On Evolution, and God.

So I was chatting with a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine about evolution. It should be mentioned, critically, that my friend, while strongly Christian, does not ascribe to the dogma of the Intelligent Design proponents. He accepts evolution as having occurred; however, in his words, "that doesn't necessarily mean that God wasn't in there somewhere." He sees the book of Genesis as, and this is too good a quote for me not to use directly: "God simplifying natural history down to a level that a bunch of illiterate goatherds standing on a hill could understand and remember," which is basically what I've been saying since I found out about the whole Evolution/Intelligent Design debate; albeit somewhat more eloquently.

The thing, he said, that bothered him was the fact that Evolution required you to start with the assumption that God doesn't exist.

That was the epiphany moment for me. Ever since I learned about this so-called Intelligent Design theory, it confused the hell out of me why some people, many of whom are actually relatively intelligent, would deny the findings of just about every single branch of the natural sciences just to maintain that the Earth is only a few thousand years old; and that all animals in existence were magically created in their current form. At that moment, I finally understood: here's a perception that Evolution somehow denies the existence of God; and God's a really tough chick to argue with.

Okay, first off, I don't want this to be an essay on the existence/non-existence of God. That's a question best left to philosophers, theologeans, and people who are a lot smarter than me.

What I do want to get into is whether or not evolution theory actually denies the existence of God.

The short answer is "no."

Evolution theory, in all the forms it has taken since Darwin, and its application as far as abiogenesis and the origins of life on earth says nothing whatsoever about whether or not God exists. It says notning about the existence or functioning of any god or gods. It's basically orthogonal to the question; roughtly as orthogonal to the question as how your microwave oven works.

Is it possible that radioactive decay rates spontaneously change as soon as we're not looking at them? Maybe; but until we have some observable data to support that premise, the scientific approach demands that we avoid speculation and work from solid data. Is it possible that God made the world to "look" old to every experiment we could possibly perform? Again, yes, it's possible, but following that logic through to its natural conclusion, it could be argued that we have no solid proof that all five of our senses are not illusory, so therefore, we know absolutely nothing about the world around us.

The point is that if no observations exist, and no observations can be expected to be made, speculation is pointless, from a scientific standpoint. Sure, speculation can be fun, and it can also draw you in new and interesting directions that you may not have previously considered; but as far as actually understanding a phenomenon, it often reflects far more upon the experimentor's personal baises than it does upon the actual nature of things.

The point is that science works upon what can be observed. Practically by definition, God is an unobservable entity; whether She exists or not. So science simply ignores the question. It's irrelevant to whether or not the theory of evolution is correct or not. We can speculate all we want as to whether God exists, and whether or not She was involved in the creation of life on earth, but all this would be beside the point. Evolution is possibly the single most-supported theory in the biological sciences. While I object to the term "unifying theory" on principle (largely because a lot of people think that it sounds too much like "God"), if the biological sciences have a unifying theory, then evolution would be it. From the gross anatomy of complex animals, to the smallest molecular pathway in our individual cells, there's a certain elegance about the system; and the only scientific explanation which simultaneously explains the magnificent diversity as well as the shocking similarities between the various organisms is Evolution.

Whether or not God was involved is a separate issue.