[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Did Darwin use theological arguments? Hello and welcome to ID the future. I'm Casey Luskin, and today I'm speaking with Cornelius Hunter, who holds a PhD in biophysics and computational biology from the University of Illinois and is the author of multiple books covering the topic of Darwin and intelligent design, including Darwin's God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Darwin's proof, the triumph of religion over science, and science's blind spot, the unseen religion of scientific naturalism. So, Dr. Hunter, thanks for coming on the show with us today.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Thank you, Casey. It's my pleasure.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Well, we're here today to discuss your contribution to the book, the Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, exploring the ultimate questions about life and the cosmos, which is published by Harvest House. I'm a co editor of the book, along with Bill Dempsky and Joseph Holden. I certainly hope you'll check it out. It's available on Amazon. It has contributions from many leading ID scientists, not just Cornelius Hunter, but also Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, Jonathan Wells, Jay Richards, Guillermo Gonzalez, Michael Egnor, Walter Bradley, Robert Marks, Brian Miller, and many others. Your contribution, Dr. Hunter, I think, was a very unique one to the book, and that it addressed whether Darwin made theological assumptions in his research. And there's this stereotype in the world today that evolution is science and devoid of all theology, and that anything that challenges evolution is theology that is devoid of all science. But your chapter really challenges that stereotype, and then it talks about how those lines are often blurred, and I'd like to discuss that with you today. So in your chapter, you do sort of a rhetorical analysis of Darwin's famous book, Origin of Species, and you find that he often uses what you call theological language. So what is some of the theological language that Darwin uses in origin of?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, he doesn't use the word God, but maybe, I think, once in the entire volume. By the way, Casey, I wanted to say that I am honored to be an author on this volume. I think it came out very nicely, and I appreciate the opportunity. But, yeah, in terms of his theological language, he really didn't use God or that sort of familiar biblical language. Independently created would probably rank at the top as his number one kind of metaphysical theological phrase. The species are independently created. That means God created them independently, one at a time, one species at a time. So the species have no relationship in terms of common descent. Now, he did use other terms as well, but those sorts of terms that kind of cleansed the volume of a religious feel there was no religious patina on it, but the religious ideas were underlying in these kind of loaded terms.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Well, that's a good way of putting it. For example, you say that some of the theological language is initially hidden. And, for example, when Darwin used the word ordinary, what does he mean by the word ordinary? Does he mean ordinary in the ordinary sense, or does he mean some kind of theological implication when he uses the term?
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Readers can get to the details in my chapter there. I won't go through all the word study that I did, but Darwin's relationship with the word ordinary is interesting. It shows up a lot more in origin of species than other contemporary volumes in this genre. And he does use ordinary in the way that we would expect it normal about half the time. And then the other half, it's split into two major categories, and one has to do with natural selection and ordinary selection. But then there's that last category. Approximately one quarter of his total usage of the term, and in this case, ordinary, refers to what we would think of as creationism, that is, the idea of design and creationism, and that God created the species independently. Often he'll append other words to it, but sometimes he just uses the word the ordinary view. The ordinary view. And what he means by ordinary view is that God created the species independently. But why this is important is it's another sign of how Darwin cleansed the language. It's a rhetorical technique of making it sound more scientific. It's giving it a scientific patina, avoiding these kind of religiously loaded words. But the fact is, the metaphysics is there all along.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not just the language that Darwin used, but also just the very nature of his arguments. In fact, you list various observations that Darwin found, as you put it, theologically objectionable. So what were some of those observations and why did Darwin find them theologically distasteful?
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Yes, there were a lot. There's dozens and dozens throughout the volume. I'll give you one that is typical and I think will make sense. Some of them don't really make that much sense. But here's one. Birds. Ducks and birds that are aquatic will have often have webbed feet, and everyone's seen that. Ducks with webbed feet, of course, and they paddle through the water. There are species of birds that also have webbed feet that are not particularly aquatic. Their natural environment is not near the water. In fact, one is called the upland goose, upland meaning away from the riverbed. And so it's normally in a more dry environment and now, you might hear this and say, okay, so what? Where is this going? This was significant to Darwin and significant to naturalists, and it's fair. It's a fair point. We need to not look at them through our 21st century template here, but to realize they're seriously grappling with the idea that God created the species perfectly. And this comes out of utilitarianism from the century earlier. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, which was picked up by natural theology in a big way, especially by Paley, and advocated that species are created just perfectly adapted for their environment. And so he kind of set Darwin up in his early years.
He read Paley. He accepted Paley like a good english boy. He had no problem with natural theology. And then he started to observe these things, like, wait a minute, why does the upland goose have webbed feet? And, well, once in a while they've been seen to be down near the water, but generally not. And so there's no need for it. So the whole perfect adaptation doctrine Darwin increasingly found to be questionable. So you can see there's just deep metaphysics and deep theology underlying Darwin's observations. His observations are theory laden or metaphysically laden, and he's interpreting them according to received metaphysics and received theology. Now, I'll just throw in Casey as an extra here. That is just really unique to Darwin. I mean, you can go back to the Epicureans, you can go up to today, the idea that a scientist has the white lab coat and works in the laboratory and checks his cultural and political and religious biases at the door every morning as he walks in. That's just mythological. So it's not that this is somehow unique to Darwin. What's more unique is our stereotype and mythology, that Darwin was a scientist who came in and gave us a scientific theory. And that, just as readers will see in my chapter, it really doesn't hold up to the historical facts.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you talked about sort of Darwin's own historical thinking on this issue. Reading Paley when he was younger and the ways he was influenced by that, was the origin of species the only place where Darwin used these kinds of theological arguments? Or had he been using this kind of theological thinking previously in his.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Absolutely. You know, it was prevalent in other people's writings as well. But Darwin himself, if you just look at Darwin's body of work throughout his life, absolutely. These sorts of metaphysical religious arguments show up repeatedly, beginning with his earliest notebooks. And that's significant because those notebooks date back to the 1830s. Now, remember the timeline here. He goes on the HMS Beagle. He goes on his voyage around the world, five year voyage in the kind of the first half of the 1830s, roughly gets back to London for the second half of the 1830s, makes his natural selection discovery in the mid 1837, fall of 1837, I think it was before that discovery. He's making entries into notebooks, and of course, he has no reason to think that these would be published and open to public view in later decades and later years. He has no reason to think that people doing a podcast are going to be talking about his notebooks. So these are notes that he's making to himself a young Darwin. He hasn't even figured out evolution yet. He's just simply collating his ideas and commenting on things. And he's making overtly, obviously, religious comments in his notebooks in the 1830s. So it's very clear that he has a religious zeitgeist that he's bringing into his science at that time. Then he comes out with a couple of essays in the 1840s, early 1840s. Again, same sort of thing, pages of metaphysical religious commentary on his observations and religious interpretations of the science. But again, no one would really raise an eyebrow or, whoa, wait a minute, what's going on here? At that time, because it was being done by others as well. This was the norm. And I would argue it's no different today, although we have more of a mythology surrounding it, and we believe that there's this thing called science that just adheres to objective empirical data and that just doesn't fit the facts.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: Well, what about natural evil? Dr. Hunter, you say that for Darwin, a good God would not make a bad world. And this, of course, refers to the problem of evil. And my immediate thought, since he was thinking theologically, maybe we can think a little bit theological here, is that Judeo christian theology has for centuries acknowledged that evil exists in the world around us, including natural evil, and has some pretty good responses and explanations for why it exists. At least that's my opinion. So did Darwin ever consider these classical responses to the problem of evil? Like, I don't know, like that human sin had tainted our world or caused it to fall, so to speak? Or did Darwin even think about these things, as far as we know? Or did he just ignore these solutions to the problem of evil? How did Darwin interface with this issue if he was so concerned with a good God making a bad world?
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Well, it was heavily informed by the received theology that would have been well accepted by Darwin and his peers. That came down from not only Anglicans, but also Lutherans of the prior centuries. And you can point to Lutherans such as Christian Wolf and Kant and Leibniz, but Anglicans as well.
And the deism, which was, albeit short lived in the 17th century, early 18th century, it was nonetheless influential. And to get to this, I want to talk to this one idea you brought up, Casey, about the fall, the fall of man tainting the world for the religious rationalism and edits extreme deism. The fall was downplayed, the fall was diluted because they didn't want to go there, because the belief was, you need to have a religion that is rational, that can be arrived at philosophically and rationally, not just some fidaistic truth claims that we have no way of arriving at rationally. So they didn't like mysteries. They needed to get rid of mysteries. And one of those mysteries was the Trinity. And you may have heard Isaac Newton wasn't too keen on the Trinity. John Locke, John Milton, the elites, the anglican elites of the 17th, 18th century weren't real keen on the Trinity for this reason. They wanted a rational religion. By the same token, the idea that, well, we're just fallen and we really can't figure things out, that didn't fly very well either, all because of this religious rationalism sort of theology that was not in total command, but it was an influential move. It was very influential in the 17th century, for sure. So that was kind of a received theology that you didn't really appeal to the fall as an explanant for natural evil. And so it was a problem. But let me say one other thing to this question of natural evil, in that if you categorize the arguments and origins, Darwin's arguments for revolution, the problem of evil is actually a minor player. Yes, it's there. And Darwin brought this up later. And so it's kind of a convenient way to think of it, because the other arguments were similar, it had similar structure, and everyone's heard of the problem of evil, so it's a good way to think of it. But the fact is, distilliology was a much more important argument for Darwin, a much more powerful argument. It has the same form. The problem of evil form is a God who is all powerful, all knowing and all good would not allow or create evil. Well, you just replace the word evil with distilliology, structures that don't perform very well, inefficiencies and that sort of thing. Darwin once asked his friend Charles Lyle, do you really believe the shape of my nose was designed by God?
It's kind of a humorous question, kind of rhetorical, but he also meant it. He didn't believe, and this is not just Darwin, they didn't believe that God would create things that don't work very well or don't look very well to us. And so the purview of distilliology is almost limitless on anything that you don't really like. You can say, well, God wouldn't have done it that way. God would have created that. My aching back. The web defeat on the upland goose. You can take this argument pretty much anywhere. And so this was a very powerful argument, which can play out in many ways, and it did.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: This is very interesting, Dr. Hunter. I'm learning a ton just listening to you right now. A lot of these arguments amount to what you call God wouldn't do it that way arguments, or what Stephen J. Goul says, what a quote unquote sensible God would do, whatever that means. So let's talk about these. And I think these are so interesting because it's always imposing our own human perception of what God ought to do. And then saying, well, if God doesn't do it my way, then he wasn't involved. And somehow that's supposed to mean it evolved through darwinian evolution. I don't know how they make that leap, but we can get to that later. So let's talk about these what God wouldn't do it that way arguments. Does Darwin establish any of these God wouldn't do it that way arguments? And are these kinds of arguments typically very good ones, both scientifically and theologically speaking?
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Right. That's a great question, because it does fail both on the science and the theology, in different ways, of course. So on the science, you collect all these arguments, you make all these arguments that land goose and this and that. And the other thing that this is inefficient. There is a long, long history of failed interpretations of junk. So junk. I use that word junk as kind of a generic phrase of things we don't like. Evolutionists is starting with Darwin. It's going back before Darwin, back to the Epicureans, but certainly Darwin jacked it up. And after Darwin, evolutionists continued to contribute to this tradition of, okay, let's identify this. This is junk, or this doesn't work. Right? And then years later, science uncovers, oh, there was a purpose there. Of course, today, we're familiar with this term junk DNA, and most people have probably heard about the examples of junk DNA that actually do something. But this trend predates DNA, predates the genomic era. This was going on at a morphological level in the early 20th century and 19th century, with all kinds of examples that later didn't pan out. So scientifically, we need to be very careful. It's kind of a science stopper to say, oh, well, that's junk. Oh, wait a minute. Somebody ten years later, 20 years later came along and even though wasn't supposed to think that it did anything, decided to do some experiments, and, oh, lo and behold, it does something. So as scientists, we need to be very careful about ascribing junk to anything. From a theological perspective, there are plenty of verses in the Bible where God declares, I'm going to do it the way I want to do it, and that we do see through a glass darkly. Paul says that whether you want to call that a result of the fall or whether you want to call that a result of our finiteness, obviously you look up into the cosmos and you got to have to agree, we're kind of small compared to everything. So we have a limited framework both in space and time. We have limited knowledge. And yes, there is the fall. You have to acknowledge that as well. Then you read God's statements in scripture that, I'm going to do it this way. And, for example, Job, chapter 39. Job is, of course, a classic place to go for the problem of evil. And towards the end of Job, God responds. So the first, like, 90% of job is Job and his friends in discourse chapter after chapter after chapter of this discourse between folks who really don't know what they're talking about. And then at the end, God comes on the scene, and frankly, it's frightening. It's a little frightening to read this. It's very frightening, and it's very powerful. God comes on the scene and has some words with Job.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Where were you?
What were you up to when I was doing all this? Right, yeah.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Where were you when I made the Pleiades?
I put the oceans in their place and so forth. So, yeah, it's a very powerful statement.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: God drops the mic on job, basically.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: But in that passage, there's some very interesting tidbits. If it was you or I doing the talking, we would point to all the powerful things, all the beautiful things, all the great things, and God does at certain places points to the eagle and so forth. But there's also points where God looks at things that are not so good. He talks about the know. He says to job, look at the donkey. And I'm kind of hitting my forehead here. What? It is obstinate. It ignores the shouts of the driver. And then he says, look at the ostrich. The ostrich is not mindful of her eggs. She leaves them unprotected and they get trampled underfoot. The young ostrich are killed. This absolutely demolishes Darwin's entire utilitarianism project, which, by the way, Darwin explicitly signs up for and explains in chapter six of origins. He actually, in black and white, tells the reader, my theory is absolutely contingent upon theological utilitarianism. Now I'm explaining it more than Darwin did. He kind of explained it tersely.
And I have a paper on this from earlier this year. My theory is absolutely contingent on theological utilitarianism. And if that doctrine is false, my theory absolutely fails. He says this in black and white in one paragraph. If anyone doubts that Darwin's theory was theological, Darwin himself in black and white lays this out very clearly. It's there, and the scriptures just blow this out of the water. I mean, if Darwin was more scripturally informed, and if England at that time was more scripturally informed, if he had that knowledge, he would never have said that because he would have known that this doesn't fly biblically. So, yeah, these theological mandates fail both scientifically and theologically.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: You have a paper in the journal Religions, Dr. Hunter, titled Evolution is a theological research program, which elaborates on these points in a lot more detail. And I would encourage of the future listeners to go to the religions journal and search for Cornelius Hunter's article. It's very good. And you say in that article, one of your main points is that Darwin's science followed his religion, not vice versa. And then you say that this trend didn't end with Darwin. You say, later evolutionists consistently employed remarkably similar and often identical arguments to justify the theory. In this sense, the origin is more accurately viewed as initiating a genre in which religion provides the key interpretive filter to be applied to the scientific evidence. And I can think of ID critics who oppose ID in the 21st century on the basis of God wouldn't do it that way. When we have Ken Miller claiming, wrongly, by the way, that the vertebrate eye doesn't work very well because he claims that it's wired backwards and that's been blown out of the water, as you said, by evidence from the way that the wiring of the vertebrate eye is actually very precise to allow light to pass through. Thinking of Nick Matskey objecting to design because he thinks there's so much flagella diversity that God would never create all these different flagella independently. It's a fundamentally theological argument in order to disprove intelligent design. It's not a scientific one. So tell me, Cornelius Hunter, is this true? I mean, is this still very prevalent, in your opinion, or can you give any other examples of evolutionists who live after Darwin who have used the same sort of. God wouldn't do it that way, or other theological argumentation to oppose ID and creation and support evolution?
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Yes. Casey, you mentioned Ken Miller. He also made an argument about elephants. There's too many species of elephants. God wouldn't have made all these different species of elephants. My paper does have a table that lists a couple of dozen examples of post darwinian theological arguments that were by leading evolutionists, all in service of proving evolutionary theory. So nothing has really changed since Darwin. He did lay the framework, he started a genre, and it is all just simply continued. Similar types of arguments, the same sort of structure. The evidences are new. We have new kinds of instruments now, we have new kinds of scientific data, but they are poured into the exact same template. And yes, to address the folks you were talking about there and the typical evolutionary arguments, I do have to say there is a hypocrisy. There is a hypocrisy in that they will very typically claim that skeptics of evolution are religiously driven. And that's a great rhetorical argument. You've got a religious extraground. Oh, you're a creationist, right? You're a young Arthur, that sort of thing. Whereas they will say, we're just doing science. It's the exact opposite. On the evolution side, you have religious concerns, religious considerations driving you to naturalism. Now, naturalism sounds scientific. I'm appealing to natural causes. Isn't that science? But what got you there was religion, and what got you there with certainty. So evolution is considered to be a fact, not because of the naturalistic causes that have been uncovered, which are weak, but rather the justification, the theological justification that got you there. Now, on the other side of the ledger, you have design thinking and intelligent design, which looks at the science of complexity and so forth, and that science gets you to a design conclusion. So is that religious or is that science? You were looking at the science. The science is what got you to make a logical, rational conclusion. So I would argue it's where you start and what motivates you and what kicks you to your conclusion. That's where you have to decide, is it science or is it religion? Evolution is dealing with religious considerations. Intelligent design is dealing with scientific considerations.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: I think that where you start makes all the difference in the world. As to whether you are fundamentally science or religion, it's a good question to end with. Here you write in your article in the Comprehensive Guide to science and faith. Instead of finding signs of how the creator was manifest in the creation, he found signs, he being Darwin, found signs of how the creator was not manifest in the creation. So this raises the question, was Darwin's purpose fundamentally scientific or was it fundamentally theological? And if so, what was his motive? Was it to get God out of nature and out of the creation, as you put it, or what was Darwin's goal in everything that he was doing?
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Yeah, great question, because I think there is a lot of confusion on this, and Darwin is often labeled as an atheist, and that's a very convenient label for. It's a red meat label for creationists. I don't believe that fits very well. Although no doubt Darwin tended hedged more and more toward atheism in his later years, probably after he published his book in 1859. You may say he was an atheist. He was always a kind atheist, right? He was always a soft spoken atheist. He was kind of atheist who didn't want to push it. Yeah, he probably tended pretty strongly toward atheism at that point. But in writing origin, in developing his theory of evolution, Darwin clearly really did believe in these theological arguments. If you don't believe in them, it's going to be pretty hard to make a convincing case and to be compelling and to spend that much time and effort into putting that together. There's no reason not to think so. I mean, everybody shared these at that time anyway. It was very tip. Not everybody, but it was very typical at that time in England and in Europe. So he was simply operating off of the received theology and the cultural biases that were on. You can read Desmond and more. It's very obvious throughout those years. And so I do believe what was motivation was objective. I think he was sincerely and genuinely convicted that natural theology was not working, theological utilitarianism was not working, and he needed to rectify this. It wasn't the only one. I mean, others had come up with these same concerns and he came up with a solution for it, the solution for a religious problem. Now, all of this is intertwined, tightly intertwined with the science and with scientific sounding statements. So that's where this gets so tricky. This is why I say Darwin initiated a new genre, because that's the way it continued after Darwin up until today. You get everything from textbooks and journal articles down to popular works where you get a lot of scientific jargon, but interwoven and interspersed are metaphysical premises all throughout. And so I think Darwin was what was his motive? I don't think he started out life in oh, I want to get God out of here. It was more there was a sincere belief that God, that independent creation, that an act of intervening God just wasn't working. And this idea was again received. It was came from the Lutherans and Anglicans from centuries earlier for a number of reasons. I've actually got about a dozen different theological reasons ranging from deeply God centered reasons to deeply man centered reasons. So the man centered reasons are things like, we can't do science if we have a God who intervenes with miracles. Okay, so that's a man centered reason. A God centered reason is a greater God is a God who works through laws, and a lesser God is a God who intervenes and gets in and fiddles with his creation because he's violating the creation that he created. A better God would create the laws. And how much more wise is a God who creates through laws? Wow, that would require so much wisdom. So those are two examples. I've got about a dozen of these examples of the different theological threads. And this is kind of like a web of different theological ideas. They kind of interleave with each other, they're highly related to each other, but there's various different ideas that are at play and they're all pointing in the same direction, which is we need to get God distanced. And you can go back to the Epicureans. It's the same idea that they were advocating 2000 years ago. These ideas have been around forever, probably ever since men and women walked the earth. And they were very powerful in Darwin's day. And he came along with a theory that scratched that need.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: Okay, well, Dr. Cornelius Hunter, thank you so much for sharing with us today about your chapter in the book, the Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Again, the chapter is titled does Darwinism make Theological Assumptions? There's a lot more meat if you go and check out Dr. Hunter's chapter in the book. The book is available on Amazon.com. I hope you'll check it out. I'm Casey Luskin with idthefuture. Thanks for listening.
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