A review of: "Creation of evolution: Do we have to choose?" by Dr. Denis Alexander, Monarch Books, Oxford, 2008. Download PDF version. Download Microsoft Word version.
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Dr. Denis Alexander, a fellow of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, and director of the "Faraday Institute for Science and Religion". Dr. Alexander is both an evangelical Christian and a professional biologist. He is also a Darwinist, not a creationist. The aim of his book is to explain why you should be too.
I was given a copy of this book in Summer 2008, and its contents deeply concern me. Dr. Alexander professes to be an evangelical. The methods of Biblical interpretation which he applies in this book, however, are not. I do not agree with the book's overall thesis - that Darwinism can be harmonised with the Bible - but the liberal hermeneutical methods which are used to justify that thesis concern me more. Dr. Alexander does not present any argument for his assumptions in this book, but simply presents them to the naive reader as unquestionable.
If evangelicals take the contents of this book to heart, they will not only be endorsing a certain set of conclusions regarding origins; they will also be embracing a seriously erroneous approach to interpreting the word of God as a whole, and its relationship to other areas of knowledge. Such an approach, if carried out consistently, will ultimately damage the whole structure of Biblical revelation and the gospel itself - a road which I believe Dr. Alexander in this book has already travelled a long way down. I agree with Professor Andrew McIntosh, whose review in "Evangelical Times" published in September 2008 asserted as follows: "By writing this book, Alexander has placed himself on the side of liberal theologians and, in this reviewer's opinion, has departed seriously from the evangelical faith."
The following review was composed bit-by-bit after I had read the book once and decided to go through it again. It amplifies and justifies the above statement of concern. It is not a comprehensive review; there are many other issues of fact and interpretation I would take issue with. It is intended to focus on some key issues, especially the above ones. As it was not proof-read for professional publication, there are likely to be various typing and other mistakes, which I hope you will forgive!
In his preface, Dr. Alexander (henceforth DA) begins by telling us that his book pre-supposes the entire authority of the Bible and so is mainly written for Christians; fine. He then goes on to say that the creation/evolution debate has generated too much heat and not enough light, and that we need to make sure we disagree in a loving way. The disagreement, he says, is not over an essential and central biblical doctrine. The fact that God created and sustains the universe is essential and central; but just how he did so is a peripheral matter (the methods and mechanisms), an in-house debate in which we must speak with love to one another and on which we can fellowship whilst in disagreement.
OK, since we're being asked to, let's get our cards on the table. Many fine Christians have endorsed Darwinism, and creationists are no more immune from using harsh or intemperate language than anyone else in heated matters is. It won't be hard to use Google to find people who are both creationists and staggeringly rude, as well as Christian Darwinists who speak respectfully and edifyingly.
We have an early clue, though, from this introduction as to where the book is going to go. The Bible, we are going to discover, is basically empty of the significant content as to any of the how, where or when God created. It just tells us that he did, in a wonderful way that omits any details that relate to time or space. That's a slight overstatement, as Dr. Alexander will allow a few peripheral details that don't conflict with Darwinism to come in - but no others. The Bible gives a nice ethereal spiritual interpretation of the world; Charlie tells us the hard facts of history and science.
The "central / peripheral" distinction, if pushed in this way, ends up begging or obscuring the key question. Does Darwinism by its innate tendency undermine the Christian doctrine of creation? Is its nature to take away the foundations of Christian belief concerning a perfect creation at the beginning, a disastrous all-encompassing fall, the entrance of death to spoil God's "very good" creation, a plotline and favoured line from the beginning until the coming of Christ as Saviour? Does the idea of evolution inherently imply some form of naturalism or deism (Darwin himself was a deist)? It might be possible for a man to introduce a family of termites in his basement without suffering any damage... but in the normal course of things there is only going to be one ending.
It's one thing to note that embracing Darwin is not an automatic sign of damnation. Well and good. But the real question is whether Darwinism undermines the actual gospel way of salvation. Here, creationist and atheist agree - if one is true, then the other can't be. One implies this and the other implies that, and between this and that there is fundamental contradiction. The world was created very good and fell, or it began in chaos and has undergone gradual improvement since. God ordered all things by an immediate word at the beginning, or order only comes through ongoing and continuing processes which are still active today. Either one is true, or t'other - but not both. We may both embrace Christ as Saviour; but if your teaching undermines the Biblical gospel, you'll have to allow me the freedom to say so without accusing me of being unloving.
It's interesting, then, to come to the end of DA's book and read the postscript, because by then times have changed! Now that the case has been made for the full compatibility of the Bible with Darwinism as God's method of creation, we learn that Christians who assault the teaching of evolution "are embarrassing", and they "bring the gospel into disrepute". They are ignorant and creating significant barriers to unbelievers to faith. They are a red herring which distract people from doing something useful. They are like the man in Matthew 25:14-30 who buried his talent in the ground (Dr. Alexander doesn't actually go on to spell out the parable's implication that presumably we'll be cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth). I didn't really feel the warm and fuzzies there. Perhaps, I wondered, Dr. Alexander's opinion changed in between writing one and the other? Or perhaps it was just that he got out of different sides of bed on the two days he wrote those bits? Or amnesia struck between the beginning and the end? Or perhaps he's just softening us up at the beginning, and then when he's made his case and thinks he's persuaded us, he tells us what he really thinks?
The preface ends with the statement that DA hopes we'll end up agreeing with him the "Book of God's Word" and the "Book of God's Works" are in full harmony. I don't think any creationist ever doubted that... it's just whether either book has any harmony with Darwinism that we're a little bit sceptical over. The interesting question will be, as DA's book develops, how is he going to interpret those two books? Which interprets which? Which is authoritative and infallible, containing sufficient rules to interpret itself, and which is subject to the fallible judgments of fallen and foolish man? Are these two equal books, or are there differences in them that will affect how we relate them? We'll see...
Chapter 1 is titled "What do we mean by creation?", and seeks to give us a very gentle general introduction to the question. First, DA makes the point that all Christians are in some sense of the word, "creationists" - we believe that everything that is is ultimately due to God. This is regardless of what we believe about how God created. Nevertheless, words are defined by their usage, and so DA accepts that the word "creationist" often means something more as commonly used - but the real thing is not to quibble over words. It is how we answer the key questions concerning how we interpret those early chapters of Genesis, and whether it is compatible with the theory of evolution, and so on. OK.
From there, DA goes on to explain that in interpreting the Bible, we have to use skill and caution. It is written in foreign languages, and comes from foreign eras and cultures. We must be sensitive to such things as genre, the expected audience, purpose, and any relevant extra-textual knowledge, and so on. The next few pages unpack these issues a little bit, and then we are given a brief word study of the Hebrew words which are usually translated in the semantic domain of create, creation, etc.
Frankly this first chapter is rather plodding and not very well structured; the themes don't develop naturally so much as suddenly shift. Still, that's by the by; it's DA's theology that worries me, not his literary skills (the rest of the book is much better in this regard). This chapter is preliminary and there's not much meat on the table yet. There are, though, two issues which did catch my eye. Both were issues of omission, and this became a common theme as I went through the book. I found DA to be a skilful writer, widely read and informed, but ultimately, a bad theologian.
How so? Because DA basically treats the Bible the way that children do the pick-and-mix counter at Woolworths. He has a blend he wants to create, and so he selects some from here, some from there, to get his final product. Something like brewing up a good coffee - half a handful of beans of this one, half of that one, so on and so forth and voila - here's your drink, I hope you like it.
When DA (a self-conscious evangelical) introduces the key questions as to the interpretation of the Bible, I found him in practice to be very much in the modernist camp. What are his key principles for Biblical interpretation? These:
All fine and good, as far as it goes. The Bible is written in human language, and we must look to the ordinary meaning of the words in all their various contexts to understand what it means. DA emphasises that the Bible has dual authorship, and the authors use their own styles and right freely from their own minds. OK. But what's missing from this picture? It's the key principle that the Bible is, to use the title of a particular book on the subject, not like any other book. There are additional factors involved which have a significant impact on interpretation, and cannot be overlooked. Theological liberals treat the Bible as if it were any other ancient Eastern bit of literature, and stop with the list of questions above. Evangelical Christians, though, are meant to acknowledge that the above questions are important but well short of sufficiency, because we believe that the divine authorship of the Bible (which DA believes in) is primary, and that as a result it is indispensable in interpreting any one part of the Bible to compare it with the rest of the Bible. The Bible is our ultimate authority, and therefore takes the prime place in interpreting itself. It is not our job to take this interesting fact here, that fact there, and blend them together to give a plausible and defensible theory of what Genesis means. True Christian exegesis means to find out what the Bible itself actually teaches us what Genesis means. The freedom to brew up our own blend is not there for us - we've already been told how it should turn out.
For Genesis, that means that the correct interpretation of its early chapters is ultimately decided, not simply by how Genesis on its own would be read by a second-millennium-BC dweller of the East; but how Genesis is interpreted by the later authors of the Bible. This question is fundamental and primary, and it is not just a slip that DA misses it out. As I read through his book, I found that with the exception of a brief examination of Romans 5, there was no real effort to survey the question, "how does the Bible itself interpret Genesis? How did Christ use its teachings and what was his and the apostles' hermeneutic? What are the results if we apply the hermeneutic from those places that they do interpret it consistently across the whole book?" Ultimately we will as we read on find that DA interprets Genesis against the background of a reconstruction of the paganism of the early east, and that for him forms the primary context.
The other notable omission was whilst DA was giving us some warnings about mistakes we can make in reading our Bibles. They were good warnings. Westerners can be prone to treating the Bible as if it were written in our own culture, which has been conditioned by the intellectual movements of the past couple of centuries - and such readings will just be alien to the true meaning. So, DA warns us against the danger of reading passages with excessive literalism - reading passages as if they were written by modernists without sensitivity to how the original writer intended them.
Where, though, I wonder is the opposite warning? We live in times dominated by Enlightenment thought. We live in the unpleasant afterglow of over a century of unbelieving theological liberalism. We live in times when people think of the Bible in terms of myth, ancient religious stories to do with the inner, private world of personal opinion, not the real world of time and space. Literalism has slain its thousands, but liberalism its tens of thousands. It is not excessive literalism which has ruined the mainline denominations of the professing Christian church; it is liberalism. So where is DA's warning that we might be in danger of treating straightforward matters of history as if they weren't? Where are we alerted to the risks of facing the Bible's cold, hard assertions about real history, real space and time, and committing the sin of unbelief in their face? Like the Sadducees, missing the text's plain teachings about the real world and reducing it to an ethereal spiritual core of mere moral teaching?
It's not a coincidence that DA missed that aspect out. Because that's where his book's ultimately going to take us in its handling of Genesis...
Chapter 2 is entitled "The Biblical Doctrine of Creation", and is intended to complete the broad overview that began in chapter 1 ("What do we mean by creation?"). The next four chapters are on the question, "What do we mean by evolution?" and answering objections, before going on to ask whether the accounts of creation given to us by the Bible and by the theory of evolution can be harmonised, and how. So this chapter finishes off the overview of creation. In this chapter, DA discusses the Biblical concept of creation in broad terms, setting the parameters for the later discussion of how in particular we understand Genesis and what it has to do with Darwinism.
The headings will give you some idea of how the chapter develops, the first four being offered as "four key points that emerge about God in relation to his creation"; "God is transcendent in relation to his creation", "God is immanent in his creation", "God is personal and Trinitarian in his creation", "The three tenses of creation", "Creation and miracles", and the longest section, "Does the Bible teach science?".
Looked at overall within the context of the question posed in the title of the book itself, this chapter is one enormous word fallacy. It does not deal with the doctrine of creation proper, i.e., the question of origins and what the Bible teaches about how the universe and everything in it began. Rather, it deals with the doctrine of God's relationship to the creation as it now exists, i.e. the doctrine of providence. DA attempts some kind of defence for this in the opening paragraph of the chapter. He says that the Bible's teaching on creation includes origins, but is much more than this, and we shouldn't become too fixated on it; the majority of the teaching on creation is not found in Genesis, but throughout the whole Bible. The language of creation is much broader.
If we're talking about "the created order", then this is all fine and dandy. But this is supposed to be a book about origins, not anything and everything to do with the created order. What we have here is simply a word fallacy. That statement would be going too far, if the next chapter was going to sharpen things up and be "The Biblical doctrine of origins" - i.e. if DA weren't simply going to discuss providence instead of origins. But in fact, that's just what he is going to do; this chapter finishes the overview of creation with scarcely a mention of origins. Under the heading "The three tenses of creation" we get only a few general words about the past creation; in a later chapter there will be some specific analysis of the early chapters of Genesis (there's none in this chapter, despite its title), but even that chapter will minimise the relevance of Genesis to the question of origins. That's why I call it a word fallacy. We use the word "creation" commonly to mean origins. But DA takes the word and then slides over into any concept connected with creation. Bringing in providence, DA basically avoids discussing at all the doctrine of creation proper as understood in evangelical orthodoxy. That's a fairly incredible procedure when you have a Bible whose opening sentence is "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth".
It's not, however, an incredible procedure from DA's point of view, because as the book unfolds one thing becomes clear; DA's doctrine's ultimate end is to fold creation into providence and obliterate it as a separate category. Whilst the Scriptures teach that creation is indeed a past event at the beginning, Darwinism teaches that it is an ongoing process throughout almost the whole of history that continues at the present time. In fact, as far as higher life forms go, it is an ongoing process in which the juicy bits are very recent - overwhelmingly nearer to the present time than to the beginning of time. DA himself will explain in a later chapter with impressive literary skill that, if we view the history of the universe as a 24 hour clock, then man only appeared on the scene 3 seconds ago, at 23:59:57. Man was not created in any meaningful sense "in the beginning", but in reality at the end. His creation is a result of the God working immanently in the created order through the Darwinian process - i.e., it is a result of providence, not of an original supernatural act.
That's why DA structures and proceeds in the chapter in the way he does. It's not simply that he wants to remind us that the vocabulary of the created order goes beyond origins. It's because his doctrines ultimately collapses the matter of origins and makes talk of it redundant.
Immanence and transcendenceDA's section on God's immanence in creation is almost 5 pages, whereas his transcendence gets only just over 1. It's all fine as far as it goes. In the context of the book as a whole, though, this bit is a softening-up exercise, and the one-sided emphasis is not a mistake. Where we're going is that God's immanence in creation is going to be DA's answer to the objection that Darwinism is essentially an atheistic doctrine. As God is immanent everywhere, that includes him being immanent in the Darwinian process or any other theoretical or actual process, so therefore it can't be atheistic. Working this out, though, is postponed to a later chapter. What we're really interested in now, are the two sections "Creation and miracles", and (next time) the longest of them all, "Does the Bible teach science?"
Creation and miraclesHere's DA's argument in this section, summarised. It's good to put it in short form (which DA doesn't), because then its sheer fallaciousness is much more quickly apparent:
The section starts with a feature that becomes increasingly frequent as the book goes on - the anonymous bogeyman. Some Christians, we are told, view God's creative actions as being equivalent to miracles. Fair enough; everything came out of nothing, and that's pretty miraculous I think; that's not really negotiable amongst Christians. Then, this: "Other Christians invoke miracles to explain the existence of those aspects of the created order which they believe can never be understood or explained by science." Well, that's fair enough in one sense - understood one way, it's pretty much the standard definition of a miracle, if by "science" we mean those things we study which are the regularly and orderly actions of God, and by "miracles" we mean those things which are extraordinary acts of God. That would basically be a tautology. But who exactly are the "some Christians" and "other Christians"? Because I don't think DA wants us to interpret him in this way. He's suggesting that there are some group of dullards out there who are indulging in the "God of the gaps" fallacy - I don't understand this, therefore it's a miracle; "God did it", or if you're one of those very high-brow atheists we come across on el Internet, "goddidit". This kind of "some Christians believe..." line keeps cropping up in the book when DA wants to distance himself from the creationist position, but it seems that he knows that the thing he's suggesting isn't actually the position of any mainstream or representative creationist. Hence, he hides behind the "some Christians believe..." trick, which gets him out of having to document what he says, or show that reputable creationists actually believe it, but still allows the suggestion to linger in the air for the undiscerning.
Putting that aside, though, we need to actually look at the argument itself. It's another word fallacy, after that embodied by the chapter as a whole (see last time). DA picks out various words which are used in the context of miracles, signs, wonders, and so on. Then he observes that these words aren't used in the creation account; then he concludes that therefore, creation is not a supernatural event. This, of course, then leaves the door open for us to accept that creation is through the Darwinian mechanism, which involves the outworking of predictable processes over a very long period of time.
This kind of abuse of word studies is what gives study of the original languages a bad name. The root error in this case, is that DA makes the arbitrary restriction that only a certain group of key words is allowed to signal the world of miracles; if those words don't appear then it doesn't matter what words are used - we don't have a miracle. So even if the Bible were to say, "this was a supernatural event, you dummy!", it still wouldn't be a supernatural event, because the word "sign", "wonder" or whatnot doesn't appear in the sentence and "supernatural" wasn't on the list we drew up. The words which DA chooses are those which are used especially in connection with the miracles performed at the time of the Exodus, and those performed by Christ in his fulfilment - the greater Exodus he achieved through his death. They are the words to do with signs of redemption. Creation, of course, is not an act of redemption, and hence it's not a shock to find that the vocabulary to do with the highlighting of acts of redemption through wonders and signs isn't used in connection with it. Creation and redemption are theologically distinct; to insist that the vocabulary of the supernatural in one category must be the same in the other is an assertion without any necessity behind it. DA, though, makes the ultimate argument from silence by asserting that this very absence is, rather than being because creation isn't redemption, instead definite teaching for us that the creation event was through predictable processes instead of an immediate act of God.
Surely we have here one of those places where a truth is clear to every child who picks up a Bible, but obscure to the man who's buried himself in technical arguments, word studies, and the desire to rule our special creation a priori. A small child would know that if you want to establish whether or not creation was a supernatural event, you should read the language of Genesis 1, and what the rest of the Bible says in reference to those early chapters. Alexander, though, manages to establish that Genesis 1 doesn't describe a supernatural event merely by noticing that the word group to do with signs of redemption isn't used in that chapter, and without any examination of what words are actually used and more importantly, how they are connected to each other in sentences (as if the mere presence of this or that word decides what doctrine is or isn't taught). I grieve at this chapter, because many naive readers will surely be wowed and impressed - "look, the man mentions words in Greek and Hebrew; he must be right!" But the fundamental structure of the argument is entirely bogus.
Does the Bible teach science?The longest section in this chapter is under the heading "Does the Bible teach science?", and rounds off the two chapters which aim to give us an overview of the Biblical position, before we go on to get an overview of Darwinism. (The chapters after that then ask how the two can be integrated.)
There are some good points scored here against those who have a naive, Richard Dawkins-style take on how religious belief and scientific research can interact. Alexander aims some shots which hit the target in criticising some modernist assumptions. Here, we're talking about the idea that science is the primary arbiter of all truths - any kind of "truth" which isn't a "scientific truth" is an inferior species. This is the empiricist fallacy. The set of justified beliefs is much larger than the set of beliefs subject to verification via repeatable experiments. How much does my wife love me? I'd say quite a lot, but I can't measure it with the love-ometer and give you a score on a scale from 1 to 10.
DA also seeks to explain something of the principle of "accommodation"; that the language of the Scriptures is designed to be intelligible to its readers, who were to read it according to its purpose, not according to any arbitrary whim they should entertain. It is not to be read as if it were an edition of The International Physics Monthly. The words should not be interpreted as if they have coded technical and scientific meanings to demonstrate to us that in fact Moses was familiar with how mobile phones work. Just because modern secularists think that "science" is a superior kind of truth does not mean we have to bend the Bible to show that it's science in order to stop it coming off second best.
In the presence of these criticisms of modernist errors, then, it is ironic to see that ultimately DA takes a position which involves one of the biggest and most damaging to Christianity of them all. In his zeal to stop us from reading the Bible as science, DA comfortably avoids driving his cart into the ditch on the left hand side of the road. Sadly this is at the expense of making a bee-line into the ditch on the right side instead. The position which DA leaves us with is one right at the top of the list of modernist axioms. Ultimately, modern scientific journals contain objective science, and the Bible contains religious truths, and never the twain shall meet. The Bible is not intended to, and does not, teach us anything about the concrete world that you can see and touch; it contains spiritual truths for salvation. Hence DA approvingly quotes other writers with words like "the Holy Spirit did not desire that men should learn things that are useful to no one for salvation" and " [Scripture is] a Rule of our Faith and Obedience, [but not] a Judge of such Natural Truths as are to be found out by our own Industry and Experience" and "You receive no instruction on physical matters [from the Bible]. The message is a moral one".
This is ultimately a false dichotomy, and a rank modernist one at that. The God who has acted to save us is one who has acted in the world of space and time. His intervention is a historical one, involving real atoms and molecules. It is not an other-worldly salvation that only exists in an intangible spiritual realm, but in the concrete one that we live in. In this part of the chapter, DA continues to employ the strategy that has already been noted in this review. He sets up the question upon his own terms, with his own choice of dubious dichotomies, and then brings in the "some Christians believe..." straw-man to set the backdrop that he'll paint his own views against. The clear implication, given the purpose of the book, is that creationists believe that Genesis is to be read something like as if it were a copy of Newton's Principia, science written ahead of its time. Alexander writes, "A question that is often raised when thinking about the biblical doctrine of creation is whether the Bible itself presents its teachings on the subject as if they represented some form of modern science" and "There is a certain irony in the reflection that the keen atheist Prof. Richard Dawkins shares with some Christians their idea that religious and scientific truths belong to the same domain." Here are those strange bogey-men, "some Christians" again. Who are they?
The intention of the suggestion is to put into the reader's mind that this is what creationists think. That impression is confirmed because such hints are the only false suggestions that Alexander contrasts his own view with. The book is meant to refute creationism; yet DA's descriptions of creationism are off-the-wall. Ultimately this is simple intellectual dishonesty. The briefest survey of creationist literature from any kind of mainstream source would show that DA has set up and shot down a legion of flaming straw-men. No mainstream creationist thinks that Genesis is intended to be interpreted using the paradigm of modern science. The real question, which they raise again and again, is one of history. Genesis is not an other-worldly narrative, "written in timeless narratives" as DA says. It is very much time-bound. There is no "spiritual core", for example, to Genesis 5, such that we can dispense with the long, detailed genealogies of how Enos lived ninety years and gave birth to Canaan, or how Jared died aged nine hundred and sixty two. This is real-world history, because the Saviour who was coming was to be born as a real flesh-and-blood man, with a real human ancestry going back to Adam. The Son of God came as a real person in the real world to redeem real people in the real world. Genesis has to be real history, precisely because contrary to secularism, the salvation which was coming was to be a real and historical one, not just a set of private ideas. The Saviour and his apostles, taught us to read Genesis as accurate history; but all questions of that kind are conveniently ignored by Alexander in order to arrive at the neat scientific truth / spiritual truth divide that he leaves us with.
In conclusion, then, we see that Alexander totally side-steps all questions of history. He sets up the neat dichotomy, "is Genesis modern science", answers negatively, and conveniently entirely ignores what creationists actually teach. Is this deliberately dishonest, or just ignorant? Either way, I again came away sad because the clever method of setting up the debate on your own terms whilst ignoring what your opponents actually say, and then displaying a lot of skill and cleverness in your answer, will probably be persuasive to many naive readers. But to anyone who thinks that a case is only established when you represent your opponent on the strongest possible terms, this part of the book can only be judged as very weak indeed.
After 22 pages intended to give an overview of the Christian idea of creation, we are now treated to 104 to give us an overview of the idea of evolution. Perhaps this is necessary because the intended readership of the book will be assumed to already know more about the former than the latter. On the other hand, it is an interesting reflection of a theme that runs throughout the book: DA is a very orthodox evolutionist, and very reluctant to tweak with anything that forms the present consensus in the mainstream scientific community; but as regards orthodox Christian theology, it has much less that is certain and can be tweaked and adapted quite at will.
This chapter, as the title suggests, introduces us to dating, DNA and genes; the next two chapters explain the topics of "natural selection and reproductive success" and "Speciation, fossils and the question of information", before a chapter addressing some objections ties the summary up.
I am a theologian and logician, not a biologist, so if DA has made any subtle errors in the finer points of explaining DNA and genes, I won't be detecting it any time soon. Much of this kind of material is uncontroversial, though DA doesn't bother to point that out. The ways in which DNA and genes can be observed to operate in the world today can be observed by everyone, and folded into a variety of different possible theories about the past. That outwardly quite different organisms have various similarities in their genes can be explained by many different and incompatible theories. Perhaps those organisms have a common ancestor and the similarities have been copied down the years and the divergent paths of Darwinian evolution. Perhaps those organisms have a common designer who intended his highest creature, man, to study and understand the living world, and so for that and other reasons used similar designs in many of his creatures. Perhaps it's just a massive coincidence. The point is that the observation itself is a neutral fact; how we decide which theory it points to, or maybe none of the above, has to be decided on other grounds.
This is a good point to mention, then, that at no point in his book does DA explain to his readers that scientific research takes place in terms of paradigms. There is a model, and research is done to explore that model, which is then confirmed, or adapted in minor or major ways, or even scrapped, or perhaps we just put the research on the shelf because it puzzles us too much and we don't know what to do with it. Only a miniscule number of research scientists genuinely make a new advance; the vast majority are involved in doing work that simply assumes the truth of a particular paradigm, or seeks to confirm it or possibly to tease it out a little bit. When it comes to comparing two competing paradigms (such as Darwinism or special creation), you can't just point out that your paradigm "explains stuff"; that is not evidence of superiority. Evidence of superiority comes when you show that your paradigm explains stuff better than the other one across a wide range of data. Alexander, though, despite a few critiques of modernist thought here and there, allows his reader to go away thinking that science is simply a giant consensus, slowly, objectively and relentlessly grinding its way from neutral assumptions to the discovery of all (natural) truth. That's classic Darwinist rhetoric; the simple reader must not be allowed to think in terms of controlling world-views or paradigms, because the suggestion that philosophy or personal prejudice might play a part in scientists' work, or that they simply might be just barking up the whole wrong tree from the beginning in any particular area, would lead to evolution being given a more objective scrutiny than it could survive. Hence, our chapters introducing evolution simply describe whatever the present consensus is, and keep the whole matter of paradigms and competing models or world-views conveniently hidden.
It is instructive to notice just how thorough-going DA's debt to enlightenment thinking is in these chapters. Biblical truth and scientific truth are, in his mind, in effect two hermetically sealed sources of truth. Yes, the Christian scientist may pause during his work to praise the Creator for what wonderful things he has made; but Biblical truth is never allowed to set any boundaries or limits in his study - this would be a category mistake. Hence we have two self-contained chapters on creation, and now some on evolution, and these can stand quite independently of what's gone before. Simply put, DA swallows the enlightenment fallacy of a "neutral" science hook, line and sinker. There is not a word to show us any awareness of the Christian idea of theology as the "queen of the sciences", where the Word of God is the ultimate source of revelation and authority, by which every external idea must be scrutinised and have its limits defined.
Hence it is, then, that in the section arguing for a very large age for the creation, there is simply no discussion of what limits Scripture puts upon it - even whether it does. There is nothing on this in the whole book. This fits in with the way DA has been going - the Bible tells us spiritual truths, but science tells us ones about the physical world. We noted in the last chapter that the question of whether Scripture tells us historical truths is one that DA simply side-steps. Of course, enormously long ages are needed to fit in the evolutionary hypothesis, so DA piles up various lists of things that are really really old. It's another exercise in moving swiftly on conveniently omitting to discuss any of the difficulties. If there really was a global flood, then many of the assumptions used in these things are simply wrong. If you find a nearly full bucket in my bathroom under a dripping tap, you might measure the rate of dripping and then calculate how long it took to get so full - a few weeks. In fact I filled that bucket myself and then turned the tap off 5 minutes ago and it's got a little drip. By giving you a key to the past, I've shown you that you're going wrong if you just do some sums that assume that as things are now, so they have ever been. The word of God is our key to the past. If there was a world-wide flood, as it says, then we have to factor that into our calculations; we can't simply assume that present processes can unlock our past if we just wind the clock back and do the sums. DA, though, follows the secular model totally: only data from the physical present can control our interpretation of the past, and the Bible must be treated as if it either doesn't exist or says nothing on the matter. Being a professing evangelical, DA plumps for the latter: dating and the age of this or that is fixed by science, only by science, and the Bible is simply a book with nothing significant to say on matters of ancient history. We have here again the practical outworking of the "two books" fallacy (whether DA actually believes it or not): science teaches us about history and the physical world, the Bible teaches us spiritual values.
This chapter is preliminary. There's some material about encoding and non-encoding sections of our DNA. This is intended to pave the way for DA's proof of common ancestry. All that to come.
In this middle chapter seeking to explain the theory of evolution, Dr. Alexander seeks to explain the heart of modern Darwinian theory. Having discussed a little about the dating and genetics, we now get to the key idea: the combination of the continuous production of diversity, filtered by natural selection, to produce the useful improvements necessary to fill all the ecological niches of life.
Alexander explains the concept well. Three known processes (not just mutations, but also sexual reproduction and gene flow) produce variety. This variety is then put through the reality test. Those that are beneficial (in the sense of leading to longer life (and hence more time to produce offspring) or some other reproductive advantage) "survive" by being passed on to successive generations; the others are weeded out. The picture we're meant to have is well-described by Richard Dawkins as the "blind watchmaker" - there's an ever-rolling conveyer belt of possible modifications, and at the end the no-good ones are dumped in history's bin. The good ones survive, and thus the process is pretty much guaranteed to produce continual development.
Nice Story, But...Now, though, we have to apply our own set of "reality filters" to this idea. The first thing to flag up is that creationism has no quarrel with the idea of "descent with modification". It's a truism that nobody is a clone of either parent. There's nothing innate in creationism that is against the idea even of one generation being better adapted to its surroundings than the one before. It's perfectly possible, as a concept, to believe that the Creator endowed his creatures with capabilities latent in their genes that should only be activated or come to observable expression at a distant generation. In fact, creationists pretty much must believe this. If only a very limited number of animals survived the Biblical flood, then it has then to be believed that those animals had, within their gene-pool, sufficient potential to fill the earth again with all of its present variety.
Modification with descent, then, is not controversial. The big question is whether the modifications actually possible through this mechanism have limits or not. Put more simply - must a modified fish remain a fish, or can it eventually modify all the way to becoming a goat, as Darwinism teaches? Are the possibilities for change bounded, or unbounded? Strictly that's question that Dr. Alexander turns to in chapter 5. It's also to the point here, though, because in fact two of the mechanisms for generating variety that he describes do nothing of the kind - as concerns the kind of variety relevant to his purposes.
The Fifteen of SquaresOn page 80, Dr. Alexander complains that evolution is sometimes erroneously represented as only involving one process - genetic mutations - that creates novelty. Indeed it is so represented, by friend and foe alike - because that's the way it is. In sexual reproduction, there's a recombining of the genes of the parents - but recombination is not the generation of novelty. When a hand of cards is returned to the dealer, he shuffles and recombines them in interesting new ways, introducing a new game. But whatever happens in that game, it's still the same 52 cards, and you'll never turn over your hand to discover you've received the fifteen of squares, or that it's actually going to be a game of "Snakes and Ladders". Recombination shuffles what's there - it doesn't create genuine novelty. Alexander makes the point I've made above - that there can be apparent novelty, because the recombination could bring genes to express themselves in ways that they hadn't been able to in the old combination. That, though, is irrelevant to the point. The novelty gets expressed for the first time here - but it was generated previously. A mechanism that expresses already-existing potential is not a mechanism that makes potential: we have to go elsewhere to find that: which leaves us with two.
Gene flow is the same story. The duplicating, rearranging, inserting, etcetera, of information is a distinct concept from the generation of novel information. The question that the Darwinist cannot answer (because Darwinism is wrong) is "where does the information actually come from?" There is no problem for a creationist in believing in not just three, but three hundred million, if necessary, biological mechanisms for the shuffling of information. If you took a print-out of this review to the local copy shop, you might find that their machine has double-printed a page, or added a blank page, or output the pages in the wrong order. What you'd be a bit shocked to find would be that page 42 was now a report on the Boston Marathon, or the second act of Hamlet.
Dr. Alexander glosses over that critical distinction, and it's a weakness that surfaces several times in the book. The genetic code is a code, and as such can be analysed by the mathematical tools used to analyse codes. It is information, and as such falls within the boundaries of information theory. Throughout the book, Alexander either pretends that information theory doesn't exist, or when he addresses it tries to argue that it shouldn't be allowed to apply to biology, or that a special version should be allowed for dealing with biology. In this chapter he takes the "behave as if it isn't there" approach and these issues are glossed over. From that angle, these parts of the chapter are simply an instance of the equivocation fallacy. There's no real distinction between the concepts of directionless change, change within a limit, and unlimited change. I can run round in a circle: it's change, but not getting me anywhere. I can train to run faster and faster - but never so fast that I run 100m in 3 seconds, or a marathon in a minute: the change has limits.
Can We Mutate Our Way There?Mutations, then, are the only potential source of real improvement into the genome, with other mechanisms later perhaps allowing the changes it brings to actually be expressed. Can they do the job? Alexander of course thinks they can; there's no actual mathematics in the chapter or references to it to establish the point. Again that's related to the Achilles heel - no application of information theory. If an organism has been adapted down the years (or rather, its ancestors were selected down the years) for survival, then that makes it a finely-tuned organism. It's a good match for its environment (or strictly, its parents were for theirs). What, then, is the likely effect of a random alteration to its genetic code? What are the statistics? Information theory teaches that random alterations to a finely-tuned code cannot improve it, with any likelihood that could be considered within the realms of possibility even given billions of years of attempts. The sums simply don't add up.
We all know intuitively this by experience. Printing errors when running-off essays do not produce new and brilliant analyses of the topic that the author never intended. Scratches on installer CDs for a computer program don't result in brilliant new features in the code. Dropping your cheap Chinese mobile in the washing up bowl won't make it behave like a top-of-the-range Nokia. Finely tuned codes, when altered, can never produce something useful, within the limits of reasonable mathematical possibility unless the possible age of the universe is stretched by obscenely large numbers which nobody (of whatever persuasion) has ever suggested. Monkeys on type-writers won't ever produce the works of Shakespeare; it can't be done. Dr. Alexander passes over all such questions, because his take is that Darwinism is true and therefore the mathematics must work out somehow. But if your favoured theory results in two plus two equalling seventeen thousand and twenty three, you're theory is false and that fact can't be changed: the laws of mathematics don't work like that. The problem for Darwinism is that it's caught between pincers. There must be a certain average number of mutations being produced from one generation to the next. That number has to be enormously high in order to generate, amongst all the randomness, all the useful changes to take us from single-cells to man in the small number of years available for it (a billion is not a big number in the context of the complexity of the human genome). But, if the number is not very very small, then the number of dangerous mutations would mean the organism would have no hope of survival. It's an unsolvable problem. Too few mutations means that not enough of the magically-right ones to generate the new complexity could come about. But if enough good mutations do take place in an organism, then because of the facts regarding tuned information, enough bad mutations will also have happened to be fatal.
It's telling that all Alexander's examples in the chapter are of the kind that creationists refute before breakfast. They're all of the "change within limits" kind. There are no genuine examples of true novelty in the sense of new useful capabilities through the addition of new information. There are moths of this colour or that colour, or bacteria resistant to this drug or not resistant to this drug. There are sub-sections of the population that die of malaria and some that don't because of sickle-cell anaemia. But nowhere are there fish that become reptiles, or dinosaurs that become birds. He does a good job of illustrating all the kinds of "evolution" that are not controversial - and has nothing to illustrate the kinds that are. In a book positively comparing full-blown evolution with creationism, it's a telling omission: after so many years of creationists making this criticism, if there were good answers and examples we'd have heard them by now.
More than Genes?Another issue that Dr. Alexander glosses over, both here and in the rest of the book, is the theological implications of this scheme. Darwinism implies that every human ability is the result of survival advantage. Whatever you possess, coded somehow in your genes, must have survived because, well, it was helpful for survival. It was a help to your ancestors to mate more, and/or have healthier offspring. That's what the filter of natural selection is. This precise observation is often glossed over by all kinds of Darwinists, not just those with a theistic evolutionary axe to grind. It's not just that feature X is supposed to be somehow useful - it's got to be specifically useful for surviving.
Is that really true? No - it's a flat denial of the Bible's doctrine of man, as made in the image of God. The image of God, with all its attendant potentialities, is not simply something that arises through the struggle for limited resources. According to Scripture, it's a special endowment from God, given for us to use to glorify him. Art, music, culture - all these things are wonderful gifts. The Darwinist viewpoint, though, is that somehow they had some usefulness in our caveman past and allowed one Og to out-club Ug and so pass on his genes. Darwin himself, in his book The Descent Of Man, goes through case after case of human faculties, to try to make plausible some kind of explanation in this region. If you allow that, though, you have fundamentally denied the doctrine of man in the Bible, and the reasons assigned there for his uniqueness. The genius of the chess grandmaster, the budding Mozart infant prodigy, the literary genius of the expert novel writer - these are not features that arose from the earth : they were handed down from heaven.
The Blind WatchmakerIt's a bit of a jolt on page 86, to read Dr. Alexander speak of this unending upwards development through natural selection having taken place "under the sovereignty of God". Cells-to-cellists evolution, as just described, is a blind algorithm. Supposing we could make the sums add up and it were possible, it is then inevitable. Given the unending production line of genetic change, and the continual selection of the useful changes, and given the earth environment, it's then inevitable that every ecological niche will be filled. That's what the algorithm does. That's Professor Dawkins point when he speaks of the "blind watchmaker". It doesn't need providential oversight - it's an algorithm and it does what it does. If it needed sovereign oversight, then it would be something else. Darwinism is a deistic scheme - the results are programmed by the initial conditions. Note that Darwin himself was a deist - a point rather lost on Dr. Alexander when (elsewhere in the book) he argues that Darwinism has no theological implications. The only other use of Scripture in the chapter is a rather bizarre use of the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) as an example of natural selection.
A Hostile WorldAnother major theological problem here is spotted when you look more closely at what's embedded in the idea of natural selection. It assumes the idea of a hostile environment. For there to be progress (in the evolutionary sense), the less-well-fitted organisms have to die out. Just because one offspring has in some way better able to reproduce is in itself not particularly significant - if his other brothers and sisters can reproduce too, then all of their genes will be passed on, not just his. The reason why his genes survive, in the Darwinian scenario, while theirs don't, is because of necessary competition. Resources are scarce; nature is red in tooth and claw; it's a dog-eat-dog world, and only the fit will survive. The world has to be hostile for Darwinian development scenarios to play out. If it's not, then all the genes survive, and there's no significant development. There's just endless shuffling, as a dog gains better genes and then loses them because he didn't need them: his neighbour didn't need to eat him.
That's a scenario that sits OK with the budding atheist - and it's realising the implications of that that played a part in paving the way for the horrific atheist regimes of the 20th century. (The introduction of competition brought evolution back in a meaningful way in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where previously charity and compassion had been allowing the unfit to survive.) It's not a scenario, though, that can fit with a Biblical view of creation. Even if, like Alexander, you take the line that Genesis is totally theological and a-historical, yet you've got to then deal with the actual theology that's there. At a minimum, the world was a "very good" place, designed for man to live in a blissful paradise, without suffering, pain or death (these coming from sin). In Genesis, man's not in a dreadful battle for survival, a fierce competition to get the food and the girl before his brother does. Man lives in wonderful harmony with creation which is fruitful for his sake - because all is at peace under God's loving care. This isn't a question Alexander begins to face until much later in the book - and the aspect that the idea of development through natural selection inherently requires a hostile world is one he never addresses at all.
The Best Inference?At the end of the chapter, Alexander makes an apposite statement that he never realises the implications of or gets round to applying. It is that the business of science is to make an inference to the most plausible explanation. Yes. But, how can an explanation be known as the most plausible one unless there's another theory that is shown to be less plausible? Throughout the book, Darwinism is simply described and asserted. How, though, would a creationist deal with the issues of this chapter? What does he say about natural selection and genetics? How does his interpretation of the data differ with the evolutionist one? What are his objections, and how would Alexander deal with them? Dunno. Alexander's aim is to persuade his reader there's only one game in town. If you think you hear the noise of another one over the other side, he'll simply shout louder about his one. It's only persuasive until you start to tune out the shouting and be a little more critical. Dr. Alexander is a good describer. He describes the Darwinian theory well. But he doesn't bother to allow real-life creationists to put their case, and answer their writings; he simply behaves as if they don't exist. "The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him" - Proverbs 18:17.
No one actually knows the exact number of species on earth. the number already classified is around 2 million. ... Adam was brought by God in Genesis 2:19-20 to name all the animals, but we have a long way to go in finally fulfilling that command!
1. "Evolution is a chance process and this is incompatible with the God
of the Bible bringing about his purposeful plan of creation."
There are some bits I like about the answer offered here, and some bits I don't. I do like some clarifications about the idea of chance in general. I don't like the way that the issue regarding evolution is side-stepped with yet another word game.
Christians do need to think through their ideas about "chance". I hear phrases like "good luck" and "I was lucky" tripping readily off the lips of believers, yet I know they don't really believe in the idea of luck. They mean "God be with you" or "I was blessed", or somesuch. There is no luck, because a sovereign God oversees the casting of the lot, the falling of a sparrow to the ground, and so on. If people and events
are predestined (which they are, e.g. Proverbs 21:1, Romans 9:1, Isaiah 44:28ff, Daniel 4:34-35), then that means that God has overseen and guided things at the most minute of levels. Alexander points out that even in the event of fertilisation, it was millions to one that the particular sperm that made you, you should be the one - and yet we confess that it happened exactly according to the will of God. So far, so good.
The problem with DA's answer, though, is that he then avoids sharpening the objection a little to work within this framework. The fundamental problem is that the Darwinian theory leaves no place for the idea of final purpose. Random mutations and natural selection work together at each stage, but without any knowledge of the end goal. There is no inevitability to the rise of man or the world as we know it. For the theistic evolutionist to say, "Ah, but God had that in mind and so guided it in that direction" is a logical contradiction - Darwinism, if guided according to an overall plan, cannot then be Darwinism. Either natural selection selects merely for survival potential, or it selects according to the climax of God's will for man with his immense intelligence and abilities far beyond what is necessary for survival. If the process was divinely superintended, then it was not a Darwinian process at all, because the lack of superintendence is the essence of the theory - the selfish genes just do what's needed for their survival. What the theistic evolutionist is basically left doing is just making the empty assertion that, well, it was a nice happy event that that turned out to be exactly what was needed anyway to bring God's plan about.
Dr. Alexander's theory could explain how a deistic-type God could have created through a Darwinian process; but the God if deism is not the God of the Bible. The Bible's creation account is of a God who supernaturally intervened - an immediate event, not a multi-age process. That's why Richard Dawkins is willing to concede that a serious case can be made for a God of the type conceived in deism. Some Christian commentators seem to think this indicates a softening of Dawkins' atheism in his old age. Not so. Deism posits a God whose influence is of no practical effect - it makes no difference whether the Deistic God did something, or if nature had inherent powers to work out its own way according to immutable laws; the outcome is the same. No atheist is worried about such a "God" - one whose existence has no cash value in the real world. That, though, is the kind of God that Dr. Alexander leaves us with.
As DA develops his answer, it goes off the rails. We meet again a line of reasoning that he uses rather frequently - divide and conquer. Make some subtle distinctions, blow some smoke, and do a runner before it clears. Now, don't get me wrong. The making of careful distinctions is the very essence of proper argument and logical inquiry. My problem is that DA doesn't use this tool - he abuses it. The answer to this objection is a case in point. DA proceeds to clarify that there are three things that we might mean by "chance", so we must be clear. OK. What are those three things? Firstly, events that are predictable in principle if not in practice. Secondly, events such as quantum events which are not predictable even in principle. Thirdly, "metaphysical chance" - events without any ultimate metaphysical cause. This third one, says DA, is the one whose existence, were it real, would concern Christians. However, there's nothing in the Darwinian theory that would imply metaphysical chance, so all is well.
What, though, is actually the difference between the second and third of those meanings? It's not a settled matter amongst physicists that quantum events are actually inherently incomputable. Is DA actually suggesting that not even God can know when an atom will undergo nuclear decay? By saying that some events are not predictable even in principle, does he mean to include God too amongst those unable to predict them? This is now the horns of a dilemma. If he does, then aside from being outside of theistic orthodoxy, then this makes this meaning the same as the third - an event of metaphysical chance which is not controlled by any agent or other cause. If, though, God can predict such events, then this merges the meaning into the third: it is in fact an event predictable in principle after all: it's just that our minds aren't big enough to do the predicting like God's is.
DA never explains what an event of genuine "metaphysical chance" would look like, or how we'd know we'd come across one. He simply asserts, ipso facto, that Darwinism doesn't include any such events, so there's nothing to be worried about in there. We are told that it does include "meaning two" events, but we are simply told that this has no implications: we're not told why not. Actually I think if even God cannot predict the effects of radiation on DNA (because they're inherently, according to DA, unpredictable), leading to mutations and evolutionary development, then we do have a serious problem; but DA never considers this. We're simply assured that there are no "meaning three" events, so we shouldn't worry - but not informed how we know there aren't any such events, even if we knew what one would look like to begin with.
So, the distinction which DA brings in to answer this objection does not ultimately clarify, it obfuscates. The distinction made is not well-defined, and not explained - but some hands are waved and we're told all is OK.
An objection DA might have put, but didn't, is to point out that evolution is a multi-million year process in which imperfection gradually improves (but never reaches a state of perfection); whereas Biblical creation was an event in immediate response to the Word of God, such that all that was made was "very good", but then fell. Evolution is a slow rise from chaos; Biblical creation is a complete event that is then spoilt by sin. Such, though, is the luxury of the author who chooses his own objections and never quotes from any literature from his real-life opponents - you can pick and choose what things to answer and if your reader is new enough to the subject area, he'll not know you've sold him a dud.
2. "The theory of evolution is not truly scientific because it does not involve repeatable experiments in the laboratory."
This objection seems to be aiming to make the distinction that creationists often make, between "operational" and "origins" science. One is based upon repeatable observations, whereas the other is a degree of magnitude more speculative, being based upon inferences about unique events. The world only began once, and we can't run back the tape; science can only observe the present and try to piece together the bits. Origins science by its nature must be much more humble and tentative, much to the chagrin of atheist apologists who'd love to assert that they know we're just a cosmic accident.
A truly Christian scientist trying to reconstruct the past has a great advantage. He believes that God has spoken many words about the past These words are infallible and without error, and recorded for us in Scripture. By studying God's word, we can gain a much better interpretation of God's world. True, the Bible's principle subject is to reveal the glory of Christ and draw a chosen people to salvation in him; but that Christ and that salvation are not timeless, a-historical entities, but have come in flesh and blood. Thus the Bible contains a great deal of history, as God has unfolded his primeval promises until the coming of his Son and caused it all to be recorded so that we might believe. The Christian origins scientist can thus use this infallible word as a framework in which all the valid activity of investigation, speculation and so on can take place.
Unfortunately you won't get any idea of the above from DA's answer to this objection. His is simply to assert that whilst, yes, scientists investigating the past are building a case, yet they do it very carefully, according to accepted rules of evidence, and thus its conclusions can after all be treated as certain. With no sense of irony, he compares this to the work of the legal system, with its forensic experts, judges, lawyers and court cases. Here I wanted to say "precisely", because even with all that, yet horrendous miscarriages of justice occur and occur continually - because man in his fallenness is not as objective, clever or rational as he flatters himself to be, and the nature of original sin is that no matter how many layers of procedure, counter-balances and checks you build in, that's how it will always be apart from the grace of God intervening. Another feature of DA's answer has been commented on before - the refusal to explain that science works in terms of paradigms, and contrary evidence is often explained away or just put on the shelf; in DA's explanation, the whole Darwinian community would drop its theory at the first instant if you produced a single fact that contradicted it. All together now, in our best Jeremy Paxman voices... "oh come on, pull the other one!"
3. Evolution runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics
Here DA gives a short and not particular relevant answer. That was easy for him to do, because he doesn't state the objection in a strong or accurate form, so there's not much refuting needing to be done. He doesn't answer the question in terms of an increase in organised complexity. The impression given in the answer is that simply providing a large amount of heat (from the sun, which is gradually winding down) will be enough to account for the "winding up" of the earth. But, since when did just naked heat bring about organisation, information and complexity? DA's answer does nothing more than shoot down a straw man.
4. Perhaps God makes things look old, although in reality they are much younger, in order to test our faith?
Whereas a good question, from the second law of thermodynamics, got just one page, this silly objection gets three - three pages which I think may be the most tedious and pointless in the book. DA goes to town to patronise and re-educate the simple and naive creationist who might believe such things as this, making God a liar - though it's not a viewpoint you'll find expressed by any mainstream creationist ministry or speaker. Such is the author's luxury when he grants himself liberty to choose his own objections without reference to the actual literature of the strongest representatives of the opposing position.
There is a real question that could have been answered here. On the day Adam was created, how old was he? And how about Eve? By the Bible's testimony, they were created as adults. Eve was made from Adam's rib and brought to him as a mature woman. The anthropologist examining them would have declared them to have been alive for several years - but he would have been wrong, because his underlying assumptions of gradual development instead of instantaneous creation were wrong. The real question here is over the mere assumption of gradualism - that we can wind back the clock on today's world as far as we like, with no dramatic interventions or catastrophic events to worry about. That real question, though, is overlooked in favour of an amusing tail about Philip Gosse and his Omphalus. DA reminds us that fake histories would make God a liar. The real point is, though, that God has given us his Word so we know how to interpret the history - but DA doesn't interpret creation history using God's word; he gives that whole task to Enlightenment-mode science, and then tries to harmonise what he finds in God's word with Darwinism after the event.
5. What use is half an eye?
This bit is more technical. I found it irrelevant, because DA misses the point and spends some pages telling us about already formed systems, though limited ones, rather than telling us what use half a system would actually be!
One interesting bit was where he contradicts the approach to Darwinism, chance and providence he takes elsewhere in the book. He tells us that the human optical system is sub-optimal because there is a blind spot due to the optic nerve having to cross the retina to get to the brain - a defect the octopus does not have. He then remarks, "This provides a good illustration of the various ways in which our organs reflect their own sometimes idiosyncratic evolutionary histories." This idea of defective design due to idiosyncratic history, though, cannot be made compatible with his earlier assertions (e.g. in the answer to the first objection) that Darwinism is not a random process but perfectly superintended by God at every point to bring about the well-formed creation he desired. Either the human eye is an idiosyncratic hodge-podge limited by its own evolutionary history, or is what a perfectly wise designer intended it to be. You can't posit one of those ideas when the objection at hand makes it convenient to do so and the other when it suits you on another occasion.
6. "Surely if evolution were true, God would have told us in his Word so that we don't need to have all this discussion?"
Three-fold answer here, and a dud on all accounts:
a) The Bible is about spiritual matters such as salvation, not about the natural world. Ugh. That dichotomy is an Enlightenment dualism that is unbiblical.
b) God, like a wise parent, does not just give us all we need to know on a plate - he allows us to explore and find the truth. Humph. This answer has a load of false assumptions, such as: that whether creation is a long, upward process full of struggle or death or whether it was a supernatural event perfect at completion which then fell, is a distinction with no theological consequence and so the Bible doesn't need to inform us. Another: that telling us that creation was through a multi-billion year process would somehow be "telling us all we need to know on a plate". Hardly. That one sentence doesn't give you an iota of knowledge about genes, DNA, and so on.
c) That if the Bible were to tell us about evolution, it would then be an impractically long book. Balderdash. The Bible could say something to indicate that the universe is billions of years old, or was formed through slow and gradual processes, in just a few words. When we're debating creation versus evolution, we're debating two broad frameworks with considerably flexibility on squillions of biological details which could be accommodated by either system. This answer is exceptionally weak.
7. "Perhaps God made the original kinds by special acts of creation which then underwent rapid evolution to generate the species diversity that we see today."
The answer to this objection is a bit special, because DA actually condescends to name an actual creationist, albeit a dead one (Henry Morris). But it's not accompanied by any references to his works or quotes so that you can check out if he's accurately represented or not... I think DA's intention throughout the book is to imply that doubting Darwinism is beneath his intellectual contempt, and he doesn't demean himself by actually touching any of their works: so neither should you!
DA's ridiculous answer to this objection is that it amounts to "throwing out the whole of current science", because if you reject speculative evolutionary dating scenarios then, well, those scenarios are based upon irrefutable scientific principles which if you were consistent you should reject everywhere else too. i.e. It's a thin end of the wedge - reject it here, you should for consistency reject it everywhere, so let's say that that's effectively what you do do!
By this kind of reasoning, I should set DA a maths test, and if he gets one single question wrong then I'll give him 0% on the entire test because maths is after all a coherent system - and if you mistakenly get a sum wrong in one place then, well, that mistake if consistently applied everywhere else would falsify the rest of mathematics too! Great stuff. But in terms of logic, this argument is pants.
The other part of the answer is that there simply isn't enough time for rapid enough speciation to occur. I find this answer also incredible, because the objection itself doesn't state just how many different specimens of each created kind there were, or any figure for how much genetic diversity was present in their original state. It just states that there were several original created kinds, rather than just one common ancestor for the whole family of life. How many species there were within those kinds and how long would then be needed for further diversification to today's levels is not stated in the objection, so the answer that there's "not enough" needs to be argued with some numbers, not just boldly asserted.
It is describing creative events that occurred before anyone was around to describe them, so it cannot be history in any normal use of that term.And that's it. What DA means by "normal use" of the term "history", we are not told. Whether God himself, inspiring Moses, might be an even better historian than the normal human ones who weren't around and therefore whether we don't need to worry about their absence, doesn't seem to be worth discussing. Nope - if it happened before any men were here, then even if God himself records it it just cannot count as "history" in a meaningful way and there's nothing left even worth discussing. This kind of "clever" word-game, by which DA entirely side-steps the central and relevant issues in order to swiftly proceed on to some display of intelligence on some other side-issue is what makes this book a deeply frustrating one for anyone looking for an informed critique of young earth creationism.
"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
This chapter continues and concludes the discussion of the question of how to identify Adam and Eve, begun in the previous. As with the previous chapter, the bigger issues are revealed in this chapter by taking a step back. It is amazing to see what DA is certain about, given how uncertain he is about many things in the Bible. Ancient teeth fragments can be relied upon to reveal human evolution in dogmatic detail. Stone tools appeared 2.6 million years ago. We know who lived near Lake Turkana (not so far from here - another few hundred k's up north - a couple doing food relief from this town travelled there yesterday) 1.44 million years ago, and don't make the mistake of saying it was 1.43 or 1.45.
The chapter, then, starts with several pages of dogmatism about the evolutionary history of man and his various cousins, the gorillas, gibbons, chimpanzees and Great Uncle Archie's family of throwbacks. There's some discussion of genetics, the development of human culture and language, before focussing on the "Neolithic" era (10,000 BC onwards), as the ultimately most relevant to the identification of Adam and Eve. This all winds up to the conclusion, which ought to sound out the big warning bells for anyone whose evangelical instincts haven't been thoroughly lobotomised by the 230-odd pages beforehand:
"It is against this cultural and historical background [reviewer: i.e. the history of humanity according to present Darwinian theory] that one needs to consider the early chapters of Genesis."
Did you get that? Perhaps you were one of those naive Bible believers who thought that God gave us Genesis as a true account of humanity's origins, so that by this divine yardstick you could measure, approve or reject all competing accounts. Perhaps you foolishly imagined that the Word of God gave you a cultural and historical background against which to test theories from other areas of study, such as Darwinism. Simpleton! DA will put you right. The sure and certain revelation of Darwinism gives you the truth, and against this background you must read the Word of God. If you can't spot the theological down-grade by this stage of the book, you're not going to.
There's then a small aside whilst DA considers the question of whether humans are still evolving. I applaud him for including it, as many times in the book he simply skirts around relevant issues. In DA's theology, creation is via gradual processes which are part of the world today as much as they are the past. This does raise as a natural question - so, are human beings still developing upwards, and shall we in future be something else? Did Jesus die for the coming homo futuris as well as the present homo sapiens? Well, DA poses the question but his answer is a pot of warm slop. Holding to Darwinian orthodoxy, he doesn't deny any of the premises, but falls back on giving three reasons why future human evolution (though theoretically possible), is unlikely in practice. What it boils down to is that in the modern world we don't get the isolated populations where natural selection can kill off the weak before they pass on their faulty genes. I think DA's answer needs to be better informed by the realities of present anthropology, because what he says isn't true. It's widely reported in the news in recent months (following a kind of contact made with an isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest) that there are still believed to be around 100 tribes in the world that have no contact with the rest of humanity or with modern life. So DA needs to cook up a better answer than this one. (Did anyone see Steve Jones' answer to the same question in the Telegraph recently? Equally preposterous!).
This then leaves us with the synthesis of all the material in the preceding 40+ pages on the Adam/Eve question. After all this, just who were they?
DA presents us with five possible "models", different ways in which Christians have answered the question. These range right from saying that Genesis is thoroughly mythological, just a story to teach timeless truths, to the young-earth creationist (YEC) position that Adam and Eve were created immediately out of the ground on the sixth day. You can guess which model DA is going to favour and which he holds in utter contempt by the number of words he gives in describing each: in turn models A, B, C, D and E get 1/3 of a page, 1/2 a page, 3 pages, 1/3 of a page, and 1 sentence. Yup, model E is the YEC position (D is old earth / episodic creationism), and as DA wants to keep his good standing in the academic community its necessary to make clear he sees it as beneath his contempt to discuss, so just 1 sentence it is. DA sees all these models as possible within a Biblical framework, which is a revelation in itself about DA's approach to Scripture, though consistent with all we've seen so far. Whether you take an out-and-out liberal position and assign the foundational historical narratives of Scripture to the wastebin of utter myth, or whether you think that when God says he made Adam directly from the earth he really means it, is a matter of comparative indifference, though DA has a preference. After this, models D and E simply get tossed into the wastebin, because they are incompatible with the theory of human evolution, and that, to DA, is all that needs to be said to tell you they must be false.
That preference is model C, which recognises that the rest of Scripture does treat Adam and Eve as real historical individuals (not generic humanity, or "everyman"). Moreover, it recognises that this is going to be "perhaps" somewhere around 6-8,000 years ago - here we get the only fleeting mention that the Bible (e.g. Genesis 5) contains detailed genealogies, a point inexcusably absent when DA is discussing what literary genre the Genesis accounts are. This dating would make them (reading Genesis, as we have been told we must, against the backdrop of the certainities of contemporary Darwinian accounts) Neolithic farmers living somewhere in the east.
This identification does then pose a number of theological problems if you want to keep carrying your membership card for the club of Darwinian orthodoxy, such as:
What we see as DA looks into some (but not all, particularly the interesting one about original sin - see Romans 5:12ff) of these questions is the same picture we've seen all the way along. His evolutionary orthodoxy holds absolutely firm - and the Bible becomes a nose of wax to be moulded as one pleases. He grants all these implications (lots of other humans, the human race is not all descended from Adam and Eve, Adam had human ancestors, etcetera), and then goes around to find some theological wheeze to still allow some kind of meaning to be put on the Bible's plain statements, and then he proclaims the resulting massacre of the sacred Word to be an elegant harmony of "science" (read: Darwinism) and "theology" (read: the Bible's history). Yuk.
The basic answer is that Adam was the first man to whom God started to reveal himself in a special way - the first man to come to a heightened awareness of God and his greatness, and to be invited into a saving relationship. What about the salvation, DA asks, of those who were before and scattered in other parts of the planet? We don't know, he answers, and should be humble. More pertinent would have been to ask, "saved from what - what does this concept mean in DA's alternative proto-history?" The picture DA gives us for Adam is basically that which holds for Abraham - a chosen family picked graciously out of a world of ignorance. What "graciously" could mean in a context where nobody else even has this mysterious awareness of God and hence none at all of his moral laws or commandments could mean, we are never told. The "salvation" DA has in mind seems to be very amenable to contemporary thinking - a kind of "God became my special friend", rather than the deliverance from holy wrath against wilful covenant-breakers which is actually the story of Scripture.
This leaves us wondering what the fall could mean. If life had gone on for gazillions of years, and intelligent humanity for tens of thousands, with no knowledge of God (how, from Romans 1:18ff, is that possible?), and God decides now to enlighten a couple of farmers a little, if they say "no thanks" what kind of fall is that - to just continue as you were before? How to understand death, the fall and evil within this bizarre framework are the subjects of the next three chapters. But perhaps I can urge my readers... it really is so much simpler just to believe the Bible as it really is than go into this insanity.
The next few chapters of the book are in my opinion particularly significant, and worth reading especially for any wavering creationist who wonders if he's making too much fuss over the origins issue. In these chapters, Dr. Alexander spells out the theological implications of his "evolutionary creationism" view. Accommodating one's interpretation of the Bible to Darwinism comes at a price, and in these chapters DA spells out just what that price is, with commendable candidness. From an orthodox evangelical point of view, the concessions that have to be made are much too great.
The organisation of the book could have done with a little more work in this bit, because in fact a significant part of the discussion is contained in the next chapter, "Evolution and the Fall". As "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin" (Romans 5:12), as God had promised (Genesis 2:17), you can't really discuss the Biblical doctrine of death without discussing the Fall. DA, though, does appear to think otherwise. As he presents these matters, this chapter is intended to be a "complete" (page 253) summary of the Bible's teaching on death, and the Fall is something that we can better understand after (not as part of) getting this "complete" understanding. This is not simply a matter of presentation. DA's doctrine of death and the Fall really does depend on this separation.
DA presents death in three parts - physical death, spiritual death, and the "second death". That in itself is OK - until you realise the hermetic sealing existing between the first and second of those (except in the case where God sends physical death as a particular judgment). That's how the Fall doesn't need to be discussed in this chapter at all - there is no reference whatsoever to Genesis 2-3 or to Romans 5 - because these two kinds of death are quite independent.
What, then, of physical death? First it's good to ask what Darwinian orthodoxy would require us to believe here, because if you've read this far in the book you'll know that that will be precisely what the Bible will end up being found to teach, or at least be "compatible" with. According to the long-ages dating DA adheres to, and the placing of the various evolutionary dates on that scale, anatomically modern, intelligent, cultured humans were around for plenty of time before Adam and Eve, who had human ancestors (though, DA adds, they would not have had any knowledge of God). Physical death is an essential part of the evolutionary engine, including in producing humanity. It cannot be an evil intruder, but has been the normal course of events for the 99.99(etc.)% of history before the Bible's timeline begins. What this means is, that you can't have the orthodox Darwinian scheme, and believe that death invaded the human race in a terrible way as a result of Adam eating the forbidden fruit.
So it is, then, that we find DA writing such heterodox untruths as "Nowhere in the Old Testament is there the slightest uggestion [sic] that the physical death of either animals or humans, after a reasonable span of years, is anything other than the normal pattern ordained by God for this earth" and "the Old Testament ideal is a long and useful life obeying God's will, followed by death." DA follows a consistent pattern throughout the book. He does not interpret Old Testament texts using the light of New Testament revelation; he instead follows the modernist error of treating them in isolation (though in this case I think even with that treatment you shouldn't go as far wrong as this). Hebrews 2:14-15 states that "Jesus... [came] that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." What does this mean? Jesus destroyed death through his physical death. Death cannot be cut up into neat "physical" and "spiritual" portions in DA's fashion, and then the portions utterly divorced from each other - the apostles' inspired explanations forbid it. Distinguished, yes - separated and divorced, no. DA writes (page 245, emphases mine) "Although there are hints of the possibility of resurrection in the later books of the Old Testament, there is no developed resurrection teaching within the old covenant". Jesus, though, thought differently, and severely rebuked the Sadducees, who only believed the first five books of the Bible, for "erring", "not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God", for not understanding that the teaching of the resurrection was clearly stated in the second book of the Bible, in Exodus chapter 3 (Matthew 22:29-32).
DA emphasises the normality of death in the Old Testament, but because this is entirely without any discussion of the Fall - i.e. the event which brought death in - it's a totally out of context discussion. Yes, of course death is normal - that's because the first father of the human race rebelled against God, and we inherited his sin and punishment (Romans 5:12ff)! DA, though, manages to give a "complete" discussion of the Biblical doctrine of death without mentioning the fall, and ends up concluding - just as orthodox Darwinism required him to do - that death is totally natural, and part of God's design for life on this earth. In this context, it then makes no sense (though DA never addresses this tension - is he aware of it?) when DA proceeds to the New Testament to talk about liberation from death, and that "Physical death has no place in the fulfilled kingdom of God", quoting the verses about tears being wiped away, etc. (p249). He speaks of physical death being "an enemy to be overcome", but we have no idea how this can be seeing as it was perfectly natural and necessary for our upward progress out of the sludge. DA's answer seems to be that it's just by contrast with the wonderful kingdom of Jesus - such a glorious thing that it makes death seem dark by comparison. DA ends up with the answer that the reason for physical death is that it is necessary for us to inherit the kingdom of God via the resurrection bodies, which could not have been done otherwise - though DA then grants that in fact this is not necessary because those who are alive when Jesus returns will inherit the kingdom without physical death. Confused? He certainly is. (As someone with a systematic bent, this leaves me wondering what DA supposes would have happened to Adam if he had passed the test of the tree, and been admitted into life - would God have killed him anyway so that he could then have been resurrected?) What we have here in DA's theology is not the apostles showing how the Christ event fulfilled the Old Testament Scriptures. Rather, they rewrite them - death, which was nice and natural before, suddenly becomes an enemy because of newly revealed future resurrection which the Old Testament believer would never have known about. Having the New Testament rewrite the Old in this way instead of fulfilling it makes us feel sympathetic for the Jews who rejected Jesus - it seems that they were correct about him not being the promised Messiah of Scripture after all, and for teaching different truths to the ones they found in their Bibles!
DA's faithfulness to whatever most contemporary scientists think is most likely concerning the past is very admirable. The price, though, is a corresponding loss of faithfulness in believing what God has actually testified about the past, and a resulting mangling of the Bible that has to take place in order to bring these things into line. I am indeed grateful to Dr. Alexander for spelling out some of the implications for Christians who seek to fold evolution into their systems of belief. DA isn't one for compromising when it comes to doing that, and he shows us exactly what price you're going to have to pay if you're going to be consistent instead of picking and choosing the bits you like. I hope that discerning readers will read this section of the book and respond with a resounding "No thanks".
This chapter (which really is a continuation of the previous, "Evolution and the Biblical understanding of death"), has really only one claim. That claim is explained from a variety of points of view and applied to different situations, and discussed in relationship to different Biblical texts; but it is a single claim. The claim is that the Fall was an event that no physical affect upon humanity or the world. It was a spiritual event, not a physical one. It made no difference to the phenomena of pain, sickness, suffering or death, all of which existed before and continued afterwards, both for mice and men.
Thus, if you only have time to read one chapter in order to see how a theistic evolutionary position works out when applied to particular issues, this is a good one. This is the chapter to read if you want to see how far from orthodox evangelical theology you have to depart in order to accommodate Darwinism within one's overall scheme.
DA achieves these conclusions mostly by continuing to interpret Genesis overall as a "theological and figurative" (by which he means, not essentially historical) narrative, and by interpreting other relevant Biblical passages through the false dichotomy of "spiritual death" versus "physical death". This is carried on even when dealing with passages such as 1 Corinthians 15, where the physical resurrection from physical death is stage front and centre - even then, it never seems to really dawn on DA to see that this dualistic separation is fundamentally un- and anti-biblical. The exegesis is also characterised by a liberal dose of the "this passage is difficult, therefore we don't know for certain what it means, therefore it can't be held to mean the thing I don't want it to mean" interpretative method, known in more polemical parlance as "blowing smoke" or "hand-waving". Does Romans 8 state that the created order itself is in bondage to decay because of man's sin? Ah, but this "passage has kept commentators and PhD theology students happily busy for centuries!" so "we cannot be too dogmatic about the interpretation". And so on and so forth. Same picture as we've seen throughout the book - what Darwinism speculates must be treated as proven scientific truth, whose accuracy is established by the certainty of the scientific method... what the Bible says is difficult and must not be treated with dogmatism, and if we can find a way of reading it that doesn't contradict the theory of evolution, we should allow that as a possible interpretation.
What then is the Fall? It's a purely spiritual event. Friendship with God was offered to a select family of Neolithic farmers in the east (whilst, remember, many other humans were living in other parts of the world, including the Australian Aborigines who aren't descended from Adam). They rejected it, rebelling against God, losing the life he offered. This makes the Fall basically a loss of something that humanity never had. It bumbled along for many tens of thousands of years (according to DA, as explained in the previous chapter) without knowing God... that knowledge was eventually offered to one particular couple, who rejected it - which, unless my logic circuits have been fried, basically means that "the Fall" means that nothing happened - things went on as they were before.
DA's treatment of pain is a massive departure from evangelical orthodoxy. Biology is a package deal; you can't have all the good things in there without the bad things, and it's pain and death that grease the skids of the evolutionary machine and make all our pleasures possible. If you think pain is an evil intruder, you've been reading Milton's "Paradise Lost", instead of the Bible. It's not possible to be a sentient being without pain. The implication of this is that God is not the master of creation who determined its modes of operation, but is a prisoner to its limited possibilities - apparently not even he could have designed a system where humans could experience pleasure without experiencing pain; this is simply logically impossible, like squaring the circle or making two and two come to five. DA then gets himself into something of a pickle when he concedes that the future kingdom of God will be without pain or suffering - because then it seems that God could in fact do such a thing, and that sentient beings can exist without pain... but DA either never realises, or simply decides to pretend not to notice, this glaring contradiction. (Or perhaps the future creation is utterly ethereal and immaterial - angels floating around with harps like those Daily Mail cartoons after all). DA concludes that the healing ministry of Jesus was not to do with him restoring a fallen creation, but simply pointing the way to a new one. This means that redemption is not, contrary to orthodox Christianity, creation restored and perfected; it is creation replaced. This is not evangelical theology. It is, though, what you get when you insist on the truth of Darwinism, and from that point of view I am glad for DA making clear what the extent of the theological pay-load is if you ever feel tempted to do that.
In this chapter, DA continues to address the question of how to integrate on the one hand the account of history and the development of life given by Darwinism, and on the other a Biblical theology. This especially concerns questions over the Fall, Adam and Eve, and the existence of suffering and pain (so-called "natural" evil as opposed to "moral" evil). This chapter particularly focuses on the latter set of issues. DA introduces it this way, though the chapter itself actually ranges over a much broader range of territory:
"The question before us is how a good God could choose to bring about all of biological diversity, including us, by such a long and wasteful process which involves so much death and suffering." (p277)
Much of that ranging seemed to this reviewer to not be especially relevant, but other material that DA found interesting, wanted to get in the book, and shoved in in various digressions in this chapter as the best place. Perhaps there are connections that evaded me. DA's basic answer to the question is one that exists in perfect harmony and continuity with the trajectory traced out in the previous few chapters. The Darwinian account of the earth's history is not up for critique or question; the Bible will not be used to examine whether there are any faults in what contemporary secular scientists say about the past. Rather, this will all be taken as certain truth, and what will be done is to search out for a theological justification by which the general themes of the Bible can be harmonised with it.
Such a harmony, as we've already seen in the discussions of the Fall, requires that pain and suffering cannot be seen as unnatural intruders into God's "very good" creation, coming because of Adam's sin. No - such an approach irreparably contradicts Darwinian dogma, because DA has already explained that humans and such unpleasant experiences had been around for many aeons before Adam was ever born to his father and mother. It's instructive to take a step back and observe how little effort - none - DA takes to actually derive his theodicy from the pages of Scripture. These questions are not answered by any kind of inductive study of Scripture, but by an exploration of the speculations of various non-evangelical theologians, of whom the most familiar to most readers will be John Hick, the pluralist universalist. This is not unexpected; beginning with an evolutionary framework as the starting point instead of Scripture, it's only really going to be such theologians who are going to have a compatible framework to help you.
The harmony itself, then, amounts to this: biology is a package deal, carbon-based life cannot be created without the accompanying down-sides, and who are we to label the natural evils that we see with such subjective labels as "wasteful" or "evil" when God has seen fit to use them as part of the process which brings about all the good and enjoyable things that we can witness and experience? In DA's solution to "the problem of evil", then, the problem is not so much as solved as defined out of existence, with various exceptional caveats in the particular case of suffering humans. Here are some representative quotes:
"Biology is a package deal. Once we have carbon, phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen and the other key elements for life ... virtually any plus that we care to mention .... is going to have an inevitable minus." (p279)
"As noted in previous chapters, life, at least carbon-based life of the kind with which we are familiar [reviewer: i.e. including humanity], is impossible without death." (p279)
"... without genetic variation between us all, we would all be clonal, looking identical. But it is that same genetic variation which affects our susceptibility to certain diseases, and which causes genetics diseases or cancers - necessary costs of living in a carbon-based world." (p280)
"It is a world in which moral and spiritual growth is made possible - more like a Boot Camp than a Holiday Camp. No pain, no gain." (p288)
DA's answer, then, is that the "problem", if it is one, is essential. It's like 2+2=4, or requiring that squares have right angles. God himself couldn't do it another way. If you want life in anything like the present form, then this is the only way to have it. Throughout the chapter, the answer is consistent - it's not because of sin. Human wickedness plays no real part in the evil of this world - don't say, "fallen world", because the Fall is to do with unseen, inner, spiritual reality - relationship with God - not to do with the dust and dirt of everyday life.
DA's dualism becomes Gnostic when he relates this to the new heavens and the new earth - the age to come. That will, he allows, be one free of such pain and suffering, a different order entirely. As remarked before, what this means is that salvation is not to be conceived of in terms of an originally good created order which was ruined through sin then being redeemed and glorified through the work of Christ - rather, Christ liberates us from an order that was originally and essentially unpleasant, to something better. We're freed from the prison of the pains of this life, into a better and ultimately disconnected order. Not creation restored, but creation replaced. This leaves us wondering (DA never even approaches this question) why Christ had to bring this new creation about in such a flesh-and-blood way. He came as a carbon-based life-form, so to speak, and suffered in the flesh. He underwent physical death, in order to bring in the new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17-21). But why? Why was physical incarnation, physical suffering and physical death needed, when the physical suffering and natural evil has nothing real to do with sin, the Fall and the spiritual world, or even in the case of physical pain is actually something necessary and good?
Ultimately, this chapter has no real relationship to a Bible-based theology. It scrapes around from what this or that Princeton University scholar had to say that can be made to fit into an evolutionary worldview. At best it has some helpful thoughts that could be developed in a Scriptural way. At worst, it undercuts the Bible's own historical narrative and removes the foundation of the gospel, replacing evangelical religion with the ancient and disastrous Gnostic heresy.
Two and a half pages end the book - the first bit with a summary of all that's gone before, the second with the forward-looking statement summing up where to go from here. DA's got a good, systematic mind and ties the book up in a straightforward way consistent with what's gone before.
The first half, then, repeats what's been argued for. Science is essentially an objective, value and presupposition-free zone; ideologies are bolted on by others. Science looks at the historical reality of what God did; the Bible gives us the theological interpretation. Evolution is compatible with believing in a God of intentions and purposes for the world. (In my review of the preceding chapter I, to save space, passed over commenting on the very weak form of sovereignty DA argues for in evolution, explicitly disavowing the concept of a total control in favour of a general directional influence). DA argues that we can hold to both Darwinism and all the historical Christian doctrines of sin, the Fall and redemption. Arguing that is water under the bridge now. I think DA makes it clear as he argues those things that he holds those doctrines in a severely modified form that does not cohere with historical evangelical orthodoxy, and at times is grotesquely dualistic in some areas, even approaching a new Gnosticism (e.g. the interaction of science and the Bible, the connection between theological and physical facts, and the relationship between the present creation and the new creation to come).
In the final part, DA takes the gloves off. The moderate language of the earlier book (though unless my detectors are wonky, it was always with a heavy dose of condescension) gives way to something quite different. At the beginning of the book, DA told us that these were matters of comparative indifference, that Christians must differ on them amicably, and that there is no excuse for any kind of harsh language or anathematising of any others because of different views on Darwinism. Either amnesia struck DA, his editors and proof-readers, or that was just flannel and now he tells us what he really thinks, or perhaps this last section was written after getting out of bed on the wrong side and he doesn't really mean it. Because now, he tells us that Christians who reject Darwinism are "embarrassing and bring the gospel into disrepute", are (via a quote from Augustine on a different matter) "dangerous... talking nonsense... embarrassing...", create intellectual barriers that prevent scientists from taking the gospel seriously, have caused very high-profile (but unnamed) scientists to give up their profession of faith, and to cap it all are following the theology condemned in the book of Galatians!
This then leads into the most cringe-worthy example of double standards, where DA, after writing a 353 page long book on the question of Darwinism, launches a stinging diatribe against Christians who waste time discussing Darwinism when the world has so many other problems to spend time on. Christians who reject evolution, he says, are "divisive" and hypocritical, talking about creation but not being the ones who spend time caring for it. They invest time in magazines about creation and fail to put money into helping the poor, tackling HIV, or funding orphanages.
I wish I could say I've never read this kind of thing before. I've probably done it myself; it's a striking example of the blindness of fallen man that someone who's just spent such a large amount of time on disagreeing with other Christians over the question of evolution can then launch such a vitriolic attack on anyone who else who dares to do the same. But we know what he really means don't we? He means, it's an evil waste of time and resources to address this matter unless you agree with me. This argumentation is silly and unworthy. It's also a false dichotomy. The creation God has made is very big - immense. God commanded us to subdue the earth - to have dominion over it (Genesis 1:28). Our hopes of doing that were ruined by sin, but restored and indeed made certain in Christ (Hebrews 2:6-9). Man is commanded to explore, harness and glorify God in every aspect of creation - physical, spiritual, intellectual, etc. Other than the gross generalisation in the above criticism, it's a clear fallacy to criticise Christians for spending time discussing and critiquing Darwinism and its effects on a Biblical world-view as if God commanded us to spend all our time building orphanages. That's a modern Western sentimentality that fails to get to grips with the vastness of the task that God set us in the creation mandate. It's a silly and cheap criticism easily turned back on the one issuing it. Why is Dr. Alexander living in the luxury of 21st century Cambridge, in the ivory towers of the Faraday Institute, when he could come out here and join me in Africa? There are slums with hundreds of thousands of people round here I can point him to. Why is he wasting time behind his desk penning insults against creationists when he could be down on the ground, caring for orphans and widows? I presume he has a good reason - and I can think of many excellent ones for this kind of thing. The point is, though, that these are cheap shots whoever is making them and whoever they are made against, whether they like Darwinism or not.
The note we end on has two more points. First, DA criticises creationists for not being enthusiastic enough about combating global warming. It has occurred to me over the last year or two that anti-creationist critics, whether Christian or atheistic, are necessarily committed to being fully convinced of disastrous man-made global warming theory. Once you take the position, as they do, that the mainstream position has to be the correct one (because of the unbiased and virtually infallible nature of the scientific process, cough cough), and that if Darwin deniers can't get published in mainstream journals then that must in itself prove they're wrong, then you have no option but to unquestioningly accept it all. It's the consensus position, and peer-review guarantees its truth. The parting shot is a final cheapie that follows on from this criticism - creationists are like the man who buried his talent in the ground instead of being good stewards of creation, for which DA references Matthew 25:14-30. He doesn't go on to explain whether, as it actually states in Matthew 25:30, he means to say that creationists are going to be cast "into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth". Perhaps I'd better not ask; I wasn't feeling the warmth, anyway.
January's "Evangelical Times" (http://www.evangelicaltimes.org) carried a letter from Dr. Alexander whose book I have reviewed at length. He was replying to the review carried in the same newspaper by Professor Andy McIntosh, a prominent creationist and scientist at Leeds University. Professor McIntosh's review, a few months earlier (you could well be able to find it on the website) had pulled no punches. He stated, correctly in my opinion, that Dr. Alexander was "seriously in error", that his book was a demonstration of "how sophisticated we evangelicals have become in justifying our unbelief" and that the spreading of the philosophy promoted by Dr. Alexander really represents "the downgrade controversy of the 21st century".
Unsurprisingly, Dr. Alexander's letter didn't totally agree. In this post, I'm going to begin going through Dr. Alexander's letter, with the hope that it'll shed some more light on the issues for my readers. Here we go.
Do we have to choose?Dear Sir,
Given the level of angst in Andy McIntosh's article in October's ET (`The Downgrade Controversy of the 21st Century') critiquing my book "Creation or Evolution - do we have to choose? (Monarch, 2008)", the reader might be forgiven for thinking that the theological gulf between us is rather wide.
Yes!
But this is not the case.
We shall see...
McIntosh and I both believe in the full plenary inspiration of the whole of Scripture as the Word of God; in a literal Adam and Eve; a historical Fall leading to separation from God of all humankind; and our deliverance from both spiritual and physical death through the death and resurrection of Christ.
This letter, then, is aiming to downplay the differences between Dr. Alexander's attempt at a Christian Darwinism, and Professor McIntosh's (in my opinion, Biblical) creation theology. Along those lines, Dr. Alexander then lists a number of doctrines which he says the two of them both agree on.
In fact as I read this, the appropriateness of Professor McIntosh's invocation of the "downgrade" metaphor was impressed upon me. One of the striking features of the decline from evangelical orthodoxy in the late 19th century, and one that allowed it to escape from under the radar of many sincere evangelicals (or often those who should have known better but had no stomach for a fight) until the rot was well and truly endemic, was the use of orthodox terminology by downgraders. The liberals believed in the divinity of Christ and the divine inspiration of the Word of God... it's just that by "divinity" they didn't mean "deity" as Christians had historically done, and by "inspiration" they didn't mean "plenary inspiration", that word having now to be added for clarity's sake.
By referring to this, what I mean is that Dr. Alexander is being more than a little disingenuous. By this late stage in doctrinal debate in Christendom, we surely all ought to know that the mere heaping up of phrases to identify doctrines that we can all tick the box for, does not mean much. To make his Darwinian teaching acceptable to evangelicals he needs to minimise the difference between it and the historical faith, but I don't think he's being accurate in doing so. That is:
The agreement on these doctrines does not extend much further than the ambiguous labels DA has given to them. It's one thing to list labels that you could both accept as describing your doctrines - but those doctrines themselves in this case are very different things. It's in DA's strategic interest to paper over these differences and behave as if being able to keep the labels was enough, because it's DA who has departed far from the historic norms. He wants to carry those who still hold them with him into embracing Darwinism, and highlighting the other adjustments they'll need to make further down the road won't suit him. It's in AM's interests and mine to point the gaping chasm between him and them out. DA basically de-historicises the story of redemption with a sharp dualism. In the Bible, man is the climax of creation and its destiny is integrally tied up with his. In DA's reconstruction, the physical side of existence began, carried out after the fall and will to the end basically unaffected, until at last Jesus replaces it with something completely different, dying in a Gnostic-style redemption in order to release us from the prison of this painful world that the Father made into a better one that hadn't been tasted before or even anticipated until he came and told us about it. In the Scriptures, the Creation itself falls because of Adam's sin, bringing in pain, suffering and death, and Christ dies physically in part to redeem, recover and glorify this physical creation. It is not evangelical theology to paper over that yawning gap by applying the trite label "a historical fall" to them both. But we pass on.
Points Of DifferenceWhere we differ is that McIntosh believes in a worldwide flood, whereas I believe in a local flood (the Old Testament often refers to the 'whole earth' or to the 'whole world' as relating to the local extended area; e.g. 1 Kings 10:24; Jeremiah 51:41; Lamentations 2:15; Ezekiel 34:6; Habakkuk 1:6).
Interestingly, DA nowhere in his book actually addresses the Biblical case for a world-wide flood; there are simply a few scientific ones scattered statements here and there. There is no systematic consideration of the question anywhere. This is part and parcel of his general refusal to engage actual creationist arguments (there being precisely zero references or footnotes to any contemporary creationist author or publication in his book), because he wishes to maintain a superior aloofness. This sentence, in this letter, is the first time I recall coming across DA making a Biblical argument against a global flood (the ones in the book I recall were based on reconstructions of history, e.g. based on what it is supposed we can deduce from chalk deposits).
It is a shame that we only have one sentence of argument from DA on this subject, but this rather trite dismissal misses the following points:
DA, then, lists the "local / worldwide" difference as a minor point of disagreement, and his position as Scripturally justified. This is a point he never addresses in his book, though, and one as we've seen above of far more wide-ranging significance, if dealt with consistently, than he allows.
Mainstream ScienceQuoth Dr. A:
We also differ in that I accept current mainstream science, not uncritically, but all truth is God's truth - whereas McIntosh rejects huge swathes of contemporary science, including that which establishes beyond any reasonable doubt the great age of the earth (about 4.6 billion years old) and our own common descent.
It is of course a truism that Professor McIntosh, as a creationist, is out of step with what is acceptable thinking in the mainstream scientific community as regards origins. Dr. Alexander, however, goes further than this and borrows an argument that previously I'd only seen in use by the "village atheist" crowd. That is, that the Darwinian theory and theories about the age of the earth somehow represent "huge swathes of contemporary science". This is pure rhetoric, and pure rhetorical hogwash at that. I type this on a laptop computer, with its intricate maze of transistors, liquid crystals, magnetic disks and so on, connected to a mobile phone which beams its packets to the nearest mobile mast... which beams it on, eventually via the satellites that connect Kenya to the rest of the world, along various fibre-optic pipes, and through all the chain of equipment until eventually it arrives in your room. I may not be a professional biologist, but trust me: Darwinism has nothing to do with any of this. And that's the story throughout. Even in biology, Darwinism as Darwinism has proved to be a theory of no practical use - the so-called now rejected "science" of eugenics being its main contribution to history. Descent with modification is a fact with practical implications; but Darwinian speculation about the supposed unlimited potential of that modification over periods of millions of years in the past has proved remarkably unfruitful for a theory that's alleged to be true. Neither does speculation about the age of the earth have any practical value in any of the scientific advances that we enjoy in day to day life. Medicines we take to cure illnesses, the vast reams of technology especially in communication, the blessings of modern transport, and so on... interesting stories about how the Earth supposedly cooled down over a period of billions of years have nothing to do with any of this.
That's why I've only previously heard this argument from Internet atheists before... as someone who did a Masters in a scientific discipline and spent large amounts of time with other scientists discussing our studies, I know that assertions that Darwinism or theories about the age of the cosmos are basically irrelevant to real, here-and-now operational science and rarely either come up for discussion or are assumed as implicit in any practical matter. Perhaps DA made the guess that most readers of the ET will simply take his word for it because they've never interacted in that world. I think he has over-reached himself, because if you want to stake out an influential position in the long run, you need to appeal to the knowledgeable and critical readers, and false rhetoric of this kind will turn them off.
Only Possible Explanation?Concerning common descent, it's interesting that here in this letter DA says that it is a fact established by "huge swathes" of evidence, "beyond any reasonable doubt". In his book, he seemed to be relying ultimately upon a single argument that was ultimately theological. He argues that similar gene sequences in humans and other ape-like creatures are so similar, including claimed genetic mistakes and unused genetic material, that unless its origin was common descent, God would in effect be deceiving us. I think that argument is rather weak when DA asserts it as the only possible explanation. For one thing, it's a genuine evolution-of-the-gaps argument; genetic material that is presently thought to be the result of copying mistakes or unused may later be discovered to have some function that our present knowledge hadn't equipped us to identify. At that point, DA's argument would vanish. The argument as a whole, though, is weak because in his book DA never compares it to any other alternative (as part of his general strategy of not representing creationist arguments, I think because he wants to give the air of them being beneath his level). There are other alternatives. Man and other creatures may have a similar genetic toolbox because... they have the same designer. Moreover, on the Biblical assumption that that Designer wishes man to investigate and harness the powers of the world that he made, it would be even less surprising. If God wants us to investigate and harmonise creation, it would be massively harder if every living entity was constructed along fundamentally different principles. The fact that they're constructed on a shared set of principles is a testimony both to his wisdom and to his desire that we should to some extent investigate, understand and harness what he has done. Moreover, the Bible teaches that the creation physically fell, because God cursed it when man sinned. That had some impact or other on actual biology, though it is not the Bible's purpose to explain things on that level. If we are looking at things on that level, though, why should it be unreasonable to believe that God should have brought about similar defects in DNA in similarly-constructed creatures? What is the theological reason why God must have, as Dr. Alexander is insisting, made such genetic changes at the Fall in arbitrary or random ways? Whether the lines on which I'm speculating here are correct or not is not important - the point is that DA's assertion that there is no possible explanation either existing or even possible for what he sees in DNA except man's common descent from other ape-like creatures is simply bluff.
There is another aspect of DA's argument here that can be played back against him. In his book, DA attempts to argue that information theory should not be applied to biology, and even that biology should be allowed to have its own definitions of information - and that attempts to apply information theory represent misunderstandings by engineers and computer scientists. This is an exceptionally weak argument which itself represents a misunderstanding of and rejection of mainstream science. Information theory is universally applicable, and there is no justification for someone to put their hand up and say "you can't apply that here!" Information is a universal fundamental, and whether the encoding takes place on paper, on computer disk, or in DNA, it must apply everywhere or not at all. The point is that the application of information theory to biology and DNA leads to the necessary conclusion that DNA is an encoding by an intelligent agent, a conclusion which fundamentally contradicts Darwinism.
All Truth Is God's Truth?The larger point, though, which DA never discusses in his book but simply assumes, as also in this letter, is his overall approach to Scripture, revelation and authority. You need to note here exactly what ideas are being packed into the slogan "all truth is God's truth". In itself, it's unobjectionable. But if you tease out the strands of what DA means by it, as hinted here and shown more fully in his book, it's simply not Christian.
DA's doctrine of authority, science and Scripture is basically a baptised Enlightenment-mode of thought. Scripture is theological, science is historical, and the twain shall scarcely meet. When Science speaks about matters in its own domain, it speaks with authority. It is effectively a second book of revelation, complementary (not competing) with the written one, and each has its own domain. In particular, Scripture cannot speak to correct science, because Scripture's domain is different: value-laden interpretations of the world and the physical facts that science unearths. And to Dr. Alexander, science speaks with authority when the peer-reviewers, applying the objective and unbiased process of impartial scrutiny, accept a theory into the mainstream consensus. Predictably, Dr. Alexander never addresses the obvious historical objection to this last idea - all the junk science that has at one time or another been mainstream, such as eugenics which we mentioned above. What you won't find anywhere in DA's book is an explanation that Genesis also speaks directly to historical matters, and that when it does so it speaks with unrivalled authority, such that any conclusions of contemporary scientists, no matter how numerous and how authoritative the journals they publish it in, must bow before it. That's because DA doesn't believe that idea - rather, in his book, he explains that Darwinian theory is the background that we must read Scripture against if we wish to harmonise it with contemporary science.
So, "all truth is God's truth" is in itself, one of God's truths. But on DA's lips, what it means is that the consensus of contemporary science ought to be treated by us as if it were revealed from heaven, and hence we ought to patronise fellow-believers in the manner in which Dr. Alexander does here. It is interesting, though, to note that this letter continues the theme in the book: that the truth is established mainly by science. This isn't a Biblical argument that DA's making: it's simply that mainstream science says so.
On scientific questions McIntosh cites only authors who are not published in peer-reviewed scientific literature, whose views are rejected by the scientific community, not because the scientists are `anti-God' but because the views lack good evidence. Readers interested in the age of the earth may download a free Faraday Paper (No. 8) from www.faraday-institute.org, Faraday Papers Folder) by Prof. Bob White FRS, an evangelical believer who is Professor of Geophysics at Cambridge University.
Here DA repeats his point to underscore it. So there's no excuse for not identifying the lines on which his thought runs: mainstream science is itself an all-but infallible authority, and there's no need to launch any actual Biblical response to Professor McIntosh's Biblical argument - the fact that contemporary journals don't accept it as the consensus is sufficient repudiation. DA here makes a pure appeal to authority - those in the seats of power in the mainstream scientific community say so, so you'd better toe the line or I'll patronise you for being an idiot, even should you yourself be a Professor! DA has so folded this idea of science's basic infallibility into his axioms of thought that he doesn't think this should need explaining, even to readers of so conservative evangelical a newspaper as the ET... when this can happen then truly the Enlightenment is still riding strong. In this letter, as in the book, DA does nothing to hint that he's aware of the idea that scientific research is done within paradigms, and is not simply a straight-forward simple fact-based procedure. Mainstream scientific journals reject ideas that Professor McIntosh promotes foundationally because they reject the Biblical paradigm that the research is conducted within. "Evidence" is not a simple up and down matter - it must be interpreted. A presuppositional Christian, such as AM, asserts that, especially when dealing with a matter such as origins, our paradigm must be explicitly Christian. That's anathema to the secularist thinking that dominates the academy, and so hence the chasm between it and Christian orthodoxy. DA, though, here promotes pure Dawkins-style Scientism - the idea that science is simply a paradigm-free, unbiased inquiry into neutral facts and proceeds simply based upon evidence.
To save you the trouble, dear reader, I did download and digest the paper that Dr. Alexander refers us to. Its thought is the same as DA's. There is no discussion of the relationship between Scripture and other supposed authorities, or a comparison of their relative fallibilities, or a Christian view of authority, etcetera. Nope - it's asserted that science proves this and that, that therefore the earth is very old... and now let's hunt for a way to interpret God's word (which is after all a theological text, not one that deals with real-world facts of history) that agrees with this assured result of modern man's cleverness. Science first - then we'll see what we can do with the Bible. That's exactly the wrong way round, as far as evangelical religion is concerned. As with DA's own writings, there's also a few arguments and bits of rhetoric borrowed from the atheists - Christians who disagree are termed "fundamentalists", and creationism is falsely said to be a late 20th Century American import (in fact the oldest anti-evolution society (now known as the Biblical Creation Society), is British... and the two most well known creationist organisations today, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International, both of which DA avoids any mention of in his book, originated in Australia). Oh come on, can't you do better than this?
Misrepresentation?McIntosh claims that I maintain certain positions in my book which in reality I definitely reject, which also make me wonder whether he has actually read the book!
I remarked a few times during my extended review that DA often seems as interested in giving off an air of intellectual superiority, that creationism is beneath his level, as much as he is interested in actually interacting with brethren who honestly disagree with him. This was evidenced mainly in the fact that in 353 pages he references precisely one creationist... who's now dead. Current creationists, their books, journals or other writings: zilch.
Given that Professor McIntosh's contains statements that only make sense if the whole book has been read ("The author makes no reference to those who have written on the biblical arguments concerning this matter, such as Douglas Kelly in his book Creation and Change" and specific references such as " his bald statement on p.242" or "contrary to Alexander's assertions on pp. 138-139" or "He even suggests (p.275)"), this sentence from Dr. Alexander comes across as being empty polemic - and a cheap shot at that. More basically, the review begins with the words "I have just finished reading Denis Alexander's new book" which makes the purveyor of such cheap shots look rather silly... or perhaps the Doctor didn't actually read the review? :-) But passing on... what actually are these positions?
For example, he suggests that I 'read' evolution into Scripture, whereas I spend a whole chapter explaining why biblical texts need to be understood according to the literary style they represent, not as if they were scientific texts. Scientific literature as we know it today, with its highly specialised language, did not exist when the Bible was written, so to seek to press the language into that literary genre is an abuse of Scripture. Of course evolution is not taught in the Bible, any more than relativity, thermodynamics or quantum mechanics.
Here, Dr. Alexander simply talks past his reviewer. Nowhere does Professor McIntosh's review state the idea that Dr. Alexander refutes here: i.e. that he "reads evolution into Scripture" in the sense that he says that Scripture actually explicitly teaches evolution as if it were scientific literature, using specialised language like textbooks on thermodynamics. That's a straw man; there's not a word in AM's review that approaches suggesting that the Bible teaches matters like relativity or quantum mechanics. The false dichotomy that Dr. Alexander makes in reading Genesis between "science" and "theology" or between science and history, is the one that the Professor actually took him to task for - to simply repeat it in the answer will only give more ammunition should the Professor wish to charge him with not having properly read his review. It smacks of a "canned response". That Dr. Alexander actually does read evolution into Scripture, in the sense that AM meant, is stated baldly on page 232, where after reviewing the present mainstream scientific (Darwinian) thinking on the history of man, he then goes on to begin considering the Scriptural data by stating:
"It is against this cultural and historical background that one needs to consider the early chapters of Genesis."
The idea that one should - indeed, must - begin with fallen man's fallible speculations about history, and then read God's inspired account against that background, is precisely what "reading evolution into Scripture" means. Methinks that DA knows he's guilty here, and simply answers a different point instead because he suspects that the ET's readers are too conservative to follow him if he spells out his full position candidly.
AboriginesMcIntosh also claims that my book suggests that some humans may still languish outside the God-called community of humanity, whereas I make precisely the opposite point (p.238) - that God graciously bestowed his image upon the whole of humankind with Adam as the federal head
On this point I think there are faults on all sides. Having read through Dr. Alexander's book more than once myself, and having read other reviewers, I think Dr. Alexander himself is responsible for a lack of clarity - or rather, a confused concept that inevitably has generated confusion in the reviewers as they try to piece the bits together. It seems that, pulling everything together, Dr. Alexander teaches that: a) As required by contemporary scientific orthodoxy, human beings had existed in basically their present form for many tens of thousands of years. b) But Adam and Eve were most likely Neolithic farmers in the east, around 6-8,000 years ago. These two points have logical implications which Dr. Alexander unflinchingly follows: i) Adam and Eve were not the first humans, but were descended from a long line. ii) Likewise, not all humans are descended from Adam and Eve; in particular, Australian Aboriginals were in Australia for long before they were around and there's no reason to think any interbreeding could have occurred given the histories, timescales and distances involved. Thus iii) God's image is some kind of super-addition to essential humanity - i.e. something that humanity had existed for a long time without before it was conferred first on Adam. This leads on to the next teaching point, c) that God, at the time that he bestowed his image on Adam, also "graciously" (Dr. Alexander IIRC uses this word, though not in a proper sense, as Biblically grace implies the existence of demerit, i.e. sin) conferred it upon the rest of humanity around the world too.
What is this image? DA doesn't give a full answer, but says that there are two important aspects for his purposes (p192-3) - the delegation of authority and the potential for relationship with God. So, when God made Adam (or rather, when he was born to his parents or had grown to an appropriate age afterwards), God extended a benefit to the whole of humanity as well as to him. Dr. Alexander then goes on to ask what the Fall would have meant for those, such as the Aboriginals (p275) who were part of Adam and Eve's family - and concludes that we can have no real idea. It is this that Professor McIntosh understands as suggesting "that some Australian Aborigines may still languish outside the God-called community of humanity because they are not descendents of Adam and Eve". I presume that the logic here is that as they were perhaps (DA's suggestion) not affected in any practical way by the Fall, by logical consequence, neither are they subjects of the redemption from that Fall achieved by Christ - AM doesn't make it explicit. If they are not part of the fallen creation, then presumably not part of the redeemed. I'm not sure I'd have imputed this line of thinking to DA though; elsewhere his teaching implies that he doesn't really see Christ's work in terms of leading to a redeeming of creation so much as in terms of replacing of it (here AM's imputed more orthodoxy to DA than he should have done!). What exactly DA does mean by this speculation and how it is systematised in his thinking is not clear, because he doesn't really clarify it - he does, as he states in this rebuttal, teach that the divine image, whatever its exact content, was extended to Aboriginals; thus, by implication, giving them the capacity for relationship with God. Hence on the precise point itself, I agree with him that AM has missed an element of his thought and drawn a conclusion that he doesn't hold.
Why Did Jesus Die?McIntosh asks, 'Why did Jesus die physically if the wages of sin is not physical death?'
This is a question which also arose strongly in my own review. It is a natural consequence of Dr. Alexander's altered doctrine of the Fall, which he makes an invisible, spiritual event. He denies that it had any impact on the workings of the physical creation, a denial that he has to make because Darwinian orthodoxy will not allow that the creation suddenly came into bondage to decay only a few thousand years ago. According to Darwinism and hence according to Alexander, all those things that Christians have historically identified as being part of the deleterious results of Adam's sin (thorns, pain, suffering, death, etc.) are original parts of the cosmos, not later intruders. Hence the question arises; if the Fall was not a physical event, why is redemption (the incarnation, Jesus' sufferings, death and resurrection) so physical? Has Alexander's Darwinism not made the essence of the gospel incoherent?
The answer is in Hebrews 9:11-28, and the fact that Jesus died to save us from eternal separation with God, the 'second death' (Matthew 1:28; Revelation 2:11).
Again (and as commonly done in the book as well as in this letter), Alexander simply ducks the question and answers a conveniently different one of his own devising. The question is highlighting the physical nature of Jesus' death; Alexander instead merely states why Jesus had to do something to save us. The answer may well be in Hebrews 9... but what is that answer, Dr. Alexander? How does it relate to the question you were being asked? Just how and why did Jesus experience physical death in order to liberate us from a fate that you see only in terms of the non-physical?
Paul in Romans (6:21-23 and other chapters) is speaking of spiritual death. As Jesus explained to Nicodemus in response to his question (John 3:4), rebirth is spiritual, not physical (v. 5).
Here in his letter, as in his book, Dr. Alexander introduces the strong dichotomy which he relies upon to evade the fundamental problem with his teaching: that between "physical" and "spiritual" death. He merely insists that this idea is what is being spoken of by this or that Bible passage. The point is, though, not whether you can super-impose this idea upon passages of Scripture as DA does... but whether it actually reads out of any passages themselves. Here's Romans 6:21-23:
What fruit did you have then in those things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now being free from sin, and having become servants unto God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.
Where do these verses teach Dr. Alexander's particular distinctive doctrine, namely that the Fall was a non-physical event, and that physical and spiritual death must be sharply distinguished? Of course, they don't. Dr. Alexander is guilty of reading a text through his own pre-supposed hermeneutical grid. His doctrine does not read out of the text - it has to be read in.
The idea that Jesus, in John chapter 3, was teaching or even implying to Nicodemus that the Fall was an event without physical consequences is exegetical madness. The idea is not even in the remote horizon of the exchange. Here, DA has plucked a verse wildly out of context to suit his purpose. Nicodemus thought of redemption in earthly and political terms - Israel being liberated from the Romans, and a new kingdom like David's being established. He needed to see that the true enemies of God's people were spiritual - sin, Satan and death - not military. He needed to see that he was in bondage to sin and that this was a more ultimate reality than Israel's political subjugation. He stumbled at Jesus teaching of the need for inward renewal and cleansing. I don't personally think that his question about being born again from his mother's womb was intended by him to be taken literally - it was simply a way of expressing his surprise at Jesus' teaching and pushing him to clarify what he meant. Alexander, though, rips this all out of context and makes Jesus teach not merely that we need inward and spiritual renewal by the Holy Spirit, but into a denial that man dies because Adam sinned! The fact that his doctrine can only be supported by ripping passages out of context in this way, and not by direct appeal to any texts where the subject is being addressed directly shows us the lack of Biblical support for the idea.
Gnostic ResurrectionDA then proceeds to state his neo-Gnostic view of the resurrection and the future state:
We have to physically die to fulfil God's purposes, for 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable' (1 Corinthians 15:50).
In this verse, Paul gives one of the subsidiary reasons why our resurrection bodies must differ in some ways (whilst still having continuity - see earlier in the chapter) with our present bodies. The state of glory is of an order which we can hardly yet imagine. To enter it, we must be changed. This change, though, does not actually necessitate death; Paul makes that explicit by saying (emphasis mine): "We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed" (verse 51). Those who are still alive when the Lord returns shall not go through death, but shall be changed without it into a fitting state for glory. Hence there is no necessity for death for us to enter that state, contrary to what DA says. I label DA's view "neo-Gnostic" because his denial of a physical Fall leads him to effectively deny that Christ's physical death is related to our physical redemption which culminates in physical resurrection and transformation. He rather views this present mode of existence as being a classic Gnostic prison, and Jesus liberates us from it - he doesn't so much redeem and glorify a Fallen world as take us out of it into something else of a totally different nature.
DA's view makes no sense of the whole thrust and purpose of 1 Corinthians 15. There must, contrary to the deniers at Corinth, be a resurrection because without it Jesus' victory over sin would be incomplete. The first Adam through his sin caused us all to die (Romans 5:12-14); to reverse that, Jesus himself died and rose, and must raise us too. His physical resurrection is the great announcement, realisation and proof that the consequences of Adam's rebellion have been overcome. His physical resurrection is such a proof precisely because Adam's rebellion brought in physical death. Cut that vital link in Biblical theology, and you're left floundering around to explain all of this. DA never answers the pertinent questions raised by McIntosh's review. Why did Jesus physically die? Why did his punishment include physical sufferings if physical sufferings are not in fact in this world as a consequence of sin? Why would he endure such a penalty if it never was part of the penalty God imposed? Just why did Jesus enduring physical death save us from a spiritual separation? He doesn't answer them because ultimately the truncated doctrine of redemption which his Darwinism leads him to... can't.
When Arguments Fail, Try PolemicYoung earth creationism causes serious pastoral problems.
This mere assertion is not contained in Dr. Alexander's book, or expanded on here, so we can only speculate about what these pastoral problems are. I suppose, based upon the general tenor of his book that DA would say that creationism pits science against faith and forces believers to choose between two truths. Whatever the precise line of argument, though, it's moot. If creationism is true, then teaching it may indeed cause problems (especially with such as DA teaching so dogmatically that it's false) but it's our duty to believe and proclaim whatever God has made known. If it is false, then to say that spreading it causes problems is telling us nothing new. Either way, DA adds nothing here to his argument except polemics. As DA's never taught creationism, we can only speculate as to what experience he has that underlies this assertion.
There are atheists in the scientific community (some very high profile) who used to be practising Christians in their teenage years, but who were turned away from the faith because their church pitted science against faith.
DA states this in his book too. Who are these atheists? Where is the documentation where we can follow these assertions up? Either way, though, this statement again adds nothing to the argument. If there are atheists who were turned away by creationism and creationism is true, then they were turned away by the truth. Are we supposed to preach lies in the hope that it will persuade people to make professions of faith? If on the other hand creationism is false, then this argument is redundant - we all agree that in that case it shouldn't be preached. Again, more polemics, intended simply to intimidate creationists to pipe down on the basis of undocumented authoritative-sounding assertions, rather than on the basis of argument.
Since DA's played this card, though, let's see if he's willing to take on a wager. Suppose that we can count up the number of atheists who turned away from a profession of faith because their church taught them that they had to accept creationism as true, and who will freely confess that, after it's been explained to them that Darwinism and the Bible are fully compatible, they will gladly return to Christianity. Suppose on the other hand that we count up the number of atheists who won't accept Christianity because they find that theism actually really is incompatible with Darwinism, and therefore they judge Christianity false because they think Darwinism is true. Which category's going to have more people? DA may be able to do the mental gymnastics to persuade himself that the Bible and Darwinism don't contradict each other a hundred times. I'd be pretty confident on the other hand, though, that he's in a slim minority. As the expression goes: a simple man can persuade himself only of some things; but an educated man can persuade himself of anything.
Preaching the gospel is made much harder when it becomes associated with beliefs, such as a young earth, which most people find ridiculous.
Again, same empty argument. If creationism is true, then this is something DA will just have to put up with - unless he believes that we should actually trim and prune our beliefs according to what our present society deems acceptable. This argument can also be reversed. DA's the one trying his darndest to make belief in a young earth seem ridiculous - which he does throughout his book using the method of never representing or interacting with actual creationist arguments, but by setting fire to a succession of straw-men. If he's actually concerned about the effect on preaching the gospel of making creationism seem ridiculous, why is he doing it?
Do people really find the idea of a "young" earth ridiculous? The earth in fact can only be as young or old as it is. It can only be termed "young" in relationship to something else. In this case, it's supposed to be "young" in relation to the telephone-number figures circulated by such as DA. I seriously doubt that more than the tiniest fraction of people have ever looked into the arguments for or against the age of the earth, or considered how to evaluate the two competing paradigms. (DA himself never approaches the matter in terms of paradigms - it's simply infallible, objective science says so...). They simply accept it on authority because people like DA say so; just as they accepted eugenics, geocentricism and other mistaken science in previous generations. This argument is ultimately a naked appeal to authority.
Still FriendsI would urge Christians to hold science and faith together as the friends they have traditionally been, not force them apart for biblically unnecessary reasons.
As the letter comes to a close, DA is really piling up the vacuous polemic. Of course, no creationist actually believes that science and faith aren't friends. They simply dispute whether Darwinism and faith are friends, or whether Darwinism and science are. Whilst in his book he falsely, without providing any references, teaches us that creationists claim that Genesis is written in the genre of a modern scientific journal, the reality is that it is DA who is forcing a dichotomy where none exists by forcing us to choose either between choosing to believe in what he terms "science", or to read the book of Genesis as self-conscious, accurate history. DA's reading forces us to accept it only as "theology"; an interpretation of events, but not actually recording events in a historical way. DA forces us to choose between evangelical Bible interpretation, or having his like poor thinly-veiled contempt down on us and accuse us of all manner of sins, pastoral problems, spoiling evangelism, spoiling the relationship between science and faith, etcetera. Still, that's the way it is - and we have to choose our lot.
I also hope that readers will not accept the representation of my book that McIntosh provides, but actually read Creation or Evolution - do we have to choose? for themselves.
Editor's note: Our reviewer, Andy McIntosh, will publish a reply to Dr. Alexander's letter in February's ET.
The End!