele. It was Mengele who tried to create super-humans by exposing people to disease and breeding from the survivors. Libby's god is not supposed to create by creating diseases, and exposing children to them in the knowledge that the survivors will have superior genes. Every case of smallpox, every case of malaria, every case of TB is one step in Libby's god's act of creation. Libby's god is a god who creates by letting animals rip each other apart, on the grounds that the fittest will survive. Why should we worship Libby's god and condemn Mengele?

Posted by: Steven Carr | 9 Aug 2008 09:06:28

[humphreyclarke]

Libby seems to be confusing her alleged god with Dr. Josef Mengele. It was Mengele who tried to create super-humans by exposing people to disease and breeding from the survivors. Libby's god is not supposed to create by creating diseases, and exposing children to them in the knowledge that the survivors will have superior genes. Every case of smallpox, every case of malaria, every case of TB is one step in Libby's god's act of creation. Libby's god is a god who creates by letting animals rip each other apart, on the grounds that the fittest will survive. Why should we worship Libby's god and condemn Mengele?

Posted by: Steven Carr | 9 Aug 2008 09:06:28

In common with most people who spend an unhealthy time policing the internet looking for gullible theists, Carr here is highly adept at throwing the kitchen sink at Christians within the space of a short paragraph. There are two components to this, firstly the God of the Galapagos is morally equivalent to the Nazis in its pitiless, blundering works of creation and mass murder. Secondly the problem of natural evil is maximised by the creative process, which involves all the evils of natural selection and also results in the creation of all the diseases which cause us suffering. These issues would take a book to resolve satisfactorily.

When explaining natural evil we need to have an eye to simplicity. Conceivably it would be possible to construct a highly complex theodicy but it would need to be a satisfying and ultimately simple one. The atheist would argue that the simplest solution to the problem of natural evil is to simply say there is no creative intelligence behind the universe and therefore good and evil are human constructions. However, you then have to explain why there is so much intelligence in nature, why our universe is so fine tuned for our existence and why it has produced these odd creatures who actually care about stuff like the problem of evil and empathise with their lunch. Human altruism and empathy goes way beyond that predicted by evolutionary theory and it seems glib to dismiss this as simply a ‘misfiring’ of kin selection and reciprocity. Arguably the only way to explain it is to appeal to a multiverse in which everything that can exist does exist, which does provide an explanation but a very unsatisfying and complex one. You could alternatively go for Spinoza’s God which doesn’t intervene but you then have to explain why a God would create all this and not take any interest in it. A God who has gone to such trouble to create caring creatures capable of knowing him is presumably capable of having a personality and interacting with his creation. The problem is that, far from ‘blind pitiless indifference’ being the norm, there is a distinct absence of it.

We live in a biophillic universe with prescribed limitations.The book of nature depicts a world that ordered in a rational and intelligible way. The universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws. When matter is filtered through these mysterious regularities in nature, it gives rise to an ordered universe with planetary systems and biological complexity. Evolution is the process whereby a single celled organism becomes through a slow incremental process, a highly complex organism capable of language and advanced social activities. It also possesses the most complex object in the known universe, the human brain. It also might be termed a law like process because it is blindingly obvious that evolution is not a random process in any meaningful sense. The randomness of the mutations is something of a red herring that leads many people to think that the evolutionary process is contingent and unpredictable. Instead what we see is progress towards greater complexity and the filling up of 'design space'. We also see that the number of forms are highly constrained.

At this point we should ask ourselves why?, if there is a God? Would it create a universe based on laws, conceivably it would be possible to create one based on ‘beauty’ or ‘goodness’. The answer based on Christian theology is that a universe which is free to develop within a law like framework is the only way to create an independent creation, which is in turn capable of producing creatures with free-will. An independent creation which is constrained to produce good but can sometimes turn and produce evil. This provides a free-process theodicy.

Carr’s depiction of evolution is the old ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ caricature which needs to be tempered by pointing to the ubiquity of co-operation in biological systems, phenomena such as symbiosis and the fact that 99% of life on this planet is plants. Furthermore death is not required for natural selection, all that is required is differential reproduction. Death is the inevitable result of a finite world. Despite widespread use of the term ‘survival of the fittest’, evolution is not primarily about survival but about what breeds. Obviously there’s no breeding without survival, but survival alone is just a precondition for breeding and it’s the successful breeding itself that matters. Also the word fittest tends to overemphasise physical fitness. Fitness also means fitting into ones surroundings, referring to how one meshes with ones environment, both physical and social, as well as physical vigour.

Is the ‘red in tooth and claw’ aspect of natural selection evil?. Here it is worth noting that while as creatures we are very sensitive to evil and adept at countering it, we don’t make any attempt to shake up this part of the natural process. Instead we perfect it, we breed animals as pets for their temperament, shape and ability; we have populated the world with animals we breed for slaughter and our own sustenance. As the greatest predator of the lot we find ourselves at the top of the food chain, but we don’t appear to be too remorseful about it. It seems vastly hypercritical to turn around to the lions and chastise them for hunting the wilderbeast. In these chains of being the creatures with the greatest mental lives and therefore the greatest capacity for suffering find themselves in a privileged place in the order. We justify our contribution to natural evil because we rightly see the suffering of all animals besides those with the greatest mental capabilities as different. Applying human morality to biology makes no sense in this respect.
God could conceivably stop the animals ripping each other apart but this would result in the starvation of the next creature in the chain. Conceivably God could make every creature in the world a herbivore, or obtain its energy from photosynthesis but this would result in a static and uninteresting natural order. The point of evolution seems to be to create diversity and complexity and to constrain it in this way would render it impotent. Conceivably God could magic this diversity into existence but this would be a cosmic puppet theatre devoid of dignity.

Lets turn to the problem of disease, the most difficult point that Carr raises. Evolution actually helps matters here, because it shows disease emerges as a byproduct of a free process rather than through direct intervention. This is all very well, but why?, if God is all powerful does he not stop it?. In Christian theology our earthly existence is imperfect and represents a transitional phase before the afterlife; the suffering of humanity through disease therefore has to be seen in the context of its eventual resurrection. There are limits to the amount and degree of evil which are possible in our world. Thus there are limits to the amount of pain which a person can suffer. This mitigates the suffering but does not excuse it or explain why it permitted to exist. I think the answer is that ultimately good and evil are completely interdependent. It is wrong to separate them into separate phenomena, they ultimately represent different extremes of the moral order. Without the existence of certain evils, certain goods cannot appear. Conceivably we could have a world where diseases occur as a bypoduct of biological processes but they are slapped down by God as soon as they appear. A creator who allows humanity only coughs and colds, and not cancer and cholera would be a creator who treated men as children instead of giving them real encouragement to subdue the world. We rightly recognise the extraordinary goodness of men like Pasteur and women like Florence Nightingale and Mother Theresa in their efforts to combat the imperfections of the world. A world devoid of evil would not allow the conquest of evil and the heroic struggle of humanity to perfect the universe. Furthermore, the Christian can point towards the living God who came to earth and pointed the way by suffering with humanity, healing the sick and ultimately proclaiming the resurrection of the dead. The point of a transient, imperfect world is for its inhabitants to choose goodness and combat the evils. Without the evil it loses its purpose. I would say that this Theodicy is simple as it doesn’t introduce theological extravagances such as demons, spirits or the fall.

Last question, is the God of Christian theology similar to Joseph Mengele?. Well the God of nature is the constant gardener, he raises his creation from non existence, breathes life into billions upon billions of creatures and through their evolvability his creations have the capacity to react to threats within the created order. Those creatures he has appointed guardians of nature will join him in heaven. In order for Joseph Mengele to be similar to God he would first have to create his experimental subjects from scratch, give them the gift of life with all its joy, love and sadness and give them tools such as, an immune system and rationality, to fend off the perils of the environment he has created. Furthermore, he would have to resurrect his subjects and place them in paradise. I don’t actually remember Mengele doing any of those things so I think the analogy is bogus. In Christianity God does not hold his subjects down and perform experiments on them. He gives them the gift of existence and the faculties to use that gift to the full. When evil raises its ugly head as a by-product of the creative process or man’s gift of free Will it is cancelled out by the ultimate good.