I recently read Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in God. There is much to admire in this book, but also much that is frustrating. In this post, I’ll focus on just one aspect of the book: how Collins handles cosmological and biological design arguments.
It’s difficult to understand the distinction Collins makes between cosmological/moral and biological design argments. On the one hand, he says the appearance of fine tuning, the emergence of mind and reason in humans, and the human moral sense are not explainable only by naturalistic causes, and support belief in a creator-God. On the other hand, he says that arguments from the appearance in design in biology are merely worthless God-of-the-gaps arguments.
I can’t see the principled distinction here. In fact, the argument from human mind, reason and the moral sense is a type of biological gap argument.
I suppose the cosmological/moral arguments can be seen as teleological. The point is not so much that there are gaps in our understanding of how naturalistic processes alone could result in the finely-tuned cosmological constant or in the emergence of human mind and morality, but that, even if we were to understand all those naturalistic processes completely, the extraordinarily low probability of how they played out suggests an intelligent purpose beyond mere chance. But the same could be said of biological design arguments such as the argument from irreducible complexity. And even the probabilistic-teleological argument itself is a sort of gap argument — we can’t conceive of how something of such a low probability could have occurred in nature, so we fill in our inability to grasp that happenstance with God.
I also don’t understand Collins’ criticism of some ID / design / OEC arguments on the basis that they present an inept designer who was forced to repeatedly intervene in the creation. The same can be said of any TE view that retains any concept of God as a sovereign creator. If God sovereignly superintended ordinary evolution, then he repeatedly and constantly “intervened” (and still “intervenes”) in the creation, making myriad trial-and-error adjustments, arguably at great cost in terms of “wasted” organisms.
The answer to this criticism of TE, of course, is that God is perfectly good, wise and knowing as well as perfectly sovereign, that his direction of evolution was fully in accordance with His goodness, wisdom, foreknowledge, and that it accomplished exactly the purposes He intended, even if we as humans don’t always fully understand them. But that same answer applies to Collins’ criticism of the “meddling” ID God. There’s no reason to assume God was “fixing” some kind of “mistake” if He intervened in the creation apart from the working of natural laws. His intevention is equally consistent with a perfectly good, wise, previously known and established plan by a sovereign creator-God. (Likewise, the same criticism and answer applies to criticisms of the Atonement — why did God have to “fix” human sin by becoming incarnate and dying on a cross?) (The other answer to this criticism is open theism, which Collins doesn’t seem to espouse. But again, that would equally be an answer in the case of an ID / OEC paradigm).
So what am I missing?