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Evolution, providence, and Gouldian contingency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2008

MICHAEL ROTA
MICHAEL ROTA
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, 241 JRC, University of St Thomas, 2115 Summit Ave, St Paul, MN 55105
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Abstract

Stephen Jay Gould and others have argued that what we know about evolution implies that human beings are a ‘cosmic accident’. In this paper I examine an argument for Gould's view and then attempt to show that it fails. Contrary to the claims of Gould, Daniel Dennett, and others, it is a mistake to think that what we have learned from evolutionary biology somehow shows that human beings are mere accidents of natural history. Nor does what we know about the contingency of evolution give us good reason to reject the view that human beings came to be according to a divine providential plan.

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Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 393 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1.  Speaking of the implications of Darwinian theory and the fact that ‘human existence only fills the last micromoment of planetary time’, Gould writes: ‘For such a limitation [the comparatively limited duration of human existence – MR] has a “plain meaning” – and plain meanings are usually correct … . If we are but a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent bush of life, and if our twig branched off just a geological moment ago, then perhaps we are not a predictable result of an inherently progressive process … perhaps we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions. In fact, I would argue that all these “plain meanings” are true, and that we should revel in the our newfound status and attendant need to construct meanings by and for ourselves’; Stephen Jay Gould Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York NY: Harmony Books, 1996), 18.

2.  Ibid., 216: ‘We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.’

3.  Idem Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 14.

4.  By ‘evolution’, I mean the thesis that all life on earth has arisen from one or a few original forms of life via a process of descent with modification, wherein the process of natural selection winnowing random variation was the major mechanism by which the diversity of life arose.

5.  Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York NY: Touchstone, 1996), 59.

6.  Ibid., 59.

7.  Ibid., 56.

8.  Quotations such as these could be multiplied. See, e.g. Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 9: ‘[T]he only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics’; and Douglas Futumya Science on Trial (New York NY: Pantheon, 1983), 12–13: ‘Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere mechanical mechanisms – but this seems to be the message of evolution.’

9.  On this question, see Peter van Inwagen The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in 2003 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 113–134; and my ‘The problem of evil and cooperation’, in Sarah Coakley and Martin Nowak (eds) Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press), forthcoming.

10.  Gould Wonderful Life, 14.

11.  By ‘an evolutionary process of the sort we have evidence of’, I mean an evolutionary process that began with one or a few very simple forms of life, and in which natural selection was the main mechanism accounting for the origin of species. (1) has ‘produced by an evolutionary process of the sort we have evidence of’, rather than just ‘produced by an evolutionary process’, in order to make (1) more plausible. For suppose it read ‘The objective probability is very low that human beings would someday be produced by an evolutionary process.’ Then it could be objected that there are certain sorts of evolutionary processes (e.g. ones that start with some particular kind of primate) that would have a high probability of leading to the emergence of humans. The insight behind the Gouldian contingency objection is that the sort of evolutionary process that actually occurred was such that it was not likely to give rise to humans.

12.  Genesis 1.26–27.

13.  John of Damascus The Orthodox Faith, bk 2, ch. 12, in Saint John of Damascus: Writings, Frederic H. Chase, Jr (tr.), The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), XXXVII, 235.

14.  Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, I.93.4.

15.  Ibid., I.93.6c and ad 3.

16.  Gould himself comes close to making this sort of claim: ‘let [the tape of life] play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay’; Gould Wonderful Life, 14, italics added.

17.  This is the argument we get by replacing ‘human beings’ with ‘rational animals’ in all the propositions of the original argument.

18.  See Simon Conway Morris Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially chs 8–9, and his earlier The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Conway Morris is a Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge.

19.  Idem Life's Solution, 283–284.

20.  Ibid., xv.

21.  Ibid., xii.

22.  So John Maynard Smith. See Conway Morris Life's Solution, xi and xii.

23.  Ibid., 162.

24.  Ibid., xii.

25.  Ibid., ch. 7, especially 151–158.

26.  See ibid., chs 8–9.

27.  Some may object that God, as the source of all being and all causality, could ensure the occurrence of an indeterministically event (just by willing it). I think this view can be shown to lead to a contradiction; for an argument to this effect, see my ‘Providence in an indeterministic world: the chess-master model’, forthcoming.

28.  If God is prepared to guide evolution in the first place, why use evolution by natural selection at all? On this question, see my ‘The problem of evil and cooperation’.

29.  The concept of special divine action is best understood by contrast with God's general action of producing and sustaining created things. On the view I have in mind, God has made a world which functions in a regular, orderly way – there is such a thing as the ordinary course of nature. And God is at all times active in sustaining the existence and causal power of created things. But God may occasionally wish to bring about effects, at certain times and for particular reasons, that depart from the ordinary course of nature. Doing so involves special divine action. Cases of special divine action include, but are not exhausted by, (1) cases in which God directly and immediately produces an effect of a sort that would normally be the effect of a created cause; and (2) cases in which God brings it about that a created cause produces an effect beyond its ordinary capacity. If God directly brought about the motion of some material entity, we would have an example of the first category. If God, say, brought it about that an electron repels another negatively charged particle with greater force than it ordinarily would, we would have an example of the second category.

30.  Peter Geach Providence and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 58.

31.  There are important differences between the view Geach has in mind with respect to the course of human events and the view I have in mind with respect to the course of pre-human evolution. One concerns divine eternity: Geach denies the classical doctrine that all times, including those future to us, are present to God (see Geach Providence and Evil, 56–57). Although I occasionally use tensed language to refer to God, the view I present is compatible with divine eternity.

32.  The chess-master analogy is misleading in several respects. While a chess-master and his or her opponent are on the same ontological level and have the same fundamental kinds of causal powers, God and human beings are radically different. God's sustaining action at every moment is required for any human action whatsoever, and all human causal powers owe their existence to God's causal power. Besides these disanalogies relating to being and causality, there are also important disanalogies relating to knowledge. God, in my own view, is timelessly eternal, so that God eternally knows the outcome of all events in virtue of His knowledge of vision, whereas a human chess-master could not have that sort of knowledge. Still, for all their disanalogies, the two cases are similar in this important respect: just as a chess-master can be assured of victory by virtue of his or her ability to respond successfully to any move his or her opponent might make, so God can be assured of the outcome of an indeterministic evolutionary process by virtue of His ability to respond successfully to any indeterministically produced event that might occur in the course of that process.

33.  There is a great deal of literature on divine action that is relevant to the objections I have in mind. See, inter alia: William Alston, ‘God's action in the world’, in idem Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 197–222; Alvin Plantinga ‘Divine action in the world (synopsis)’, Ratio, 19 (2006), 495–504; Paul Draper ‘God, science, and naturalism’ in W. J. Wainwright (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 272–303; the work produced in several volumes by the Divine Action Project, under the auspices of the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Berkeley, e.g. R. J. Russell, P. Clayton, K. Wegter-McNelly, and J. Polkinghorne (eds) Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, V, (Berkeley, CA: Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2001).

34.  The Dwight H. Terry Lectureship Centennial Conference, The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue?, 14–15 September 2006, Yale University.

35.  On the spontaneity of mutations, see S. E. Luria and M. Delbrück ‘Mutations of bacteria from virus sensitivity to virus resistance’, Genetics, 28 (1943), 491–511.

36.  That God has guided evolution.

37.  A situation in which we have complete knowledge of the history of natural causes and in which we can see that there are no naturally indeterministically produced events would look to us like a situation in which there is no ontological indeterminacy simpliciter.

38.  Thomas Tracy ‘Creation, providence, and quantum chance’, in Russell, Clayton, Wegter-McNelly, and Polkinghorne Quantum Mechanics, 256.

39.  This possibility has been explored by several authors. See Tracy ‘Creation, providence, and quantum chance’, 256.

40.  I should briefly mention an objection that I won't be considering here. It is sometimes suggested that the view I've labelled as the chess-master view of God's providence requires that God violate the laws of nature if He is to guide the course of evolution. As has been noted by Plantinga and Alston, this assertion seems clearly mistaken (see the works by Plantinga and Alston cited in n. 33). Alston's basic argument hinges on a distinction between two ways a law of nature might be formulated. A law of nature might (a) provide unqualified sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some event, or (b) provide conditions sufficient for the occurrence of some event, subject to some qualifying proviso to the effect that other forces or factors not mentioned in the law are absent. Consider, for example, two possible laws stated in general terms: (L1) If an entity E satisfies conditions C1–Cn, then E will act in way W. (L2) If an entity E satisfies conditions C1–Cn, then E will act in way W, provided that no influences on E not specified in conditions C1–Cn are present. Now, suppose there is an entity E that does satisfy conditions C1–Cn, and suppose that God directly causes E to act in a way other than way W. This would be a counter-example to, and thus a violation of, (L1), but it would be neither a counter-example to nor a violation of (L2), since God's direct influence on E is an influence not specified in conditions C1–Cn. Special divine action would involve a violation of the first type of law, but not the second. Next, Alston argues, any law which we are justified in accepting would have to be of the second sort, not the first. For this argument, see Alston ‘God's action in the world’, 212.

41.  Michael R. Rose Darwin's Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 205.

42.  Steven Weinberg Dreams of a Final Theory (New York NY: Pantheon Books, 1992), 247.

43.  Rose Darwin's Spectre, 205.

44.  Ibid., 205.

45.  While I take on Rose's language of whether ‘laws of science’ will ‘necessarily’ remain constant or exceptionless, I do not mean to endorse this language, or any particular theory of the laws of nature. I take up Rose's language simply in order to show that his comments do not add up to a good argument for (6). Also, see n. 40.

46.  With appropriate caveats for differences in the very early moments after the Big Bang.

47.  Weinberg Dreams of a Final Theory, 247.

48.  It is sometimes claimed that the scientific method presupposes that physical reality is a closed causal system. In assessing this claim, we should bear in mind the distinction between what the scientific method requires its practitioners to believe and what it requires its practitioners to adopt as a working assumption. For the reasons given in the paragraph to which this note is appended, it seems clear that the scientific method does not require an actual belief that physical reality is closed.

49.  For their helpful comments on this material, I thank the members of the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation project at Harvard University, especially Philip Clayton and Sarah Coakley; my colleague at the University of St Thomas, Gary Atkinson; and the Editor and two anonymous referees for Religious Studies. I am also grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for financial support during the time in which this paper was written.