The Incoherence of Deborah Haarsma's Christian Astrophysics in the Reason/Revelation Debate

 

What do you see in these pictures?  

The first picture is from the Hubble Space Telescope.  It's a tiny area of the sky (about one thirty-two millionth of the sky) visible only in the Earth's Southern Hemisphere.  It's centered on SMAC 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans.  As many as 10,000 galaxies are visible in this picture, and each of those galaxies probably have an average of 100 million stars.  The picture includes light from galaxies as they existed about 13 billion years ago, only about 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The second picture of this same area of the sky is from the James Webb Space Telescope.  A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the James Webb Telescope.  This picture was first revealed to the public at an event at the White House with President Joe Biden on July 11, 2022.  The picture from the Webb Telescope is clearer and more detailed than the Hubble picture.

Christian astrophysicist Deborah Haarsma sees in these pictures confirmation of what the Bible says in Psalms 19:1 (King James Version)--"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."  

Is she right?  You might agree with her if you take the side of Revelation in the Reason/Revelation debate.  But you will probably disagree with her if you take the side of Reason.  Is there any way to decide which side is right?  Or can the two sides be reconciled?  Would most human beings be inclined to agree with her religious interpretation of these pictures?  If so, does this express a natural propensity of our evolved human mind?

Some Christians have reported that looking at these pictures from the Webb Telescope made them "feel very small."  One Christian journalist observed: "It's hard and uncomfortable to comprehend being a tiny speck on a tiny speck in a universe full of tiny, beautiful specks," which sent her into "a sort of existential crisis."  But when she asked Haarsma about this, Haarsma told her: "You don't have to look at the vastness of the universe and feel insignificant.  You can look at it and see how great God's power and love are."

Haarsma said that on the Sunday after the Webb Telescope images were released, she went to services at her church where the images were projected on a screen, and the congregation sang hymns about nature.  "They created an opportunity to thank God for the wonders of the natural world."

HAARSMA'S THEISTIC EVOLUTION

Haarsma received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT.  She became a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College (now Calvin University).  She is now President of BioLogos, an organization founded by Francis Collins to promote the idea of theistic evolution among evangelical Christians who otherwise might reject evolutionary science as contrary to the Bible.  As suggested by name "BioLogos," the idea is that biology and natural science generally are "the language of God": "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God" (John 1:1).  Christians should see the modern scientific study of nature as the natural revelation of God's creative activity.

In a recent lecture, Haarsma explained "Why I Never Had a Faith Crisis Over Science." She noted that of the many young people today who are losing their religious beliefs, many say that "the church seems to reject much of what science tells us about the world."  She said that it doesn't have to be this way if Christians understand that faith and science are not in conflict, and then she explained how she had reached this conclusion in her own life.

She grew up in a Calvinist evangelical church that "grounded me in the faith."  "When it came to Genesis and the age of the Earth, my church knew of only two options.  One was godless evolution, with a godless Big Bang billions of years ago.  The other option was a Creator God who made the universe in 6 days following the text in Genesis.  Given those two choices, of course we picked the one with the Creator!"

At the same time, however, as a schoolgirl, Haarsma had a love of math and science.  As an undergraduate at Bethel University, a Christian school, she majored in physics and music.  Then, as a graduate student in physics at MIT, she developed an interest in astronomy and astrophysics.  At that point, she was forced to reconsider whether astronomy and the Genesis account of creation were compatible or contradictory.

She came across the book Portraits of Creation, with chapters by Christian geologists and Christian astronomers who explained how the scientific account of the evolution of the Earth could be reconciled with their faith.  There was also a chapter by Old Testament scholar John Stek, who explained the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian accounts of how many gods created the universe so that there was a flat Earth with a solid dome sky with water above it, called a "firmament."  This interpretation of the Old Testament as shaped by its ancient Near Eastern cultural context has been deepened by scholars like John Walton who is on the BioLogos Advisory Council.

Haarsma observes:

"I realized that in Genesis chapter 1, on the second day of creation, God takes credit for making this firmament.  That means God didn't try to correct their misconceptions about the natural world; it would have distracted them from the larger message.  God had other goals in mind.  I concluded that if God didn't put modern science into Genesis, I shouldn't be trying to get modern science out of Genesis.  Instead I should focus on God's primary message: that there is one sovereign Creator (not a pantheon of gods), that creation is good, and that humans are made in God's image."

In this way, she could accept the modern scientific account of the evolution of the universe while also accepting the revelation of God's "primary message" in the Bible.  Science and Christian faith are therefore compatible.  The mission of BioLogos is to convey that message to her fellow evangelical Christians.

Notice that Haarsma's conclusion that "God didn't try to correct their misconceptions about the natural world," because this "would have distracted them from the larger message," comes not from her reading of the Bible but from her reading of Old Testament scholars like John Stack and John Walton.  Why did she have to go outside the Bible for this?  Does that mean that God's revelation in the Bible does not guide the reader to its correct interpretation?  Does that mean that the Bible by itself is not a clear revelation of God's teaching?  A Christian reader of the Bible like Ken Ham would deny this, because he would say that the clear teaching of the Bible about the six days of Creation must be true, and it should not be distorted by scholarly commentary on the Bible that denies its literal teaching. 

In contrast to the Young Earth Creationism of Christians like Ham, the fundamental intellectual framework for Haarsma's project is what is often called "theistic evolution" or what Haarsma calls "evolutionary creation."  God is the omnipotent Creator of everything, but God has chosen to exercise his creative activity by establishing the laws of nature that allow for the natural history of the universe to emerge through a natural evolutionary process that can be studied by natural science.

As I have indicated previously, theistic evolution depends upon the principle of dual causality that was developed by medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers as a way of defending natural science or natural philosophy against the charge of being irreligious: God's supernatural power as primary cause can be understood as compatible with the natural laws of secondary causes as studied by natural science.

RECONCILING REASON AND REVELATION THROUGH THE TWO BOOKS OF ONE TRUTH?

I have written a series of posts on the reason/revelation debate, in which I have agreed with Leo Strauss that there is no way of reconciling reason and revelation by synthesizing them, and that a Socratic philosopher or a Darwinian scientist is justified in adopting a zetetic position:  The zetetics believe that while philosophy or science cannot refute revelation, it is rational for those with the natural desire and capacity for philosophy or science to choose the philosophic life, when this is rightly understood as a Socratic or Darwinian quest for knowledge that never attains the full knowledge of the whole that would refute revelation by denying the possibility of supernatural miracles.

Against this position, Haarsma assumes that the debate between reason and revelation can be resolved through a synthesis of the two in the idea that there is one truth revealed in "two books"--the Bible and nature.  As a student at Bethel College, Haarsma reports:  "I was excited to discover that a science career didn't mean pushing God out of the picture.  I was introduced to John Calvin's phrase 'All truth is God's truth'; even if some truth in nature is discovered by an atheist, it could still be from God.  By studying science, I would be investigating God's world as well as God's word, both nature and scripture.  Science could be a Christian vocation; I didn't have to be a missionary to serve God, but could serve God with my mind, as well as my heart and soul."

This attempt to reconcile reason and revelation through the two books of one truth fails, however, because Haarsma fails to show how the clearly revealed truth of the Bible (particularly, in the first chapters of Genesis) concerning the divinely created origins of the universe and of human beings is consistent with the natural science of the evolutionary origins of everything.  I have already made this argument in some previous posts about how revelation fails to resolve the creation/evolution debate among evangelical Christians because the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the Biblically revealed teaching concerning origins.

Haarsma first confronted this problem while she was studying astrophysics in graduate school at MIT: "studying astronomy meant that all of my questions about Genesis were back on the table.  I believed, and still believe, that the entire Bible is God's authoritative word for our lives.  I didn't want to just pick and choose which verses to accept, or let science dictate that some verses weren't true."

But as we have already seen, Haarsma really does "let science dictate that some verses weren't true."  When she learned that the Bible's account of God's creating the "firmament" (the King James translation of the Hebrew word raqia) was using the language of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian creation myths that were contradicted by modern astronomy, she decided that this Biblical teaching about the "firmament" as a solid heavenly dome needed to be rejected as false.

In Egyptian iconography, the starry sky is represented by the goddess Nut, whose body arched over the land.  This was the boundary between heaven and earth, and it held back the water above.  The concept of heavenly waters was a natural deduction from the experience of precipitation from the sky.

The Bible echoes this image in the Genesis account of the "firmament" in the second day of creation.  "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.  And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.  And God called the firmament Heaven.  And the evening and the morning were the second day" (Gen. 1:6-8).  This is the same Hebrew word for firmament that appears in Psalms 19:1--"and the firmament shewth his handywork."

But when we look at the Hubble and Webb pictures of deep space, we know that this is not a picture of a solid starry "firmament," because we know that astronomy shows the falsity of the Egyptian image of the sky.

As we have seen, according to Haarsma, in God's revelation in Genesis, "God didn't try to correct their misconceptions about the natural world; it would have distracted them from the larger message."  

But in response to Haarsma on this point, Ken Ham (a young Earth creationist) has complained that this "accuses God of using error to teach truth."   As far as I know, Haarsma has never replied to this criticism.

If God had corrected the errors of ancient Near Eastern cosmology, wouldn't this have confirmed God's revelation as truth that was beyond human understanding prior to modern science?  If there is no correction of ancient cosmology, does this imply that this is not really a revelation of a truth beyond the human beliefs of that time?

Haarsma might respond that we can see this was a true revelation because it corrects ancient theology in teaching a monotheistic religion of a creator God that was new.  But if we're going to read the Bible within its cultural setting, as she does, then we might notice that parts of the Bible seem to accept the polytheistic idea that different peoples have different gods (for example Judges 11:24).  We might then wonder whether Yahweh was originally one of many gods who at some point was elevated to be the one universal and transcendent god of Israel, which is the argument of Thomas Romer in The Invention of God (Harvard, 2015).  So why isn't God a cultural invention?  To deny this, it would help to have a revelation in the Bible of cosmological truths that correct traditional cosmologies in ways that people of the ancient Near East could not have understood, but which might be confirmed by modern science.

This illustrates the impossibility of rationally proving that a claim of supernatural revelation really is a miraculous revelation from God rather than the invention of human imagination.

This also illustrates how Haarsma's attempt to synthesize reason and revelation forces her into heresy in denying some of the fundamental theological tenets of the evangelical Christian Reformed Church (CRC) to which she belongs.  It is common for CRC schools like Bethel University and Calvin University to have a "Statement of Faith" that all the students and faculty must accept, and faculty members can be fired if they disagree with any article of that faith.  A fundamental tenet is that the Bible is "inerrant" or "without any error."  Haarsma denies that when she says that the Bible did not correct the "misconceptions about nature" in the Egyptian understanding of the sky as a "firmament" dividing the waters above from the waters below.

She also assumes that the Biblical account of all humanity originating in Adam and Eve is an error because the evolutionary science of human evolution from ancestral primate species does not recognize the origin of all humans in two individuals.  As I have written in some previous posts, this debate over the historical reality of Adam and Eve has led many evangelical Christians to identify theistic evolution as heresy, and some faculty members at Christian schools (including Calvin University and Bethel College) have been fired for denying the Bible's claim that human history began with Adam and Eve.  When Howard Van Till, a professor of physics at Calvin University, identified himself as a theistic evolutionist, he was charged with heresy; and eventually he was forced to retire from the University in 1999.  His position was filled by Loren Haarsma, Deborah's husband.

What we see here is that rather than achieving a reconciliation of reason and revelation, Haarsma has fallen into an incoherent position in which she vacillates between appealing to revelation to correct the claims of reason and appealing to reason to correct the claims of revelation.  So, for example, as we have seen, she will appeal to modern astronomy to correct what the Bible says about the heavenly "firmament."  But, then, when she writes about the "fine-tuning" of the universe, she corrects those scientists who deny that this is evidence for God, and she says that "from the perspective of biblical faith, science merely investigates the physical world that God created and sustains."

This debate over how to understand the First Cause of everything, including the laws of nature, points to the deepest problem for human understanding--the problem of ultimate explanation. All explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained. To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, we might answer that we must just accept this as a brute fact of our experience. That's just the way it is!

The response of the biblical creationist is that it is very unlikely that the Universe would exist uncaused, and it is more likely that God would exist as the uncaused cause of everything.

In our search for ultimate explanations, we must appeal either to nature or to God as the unexplained ground of all explanation. Thus does the natural desire to understand leads us to this most fundamental of choices--nature or God, reason or revelation. Philosophy cannot refute revelation, and theology cannot refute philosophy, because any attempted refutation would have to beg the question at issue. As Leo Strauss observed: "All alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbelief in revelation, and all alleged refutations of philosophy presuppose already faith in revelation. There seems to be no ground common to both, and therefore superior to both."

WHY HAS BIBLICAL REVELATION AND THE HOLY SPIRIT FAILED TO RESOLVE THE CREATION/EVOLUTION DEBATE?

In a previous post, I have written about Haarsma's contribution to the edited book Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design.  As indicated by the editor Jim Stump, the purpose of bringing together the four authors in this book--Haarsma, Hugh Ross, Ken Ham, and Stephen Meyer--was to see if evangelical Christians who have studied the creation/evolution debate could come to some agreement in this debate as guided by God's revelation through nature and through the Bible.  But they failed to reach any agreement.  Why?

In John 17, Jesus prays to God that all believers will be as one, that they will come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of revelation by showing their agreement about that revelation.  In Stump's "Introduction" to Four Views, he says that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what revelation teaches about origins (16).  But in his "Conclusion" to the book, he laments that this has not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).

There are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.  Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).  But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of revelation.  So, we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no revelation about origins, or the revelation is not clear enough to be understood.  All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.   

It would strengthen Haarsma's position if she could explain this failure of the Bible and the Holy Spirit to lead Christians to some agreement about the origins of the Universe and human beings.

The Genetic Evolution of Adam and Eve: Francis Collins and Theistic Evolution

 

On June 26, 2000, in Washington, D.C., in the East Room of the White House, "the language of God was revealed." 

That's the way Francis Collins describes his experience that day as he stood next to President Bill Clinton for the public announcement that the Human Genome Project had produced a first draft of the human genome. "Today," President Clinton said, "we are learning the language in which God created life.  We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."  This phrasing in Clinton's speech--describing the human genome as the "language of God"--was suggested by Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, who is an evangelical Christian and a theistic evolutionist who sees a fundamental compatibility between science and faith.

In 2006, Collins published a best-selling book--The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief--defending theistic evolution, or what he has called "BioLogos," as the best way to reconcile science and faith.  In 2007, he established the BioLogos Foundation to promote this position.  In 2009, he was appointed by Barack Obama as the Director of the National Institutes of Health.  This was controversial for some scientists at the time who worried that his management of federally funded scientific research might be distorted by his religious beliefs.

Collins has also created a controversy among some evangelical Christians who worry that his theistic evolution denies the truth of the Bible, particularly the teaching in Genesis about the creation of Adam and Eve.  This controversy was highlighted in a cover story in the June, 2011, issue of Christianity Today entitled "The Search for the Historical Adam." 

Collins and other evangelical Christians who have adopted his position have argued that the story of Adam and Eve cannot be historically true, because it contradicts the scientific evidence for the evolution of human beings from ancestral species.  Now that we have complete drafts of the genomes not only of human beings but also of chimpanzees and other animals closely related to human beings, Collins and his colleagues argue, we can identify the genetic similarity of these species, and we can reconstruct the genetic history of human evolution from other primate species.  We can also see evidence in the human genome that the human species descended from a common set of founders, approximately 10,000 in number, who lived about 100,000 to 150,00 years ago.

If this is true, then it cannot be true that all human beings are descended from two individuals--Adam and Eve--who were separately created by God in His image.  Here it seems that the Book of Nature contradicts the Book of Revelation.  To overcome this apparent contradiction, we must decide either that we have misread the Book of Nature or that we have misread the Book of Revelation.  The theistic evolutionists like Collins argue that the genetic evidence for human evolution is convincing, but that the Genesis creation story needs to be read as an allegorical story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson and not as a literal history that teaches anything about the science of human origins.  Thus, the debate here is both a scientific debate over the genetic evidence and a theological debate over the biblical evidence.  Both the scientific and the theological arguments for Collins' theistic evolution have recently been elaborated by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight in Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science (2017).

This debate has serious consequences for professors who teach at evangelical Christian colleges--like Wheaton College and Calvin College, for example--where the faculty must sign a statement of faith that affirms (at Wheaton College) that "God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race."  Professors who publicly endorse theistic evolution can be fired for violating their college's statement of faith.  And, indeed, a few professors have lost their jobs for this reason.

But what I find most remarkable is that in recent years many of these colleges have allowed their professors to embrace theistic evolution, and this seems to show a general movement in the American evangelical community towards accepting the sort of theistic evolution advanced by Collins and others connected to the BioLogos organization. 

There seem to be two reasons for this.  First, the recent advances in genetic science have produced overwhelming evidence in favor of the evolutionary theory of human origins.  So, for example, the genetic evidence for human evolution from primate ancestors is so compelling that even a young-earth creationist like Todd Wood must admit that this is a "problem" for his reading of the Genesis creation story as literal history, and even the anti-evolutionist intelligent design proponent Michael Behe admits that the genetic evidence for the evolution of humans from primate ancestors is convincing.

The second reason why American evangelicals are becoming receptive to theistic evolution is that in recent years they have been moving away from their fundamentalist literal reading of the Bible and towards a reading of the Bible as shaped by cultural traditions of poetic story-telling that were never intended to be a scientific history.  One indication of this is the publication last year of the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible by Zondervan, one of the leading publishers of Bibles for evangelical Christians.  This Bible has been edited by John Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, and Craig Keener, Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Seminary, Wilmore, KY.  As the title of this Bible indicates, Walton and Keener provide notes on the ancient cultural traditions that shaped the lives of those who first wrote and read the books of the Bible. So, for example, the Genesis story of creation is compared with other creation stories in the ancient Near East, which suggests that creation story-telling was more about symbolic meaning than about physical existence.

But if we believe the Bible to be truly a revelation of God's eternal truth, then the Bible cannot be entirely a work of poetic fiction, because we must believe that at least some of what it says is a literally true history of God as the Creator of the universe and of ourselves, who cares for us, who gives us a moral law, and who redeems us when we fail to live up to that moral law.  And that history must include supernatural miracles that are beyond the comprehension of natural science.

So we must wonder whether theistic evolution can really reconcile the supernatural faith in the Bible and the natural science of evolution.  Collins claims this can be done if theistic evolution is based on six premises (The Language of God, 200):

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.

2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.

4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.

5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.

6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature.  This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

In formulating these premises, Collins indicates that he continues the tradition of theistic evolution that stretches from Asa Gray to Theodosius Dobzhansky to Pope John Paul II.  But the primary influence on Collins' thinking is C. S. Lewis.  Collins' conversion to Christianity from atheism began when he read Lewis' Mere Christianity.  And Collins attributes most of his arguments in defense of Christianity to Lewis's writings.

Notice that while "no supernatural intervention was required" in the unfolding history of evolution, according to premise 4, supernatural intervention does seem to be required in premises 1, 2, and 6.

For premise 1, the initial creation of everything out of nothing was a miraculous act by the Creator.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).  For Collins, that is not just figurative language.  That is a factual statement of God's creative activity at the beginning.

For premise 2, God's initial creation of the laws of nature provided the "fine tuning" of the universe--the precise setting of certain mathematical constants in nature--so that the conditions necessary for the eventual evolution of intelligent life on Earth could be satisfied.

Here the appeal to the miraculous creative power of God is the only way, Collins argues, to answer questions that science cannot answer--questions about why the universe came into being, about what came before the Big Bang, and why the universe seems to be so finely designed for us to be here (6, 81).  These are not scientific questions because they are questions about what is outside of Nature--outside of space and time.

After all, even Darwin, as an agnostic, had to confess that "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us" (Autobiography, 94).

But then I don't understand the need for supernatural intervention that is implied in premise 6.  If the spiritual nature of human beings is unique to them in ways that "defy evolutionary explanation," that seems to imply that while natural evolution could explain the physical body of human beings, divine intervention was required to create the spiritual soul.  This is what John Paul II said in 1996.  It is also what C. S. Lewis suggested in a passage in The Problem of Pain quoted by Collins.  Lewis identified the story of Adam and Eve as a "Hebrew folk tale" that conveyed a moral lesson rather than a scientific history.  Lewis offered this interpretation:

"For long centuries, God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself.  He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all of the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated.  The creature may have existed in this state for ages before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity.  But it was only an animal because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends.  Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say 'I' and 'me,' which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past. . . . We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell.  Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods."

Notice how much Lewis concedes to the Darwinian account of human evolution.  The human species evolved from ancestral species over long periods of time.  Then, at some point, "God caused to descend upon this organism" a new kind of consciousness that is unique to human beings and that constitutes the "image of God."  This looks like the same idea that William Tearle suggested in a letter to Darwin (in April 1880).

This seems to require a supernatural intervention for God to create the uniquely human soul, and this seems to be what Pope John Paul II suggested in 1996: natural evolution created the human body, but the creation of the human soul required direct divine intervention.  But why couldn't this have been a natural process of evolution through which "a brain sufficiently complex" for uniquely human consciousness evolved by natural selection?  Why couldn't the human soul arise from the emergent evolution of the primate brain passing over a critical threshold of size and complexity?

That the human mind arose from the emergent evolution of the primate brain is perhaps suggested by Michelangelo's famous Creation of Adam fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Frank Meshberger has pointed out that the image surrounding God and the angels has the shape of a brain, with God's right arm extending through the prefrontal cortex.  Since Michelangelo was known to have performed dissections of the human body, he could have learned enough about neuroanatomy to convey the message that God's gift of human ensoulment was actually the gift of a human brain that could have arisen by natural processes.

Collins would seem to agree with this in so far as he says that "once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required."  He writes:

"But how could God take such chances? If evolution is random, how could He really be in charge, and how could He be certain of an outcome that included intelligent beings at all?"

"The solution is actually readily at hand, once one ceases to apply human limitations to God.  If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of the stars, planets, and galaxies, all of the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the evolution of humans. . . . In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.  Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process" (205).

Asa Gray thought he saw a similar conception of theistic evolution in Darwin's Origin of Species. For example, he saw this in Darwin's explanation of how the eye could have evolved by natural selection, and then Darwin asked: "Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds [under variation proceeding long enough, generation multiplying the better variations times enough, and natural selection securing the improvements]; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?"

Thus, we can see the eye as intelligently designed by the Creator allowing the eye to emerge from a natural process of evolution, without any need for miraculous intervention into nature beyond the original miracle of God's creation of the laws of nature.

But even if theistic evolutionists like Gray and Collins do not need to believe in the historicity of the Bible's six days of creation, including the creation of Adam and Eve as the first two human individuals, they must believe in the historicity of Jesus Christ's miraculous birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection as God incarnated as a human being.

The apostle Paul seems to teach, however, that the historical reality of Jesus depends on the historical reality of Adam, because the whole story of salvation depends on understanding the obedience of Jesus as the Second Adam overcoming the fallen condition of humanity from the disobedience of Adam (Romans 5:12-17, 1 Corinthians 15:49).  If so, then this seems to demand belief in Adam and Eve as the first human couple.

And yet the first chapters of Genesis do suggest that Adam and Eve were part of a larger human population.  Whom did Cain marry?  Whom did God protect Cain from after he killed Abel?  We might say that Adam and Eve were the leaders of an original population, and then we could recognize both a prehistoric couple and a prehistoric population.

Was the Coronavirus Created by the (Evil) Intelligent Designer?

Is the coronavirus intelligently designed?  If so, does that show the evil of its intelligent designer?  Or is it the unintended product of a natural world created by the beneficent intelligent designer, in which viruses generally have a good role to play?

Some people believe that the coronavirus was bioengineered in a U.S. military bioweapon laboratory. It was introduced into Wuhan to cripple China's economy, to advance "the New World Order globalist cabal to implement the Super-Vaccination Agenda," and to achieve the depopulation of the Earth.  Some scientists in India have reported that COVID-19 has HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions that are not found in any other coronavirus.  If this did not come from random mutations, the conspiracy theorists claim, then it must be "by purposeful and malevolent design."

Another conspiracy theory promoted by Senator Tom Cotton and Fox News is that the coronavirus is a biological weapon designed in a Chinese military lab just outside of Wuhan that somehow found its way into the Wuhan food market.

The viral social media spread of these conspiracy theories about the coronavirus has become a mimetic epidemic.

If the coronavirus was created not by human intelligent designers but by a divine intelligent designer, then we would have to wonder whether such an intelligent designer is evil in designing microbes that kill human beings.  Or can we see the overall goodness of an intelligently designed natural world, which nevertheless allows for the unintended evil of some viruses that evolve in ways that make them deadly threats to human life?

Michael Behe is a microbiologist who has been one of the leading proponents of Intelligent Design Theory, who is known for his argument that some biological mechanisms (like the bacterial flagellum) show the "irreducible complexity" that is the signature of an intelligent designer rather than Darwinian evolution.  I have written about his arguments here and here.

In his book The Edge of Evolution, Behe claims that many of the biological causes of human disease and death--such as the HIV virus and the malarial parasite--show the signs of intelligent design.  This leads him to doubt the goodness of the intelligent designer.  He concludes that "an intelligent designer deliberately made malaria," and thus it seems that the intelligent designer deliberately decided to kill millions of human beings, including innocent children (237).  When we see how "horrific" life on earth really is, Behe suggests, we must wonder: "Maybe the designer isn't all that beneficent or omnipotent" (239).  After all, the intelligent designer is responsible for creating "nature red in tooth and claw" (43).  The intelligent designer might actually be an evil demon (238).  This is a disturbing possibility for someone like Behe, who is a devout Catholic.

Now, Behe has said (here) that the COVID-19 virus is clearly intelligently designed.  It must be well designed to succeed in invading human cells.

A protein on the surface of the virus must bind specifically to a receptor protein on the surface of the cell--like a key that fits into a lock and opens it.  Viral mutations can change the shape of the key at random, and sometimes this random variation stumbles upon a key that fits the lock.  Sometimes a viral key that binds to an animal protein (perhaps in a bat) mutates and becomes able to bind to a similar human protein.  The virus can then jump from the animal to a nearby human and become very virulent.  Apparently, this is what happened in the Wuhan food market.

Behe writes:

"So, do I think viruses were designed?  Yes, I most certainly do!  The viruses of which we are aware--including the coronaviruses, Ebola, and HIV--are exquisitely, purposively arranged, which is the clear signature of intelligent design.  Well, then does that mean the designer is evil and wants people to suffer?  No, not necessarily.  I'm a biochemist, not a philosopher.  Nonetheless, I see no reason why a designer even of such things as viruses should be classified as bad on that basis alone."

". . . if we were on a ship in a powerful storm, we might be excused for thinking storms are bad.  But in calmer moments we understand that on balance the ocean is very good and that, given an ocean and the laws of nature, storms will arise from time to time.  What's more, we just might get caught in one.  In the same way, most viruses do not affect humans and may well have a positive, necessary role to play in nature of which we are currently unaware.  (I would bet on it.)  From time to time a storm arises in the virosphere and affects humans.  But that's no reason to think either that viruses weren't designed or that the designer of viruses isn't good."

In saying the viruses may have a good role to play in nature, Behe cites the research of Marilyn Roossinck (2011, 2015), who argues that viruses should not be seen as just pathogens, because in fact they are often beneficial to their hosts in ways that sustain life as we know it.  Viruses are often critical symbiotic partners in the health of their hosts.  For example, the gastrointestinal tracts of mammals--including humans--are full of viruses (as well as bacteria), and they probably have important functions in their mutualistic interactions with their hosts.

Behe's reasoning, therefore, seems to be that the intelligent designer could have designed the general structure of viruses and the mechanisms of mutation so that viruses can serve some vital functions in nature, and so viruses are generally good, which was the intention of the designer.  But the natural process of random mutation can create viruses like COVID-19 that are deadly to human beings, which is a bad outcome that was not intended at the beginning by the intelligent designer.

Does this allow the religious creationist to see the coronavirus as an evil product of nature in a world that was created by an all-good intelligent designer?

Notice that Behe concedes that the COVID-19 virus can be explained fully as a product of Darwinian evolution that does not require the intervention of the divine intelligent designer in nature.  The designer of the COVID-19 virus is evolution by natural selection working on random genetic mutations not God!

In The Edge of Evolution, Behe makes it clear that while he believes that intelligent design is required to explain the emergence of the higher taxonomic levels of life--kingdoms, phyla, classes--Darwinian evolution explains the lower levels--order, families, genera, and species.  So the evolution of the human species from common descent from primate ancestral species is fully Darwinian.  Similarly, the evolution of viruses is by Darwinian evolution.

Although Behe seems to reject "theistic evolution" in two passages (210, 229), he generally seems to accept it, because he assumes that once the Intelligent Designer created kingdoms, phyla, and classes and set in place the general laws of nature at the beginning of the universe, He did not intervene into nature after that.

Consider, for example, the following passages.  "The possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain.  What's more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166).  "The purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws.  The purposeful design of life is also fully compatible with the idea of universal common descent, one important facet of Darwin's theory" (232).

This allows Behe to say that the Intelligent Designer bears no moral responsibility for the evil of the COVID-19 pandemic, because this virus arose not by the intervention of the Intelligent Designer but by natural Darwinian evolution.

Houses of worship have been closed to large religious meetings because of the pandemic.  When they reopen, and religious believers survey the death and destruction inflicted by the pandemic, will it be possible for the preachers to use this reasoning to say that God cannot be blamed, because He was unable or unwilling to intervene in nature to prevent the evolution of the COVID-19 virus?

Will the preachers also say that the Intelligent Designer allowed this to happen to teach us that preserving our mortal life in this world is less important than securing our immortal life in the eternal world to come--Heaven or Hell?

One of the leading medical scientists in the American government directing the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a devout Christian--Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health--who is a theistic evolutionist.  I wrote about Collins (here) when he was first appointed by President Obama.  As influenced by the theistic evolutionism of C. S. Lewis, Collins sees no conflict between evolutionary science and Christian faith.  He thinks science can be a form of worship insofar as it means studying the wondrous work of God's mind in nature, which includes God's working through the natural evolutionary process.  And he thinks scientists should respect theistic faith as a way of answering ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of human life in the universe that are beyond science.

Peter Wehner has an interview with Collins at The Atlantic website.  There is one point in the interview where Collins intimates how his faith helps him to face up to the sufferings of life like the COVID-19 pandemic:

"I think I've also arrived at a place where my faith has become a really strong support for dealing with life's struggles.  It took me awhile, I think--that sense that God is sufficient and that I don't have to be strong in every circumstance.  One of my great puzzles when I first became a Christian is that verse [Second Corinthians 12:8-10], 'My grace is sufficient for you, because My strength is made perfect in your weakness.'  That was so completely upside down for me.  Weakness?  And now I embrace that with the fullness of everything around me when I'm realizing that my strength is inadequate, whether its coronavirus or some family crisis, God's strength is always sufficient.  This is such a great comfort, but it took me a long time to get to the point of really owning that one."

He also says that as a young man, his atheism was challenged when he was a third-year medical student, and he began treating patients who were dying, whose faith sustained them: "Many of these people were deeply committed to faith.  I was puzzled and unsettled to see how they approached something that I personally was pretty terrified about: the end of their lives.  They had peace and equanimity, and even a sort of sense of joyfulness that there was something beyond.  I didn't know what to do with it."

Collins founded the organization BioLogos to promote the idea that science and Christianity are compatible.  Recently, the folks at BioLogos have been producing podcasts and blog posts on the coronavirus pandemic exploring how the evolutionary science of viruses can help Christians see how the evil of the coronavirus pandemic can be reconciled with their belief in God as the good and loving Creator of nature.

Jim Stump, Vice President at BioLogos, has written an essay on "Coronavirus and the Problem of Evil."  If God is good, benevolent, and omnipotent, Christians might ask, why doesn't He protect us from evils like this pandemic?  Stump's answer is the one suggested, but not fully elaborated, by Behe:  God does not intentionally design natural evils like viral pandemics, which actually arise as unavoidable side effects of the naturally good world that God has created.

Traditionally, as Stump indicates, some Christians have solved the problem of natural evil by saying that it's a consequence of the Fall.  Adam and Eve were created by God to live in a naturally good world, but when they yielded to the temptation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they sinned, and God's curse on them for their sin included a curse on nature, so that human beings would henceforth suffer and die from natural threats to human life, including deadly viruses.

I agree with Stump that this fails for two reasons.  First, the punishment doesn't fit the crime: extending the curse on Adam and Eve to include a curse on all of nature for the rest of human history on earth seems excessive.  The second problem is that evolutionary science leads us to believe that viruses came into existence millions of years before the first human beings.  (I have written about reconciling Adam and Eve with evolutionary science here and here.)

Stump proposes a better way to solve the problem of natural evil.  The theistic evolutionist can argue that God has chosen to use the natural processes of evolution to create a good world that sustains human life, but these generally good conditions for life have unavoidable side effects that are bad.  Viral pandemics illustrate this.  Human life as we know it would be impossible without viruses.  Most viruses on Earth are infecting bacteria and thus slowing down their reproduction, so that rapidly reproducing bacteria do not overwhelm us.  But for viruses to do that, they must mutate rapidly, and that rapid mutation can sometimes create viruses--like COVID-19--that are dangerous to human beings.  Evolution creates trade-offs in which we have to take the bad with the good.

We should also see that the same evolutionary process that creates dangerous viruses also endows human beings with the intelligence and motivation for scientific understanding of viruses and viral epidemics that can teach us how to fight those viral threats to human life, which is what we are trying to do now.

I have written about intelligent design theory, scientific creationism, and theistic evolution here, here, here, here, and here.

I have written about Heaven and Hell here and here.


REFERENCES

Roossinck, Marilyn. 2011. "The Good Viruses: Viral Mutualistic Symbioses." Nature Reviews Microbiology 9 (February): 99-108.

__________.  2015. "Move Over, Bacteria! Viruses Make Their Mark as Mutualistic Microbial Symbionts." Journal of Virology 89 (13): 6532-6535.

Does the Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 by Natural Selection Depend on Intelligent Design?

A Colorized Electron Microscopic Image of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus (in Red) Attacking a Human Cell (in Green)

Was the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic intelligently designed--by either a human or a divine genetic engineer?  Or did it evolve by natural selection working on chance variation without any intelligent design?  Or should it rather be understood as a virus that evolved by natural selection but parasitically dependent upon the divine intelligent design of its animal hosts--bats and humans?  

And how does this influence our moral judgment?  If this pathogenic virus was created by an intelligent designer, can we rightly blame its designer--either human or divine--for the suffering of its human victims?  If it was created not by design but only by natural evolution, blaming a dumb virus for harming us makes no sense, but can we still judge it to be a bad virus that is very good at infecting us to achieve its parasitic reproduction of its progeny though our cells?  

Or should we blame ourselves for this bad virus because the Bible teaches us that it is a consequence of the Fall of Adam and Eve, whose sin in disobeying their Creator provoked his Curse on them and their world so that all of humanity would have to suffer and die until their redemption by Christ and resurrection in the afterlife to eternal life in Heaven?  If this is so, can we still rightly use any natural means available to us to understand and fight against this virus, while also praying to God for consolation in our suffering and perhaps even relief from the pandemic?  In doing this, is our scientific understanding of the pandemic contradictory to or compatible with our religious understanding of ourselves as sinful creatures longing for redemption by our Creator?  Should this pandemic remind us of our mortality and of our desire for immortality that can only be fulfilled through religious faith in resurrection to eternal life?  Or should this reminder of our mortality enhance our appreciation for our mortal earthly lives, as the only lives we will ever live, in which "death is the mother of beauty"?

Oh, I know what you're thinking--too many questions that I cannot possibly answer in any fully satisfactory way.  Of course, you're right.  But knucklehead that I am, I'm plunging ahead anyway.

THE EVOLUTION OF A VIRUS

The virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic has been identified by virologists as SARS-CoV-2--a strain or variety of the species severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus, belonging to the genus Betacoronavirus and the family Coronaviridae (Gorbalenya et al. 2020).  The term coronavirus was originally coined because there are spike proteins protruding out of the surface of the virus so that as pictured through an electron microscope, the virus seems to have a "corona" like the Sun.

SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans.  A previously identified strain of this same species is SARS-CoV, which is the virus that caused the SARS pandemic in 2003.  A closely related virus is MERS-CoV, the strain of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-related coronavirus species that caused the MERS epidemic in 2012.  These three coronaviruses that cause severe disease all came from bats.  Of the four coronaviruses that cause common colds, two (OC43 and HKU1) come from rodents, and the other two (229E and NL63) come from bats.

One of the most popular conspiracy theories about the SARS-CoV-2 virus is that it originated not through natural evolution but through the human intelligent design of genetic engineers in a lab near Wuhan, China, who wanted it to be released in the United States so that it would cause a pandemic that would destroy Donald Trump's presidency and lead to his defeat by Joe Biden.  Other variations of this theory that the virus was genetically engineered come up with different sinister motivations for the conspirators--such as pharmaceutical companies that want to profit from selling vaccines and Bill Gates who wants to impose a global mandatory vaccination program on all of humanity.

Arguing against this assumption that this virus is the product of purposeful design, some virologists have compared the SARS-CoV-2 genome with the genomes of other closely related viruses, and they have concluded that the most plausible inference is that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through evolution by natural selection (Andersen et al. 2020).  Coronaviruses have single strands of RNA that carry their genetic information, and they can evolve quickly because not only do they mutate, they also recombine--when two distant coronavirus relatives are in the same cell, they can swap chunks of their RNA; and sometimes this recombination can create new versions of the RNA strand that can infect new cell types and jump to new species.

Recombination happens often in bats that carry many viruses known to infect humans.  The SARS-CoV-2 virus shares 96% of its RNA genetic material with a virus found in a bat in a cave in Yunnan, China, which suggests--although it does not prove--that this virus or some immediately ancestral virus came from bats.  The SARS-CoV-2 virus differs in one critical respect from this similar virus found in the rat.  The spike proteins of coronaviruses have a receptor-binding domain (RBD) that connects to the membrane of the host cell and allows the virus to enter the cell.  This is the key that unlocks the cell so that the virus can invade the cell and then hijack its metabolic machinery for reproducing new viruses that then break out of the cell for transmission to other host cells.  The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a particularly efficient binding domain adapted for entering human cells.  This binding domain differs in important ways from the binding domain of the Yunnan bat virus, which seems to be unable to infect humans.

A scaly anteater called the pangolin carries a coronavirus that has a receptor-binding domain almost identical to the RBD of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  But the rest of this coronavirus in the pangolin is only 90% genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2.  So there is debate among virologists over whether the pangolin could have been the intermediary animal between bats and humans for the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

So the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have evolved by natural selection in an animal host (a bat or a pangolin) before it jumped into a human.  Or an ancestor of this virus might have jumped into humans, and then it might have evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through adaptation to its human host cells.

It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was designed in a lab by genetic engineering because its genome does not show any of the standard genetic tools used by genetic engineering scientists (Andersen et al. 2020).

Although it cannot be proven one way or the other, one can infer from this that the most plausible explanation for the SARS-CoV-2 virus is that it emerged not by human genetic engineering but by evolution through natural selection.

On his popular blog, P. Z. Myers--a self-described "godless liberal" who fervently defends Darwinian evolution against creationists and intelligent design proponents--has concluded:  "Sorry, conspiracy theorists.  The best explanation is evolution and natural selection, not Evil Intelligent Design."

Michael Egnor, an advocate of intelligent design theory affiliated with the Discovery Institute, responded to Myers' blog post by agreeing with him that evolution by natural selection can explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2.  But he also insisted that this shows the failure of Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the origin of living species.  He wrote:  "There is another lesson about design and evolution to be learned from scientific research on this virus.  Natural selection, if understood as undirected variation and differential reproductive success, is a destructive process.  Natural selection destroys biological functional complexity--it produces diseases, cancer, and pandemics.  It weakens and kills.  Natural selection does to living organisms what rust does to a machine.  Natural selection corrodes and destroys life, and plays no role in creating it."

Myers responded by claiming that Egnor was wrong about this: "Not for the virus, it wasn't a destructive process.  What was undergoing natural selection here was the virus, not us, and it has acquired attributes that make it wildly successful--it is now colonizing vast fields of billions of human beings, producing uncountable numbers of progeny, infecting more people at an accelerating rate.  The virus is stronger and thriving thanks to those features, and doing very well thank you very much."  It is also possible, he observed, that natural selection could be working through the viral pandemic attack on human beings to make the human species more resistant to SARS-CoV-19, which would be a constructive process in improving the functional complexity of the human immune system.

Egnor responded by claiming that Myers fails to see how the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 by natural selection of chance variation presupposes the intelligent design of those animal species (bats and humans) that serve as hosts for this parasitic virus, which cannot be explained by undirected evolution.  It is not even clear that viruses are living beings, because unlike living species, viruses cannot reproduce themselves on their own.  They reproduce only by parasitically using the metabolic machinery of the living cells that they invade.  And if viruses are not alive, then the evolution of viruses through random mutation and differential reproduction does not show the evolution of life.  "The coronavirus's evolution--the pandemic--depends on the living specified complexity of humans and bats.  Intelligent design in nature is the prerequisite for all natural selection--nature without teleology would be chaos, and no evolution at all."

Egnor claimed that his point here was recognized by Aristotle.  "Aristotle saw this in his definition of chance in nature--chance is the accidental conjunction of purposeful events.  Without purpose there can e no chance.  His example is instructive: he considered a farmer who ploughs his field and by chance discovers a treasure buried by someone else.  The treasure is discovered by chance, but everything else--the farmer's ownership of the field, his decision to plough it, the accumulation and burial of the treasure by the other man--is purposeful, and in fact the only reason the accident of discovery happened is because it is embedded in a world of purpose.  Chance can't happen--the word has no meaning--in an entirely accident world.  Chance presupposes design."

Notice what Egnor does here: he jumps from claiming "intelligent design in nature" to Aristotle's account of human intelligent design.  Here he employs the sophistical technique that runs through the intelligent design rhetoric of the Discovery Institute--the fallacy of equivocation in conflating human intelligent design, which we know by ordinary experience, and divine intelligent design, which we do not know by ordinary experience.  I have written about this here and here.

Notice also that in saying that viruses show how "natural selection corrodes and destroys life and plays no role in creating it," Egnor ignores that fact that most viruses support life in mutualistic relationships with plants and animals.  So, for example, we know that viruses are part of the human microbiome in the human gut, and that some parts of the human genome originated from viruses.

Egnor also ignores the fact that even if viruses are not living, other infectious pathogens--such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and helminths (worms)--clearly are living things; and they evolve by natural selection just as viruses do.

Contrary to Egnor's argument, our explanation of the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and other parasitic pathogens by natural selection does not depend upon any assumption of divine intelligent design.


THE DARWINIAN ETHICS OF A VIRUS

Any scientific account of the COVID-19 pandemic must explain why the SARS-CoV-2 virus is so good at being a bad virus.

In the scientific writing, it is common to see it said that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is better than the SARS-CoV virus, because SARS-CoV-2 is much more effective than SARS-CoV in successfully infecting host cells (Cyranoski 2020).  SARS-CoV-2 is good at forcing entry into human cells because this virus has a receptor-binding domain that has evolved for a particularly snug fit with the membrane of human cells in the upper respiratory tract and the lungs.

But this good functional complexity of SARS-CoV-2 makes it a bad virus for us.  What's good for this parasitic virus is bad for its human hosts.

This manifests the general character of Darwinian ethics.  There is no cosmic good for all living beings, because what is good is relative to each species, and what is good for one species can be bad for other species.

It is possible, however, for different species to enter relationships of symbiotic accommodation in which one species cooperates with another for mutual benefit.  And so, for example, the viruses and bacteria in the human gut benefit themselves even as they benefit their human host.  In fact, the number of these viruses and bacteria in the human body exceed the number of human cells.  Walt Whitman was right: "I am large, I contain multitudes" (Yong 2016).

To see why SARS-CoV-2 is so good in causing a bad pandemic, one needs to follow the virus through the five steps in his invasion of human cells (Cyranoski 2020).

   An Electron Microscopic Image of  SARS-CoV-2 Viruses Showing the "Corona" of Spike Proteins

First, one of the virus's spike proteins has a special receptor binding domain that binds to a receptor enzyme on the surface of human cells, which is called angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE2).  This enzyme helps to regulate blood pressure, which is good for us, but it's bad for us when this enzyme is used by the virus as the first step in its invasion of our cells.

Second, furin or another enzyme on the surface of the human cell breaks the spike protein at one of its cleavage sites.

Third, this releases small chains of amino acids that fuse the viral membrane with the membrane of the human cell.

Fourth, the fusion of the membranes allows the virus's RNA to enter the human cell, where it hijacks cellular machinery to produce more viral RNA and proteins that are assembled into new viral particles.

Fifth, the new viral particles break out of the human cell, and these new particles can then either attack other cells or leave the body and infect other people.

While the four coronaviruses that cause common colds are most successful in attacking the upper respiratory tract, and the MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV viruses are most successful in attacking cells in the lungs, the SARS-CoV-2 viruses are good at doing both, which makes them more effectively infectious.  This might explain the differences in symptoms.  If the virus starts in our nose or throat, and does not go into the lungs, this might produce a cough and fever, but not much more.  If the virus gets into our lungs, the attack on our respiratory system might become more severe, and even kill some of us.

So, for these and other reasons, SARS-CoV-2 is good at being a bad virus.


THE BIBLICAL UNDERSTANDING OF A VIRUS

Some of the scientists who are studying SARS-CoV-2 and looking for a way to fight it are Christians, who are also trying to understand how the Bible might explain the spiritual meaning of this virus and the pandemic that it has caused.  Perhaps the most prominent of these Christian scientists is Francis Collins.  As the Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Collins is supervising most of the research studying the COVID-19 pandemic and looking for a vaccine.  He is famous as the former leader of the Human Genome Project.  He is also famous for arguing that natural science and religious faith are not in conflict, because science and faith can actually reinforce one another.  A critical part of his argument is that religious believers who reject Darwinian evolution as atheistic are mistaken, because Christians can accept the scientific truth of evolution while seeing natural evolution as God's way of carrying out His creative plan.  To promote this kind of thinking, he founded BioLogos as an organization defending the idea of "evolutionary creation."  Last week, Collins was honored as the 2020 Templeton Prize Laureate for promoting progress in religious thought through science.  (The Templeton Prize website has a lot of material on this.)

I have written a series of posts on Collins as a theistic evolutionist here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

At BioLogos, there is a podcast with Collins on "Where Is God in a Pandemic?"  He says that he has been troubled by the old question as to why God permits evil and suffering--such as a pandemic.  He says he finds consolation in two Biblical verses.  Psalm 46:1-2 promises "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore will not we fear."  Joshua 1:9 commands: "Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God is with thee."

Collins does not hold God responsible for the pandemic.  He does not suggest that God is using the pandemic to punish us.  Collins probably agrees with Jim Stump, Vice President at Biologos, on this point.  As I have indicated in a previous post, Stump argues that God does not intentionally design natural evils like viral pandemics, which actually arise as unavoidable side effects of the naturally good world that God has created.  Human life as we know it would be impossible without viruses.  Most viruses on Earth are infecting bacteria and thus slowing down their reproduction, so that rapidly reproducing bacteria do not overwhelm us.  But for viruses to do that, they must mutate rapidly, and that rapid mutation can sometimes create viruses--like SARS-CoV-2--that are dangerous to human beings.  Evolution creates trade-offs in which we have to take the bad with the good.

Collins and Stump reject the traditional way in which some Christians have solved the problem of natural evil by saying that it's a consequence of the Fall.  Adam and Eve were created by God to live in a naturally good world, free from death and suffering, but when they yielded to the temptation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they sinned, and God's curse on them for their sin included a curse on nature, so that human beings would henceforth suffer and die from natural threats to life, including deadly viruses.  In this way, the COVID-19 pandemic is God's punishment for our Original Sin inherited from Adam and Eve.

In this podcast, Gary Bates of Creation Ministries International asserts the literal truth of the Fall in Genesis 2 as the explanation of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Most viruses are beneficial for human beings, but some become bad, and this arises as a consequence of God's curse on Adam and Eve.

Although a scientific creationist like Bates (or Ken Ham) would disagree with theistic evolutionists like Collins and Stump on this point, they all agree that as Christians they can take consolation in their faith that they will be redeemed for eternal life after death, and therefore they need not be thrown into despair by the pandemic's reminder of human mortality.

They also agree that in responding to the pandemic, Christians should follow the guidance of the natural scientists--the virologists and epidemiologists--studying the pandemic.

They also agree that since Christians believe that all human beings are "created in the image of God," this gives ultimate value to every human life, and therefore the governmental orders for lockdowns for minimizing COVID-19 deaths must be obeyed, regardless of the catastrophic economic costs.  To engage in a cost-benefit moral analysis to see if the economic costs of the shutdown outweigh the health benefits would violate Christian morality.

But is that really true?  Shouldn't Christians be morally concerned about the devastating human costs of lockdowns--including the human lives that will be lost or ruined as a consequence of the global Great Depression caused by the lockdowns?


REFERENCES

Andersen, Kristian, et al. 2020. "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." Nature Medicine 26:450-52.

Cyranoski, David. 2020. "Profile of a Killer Virus: The Complex Biology Powering the Coronavirus Pandemic." Nature 581:22-26.

Gorbalenya, Alexander, et al. 2020. "The Species Severe acute respiratory syndrom-related coronavirus: Classifying 2019-nCoV and Naming It SARS-CoV-2."  Nature Microbiology 5:536-544.

Yong, Ed. 2016. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

The Failure of Biblical Revelation in the Creation/Evolution Debate

Last week, I spent two days touring the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky.  These are two Christian creationist theme parks designed and managed by Answers in Genesis (AiG), which promotes the young-earth creationism of Ken Ham, who argues that Genesis 1-11 clearly teaches that the universe was created in 4004 BC over six twenty-four-hour days, and that there was a Global Flood in 2348 BC that is responsible for most of the geological record that we see today.

This denies the modern evolutionary teaching that the universe is billions of years old.  This also denies three other Christian views of creation.  The old-earth creationists interpret Genesis as allowing for the universe to be billions of years old, so that God's creative miracles occurred over a long period of time.  The evolutionary creationists interpret Genesis as allowing for God having originally created the laws of nature billions of years ago, so that God's creative plan could then unfold from the beginning through the natural process of evolution as understood by evolutionary science.  Finally, the Christian proponents of intelligent-design theory argue that a purely natural science can prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer without any appeal to the Biblical story of creation, although identifying this Intelligent Designer as the God of the Bible is a matter of personal faith rather than scientific demonstration.

That the Bible provides no clear teaching about the history of creation on which Christians can agree suggests to me the failure of Biblical Revelation to resolve this disagreement among Christians in the creation/evolution debate.  So, when I visited the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, I studied the exhibits to see if they could change my mind by revealing the Bible's clear teaching of young-earth creationism.  I had already studied the four AiG books that present most of the exhibits:  Journey Through the Creation Museum (2018), Creation Museum Signs (2021), Journey Through the Ark Encounter (2017), and Ark Signs That Teach a Flood of Answers (2017).

Ham's rhetorical arguments conveyed through these exhibits--and also through his writings--did not persuade me that he has found the Bible's clear teaching of creation history.  This confirmed my original thought that the disagreement about creation and evolution among Christians shows the failure of Biblical Revelation to resolve this issue.

I know of two serious efforts of Christian creationists to find a Biblical settlement of their disagreements.  I will begin by showing how they failed.  Then, I will show how Ham also has failed to do this in these two creationist theme parks.

If I am right about this, then one explanation for it would be that the Bible is not a Divine Revelation of God's truth at all.  But another explanation would be that the purpose of Biblical Revelation is to reveal the truths necessary for salvation, about which most Christians can agree, and that deciding whether Genesis 1-11 is literal history or figurative storytelling is unnecessary for salvation, and therefore Christians can disagree about that while agreeing about their salvation.

There is another problem with the Revelation of what is required for salvation, however.  The Hebrew Bible is accepted as God's Revelation by at least five major religions:  Judaism, Islam, Catholic Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Protestant Christianity.  Obviously, they don't agree about what this Revelation teaches about salvation, which again suggests the failure of Revelation.  

FOUR EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS SEARCHING FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY

Six years ago, I wrote a post on a book edited by J. B. Stump--Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Zondervan, 2017).  Four positions in the creation/evolution debate were represented by four leading proponents: Young Earth Creationism (Ken Ham), Old Earth Creationism (Hugh Ross), Evolutionary Creation (Deborah Haarsma), and Intelligent Design (Stephen Meyer).  This was the first time that these four people had engaged one another directly.  Each of the four wrote a chapter, followed by responses from the other three, and then a rejoinder by the chapter's author.

In John 17, in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest, Jesus prayed to God that all believers would be as one, that they would come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of Revelation by showing their agreement about that Revelation.  In Stump's Introduction to Four Views, he said that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what Revelation teaches about origins (16).  But in his Conclusion to the book, he lamented that this had not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).

There are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no Revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a Revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the Revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.  Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).  But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of Revelation.  

So, we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no Revelation about origins, or the Revelation is not clear enough to be understood.  All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.   

Notice also that these four people are all evangelical Protestants, which is a minority of Christians.  Around the world, the majority of Christians are Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.  And the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches deny the Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of the Bible--that the Bible is so clear and easily understood by anyone who reads it that each Christian should be his or her own priest, with no need for an ecclesiastical priesthood to teach them what the Bible really means.  The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believe that the Bible is a divine Revelation, but they also believe that the Bible is so obscure that they need the divine Revelation of the Bible's correct interpretation through the Holy Spirit working through the Church's tradition of priestly interpretation.

For example, as I have indicated in some past posts, the Catholic Church originally condemned Galileo's heliocentrism as contrary to the Bible's geocentrism; but later the Church apologized for its mistake and endorsed Galileo's biblical hermeneutics--rejecting the literal interpretation of the Bible when this contradicts what natural science has discovered about the natural world.  By this same principle, Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis have endorsed theistic evolution--that God exercises His creative design through the natural process of evolution--but with the understanding that the creation of the human immortal soul requires an "ontological leap"--God's miraculous intervention into nature to create the spiritual soul in His image.  

In response to this, I have argued that no miracle is required here if we see the emergence of the human soul in the human brain that is unique in having 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  This gives human brains the capacity for symbolic thinking about imagined realities such as the supernatural creation of human beings in God's image.

CHRISTIAN FRIENDS OR MORTAL ENEMIES?  TODD WOOD AND DARREL FALK

The debate over whether evolutionary science is compatible with Biblical creation is one of many "culture war" conflicts that divide Christians and sometimes even drive their churches and schools into angry disputes between "us" and "them."  The Colossian Forum is an evangelical Christian organization designed to teach Christians how to think about and resolve these disagreements in a way that heals their divisions and brings them together into a loving Christian community.  The Colossian Forum directs its attention mostly to four kinds of disruptive disputes among Christians: "Faith and Politics," "Sexuality," "Origins," and "Women and Men."  The Biblical verse that captures the thought behind the organization is Colossians 1:17--"all things hold together in Christ."  According to the Colossian Forum, if Christians honestly discuss their disagreements, look to the Bible for instruction, and pray for Christ's help, Christ will bring them together in Christian unity through the guidance of the Holy Spirit in revealing the Bible's teachings.

To show how this could happen in the creation/evolution debate over origins, the Colossian Forum invited Todd Wood (an evolutionary biochemist who is a young-earth creationist) and Darrel Falk (a geneticist who is an evolutionary creationist who believes God created life on earth through an evolutionary process as understood by evolutionary science) to come together for a series of meetings over a few years.  Their discussions were then published in a book--The Fool and the Heretic: How Two Scientists Moved Beyond Labels to a Christian Dialogue About Creation and Evolution (2019).

I have written some posts about Wood, who is best known as a "baraminologist" who studies the "baramins" ("created kinds") that were created by God in the six days of creation, from which all species have evolved by natural selection.  Falk is a founder of BioLogos, an organization that promotes Christian evolutionism.  I have written some posts on BioLogos and its evolutionary creationism (or theistic evolution).

Wood and Falk actually agree about a lot.  They are both devout Christians.  And they agree that there is plenty of evidence supporting the theory of evolution, including the evidence for the evolution of humans from animals over millions of years.  

As opposed to Falk, however, Wood denies that all of this evidence makes evolution true, because Wood's Christian faith includes a belief in the creation story in Genesis 1-11 as literal history that began 6,000 years ago, which means that the evolutionary story of how all life evolved "from molecules to man" over billions of years must be false, despite the fact that there is so much evidence supporting it.  But since the Bible gives us few details about how the natural world has developed, Wood admits, we must use science to understand those details.  And that is what Wood tries to do in developing a creation science that should work better than evolutionary science.  Wood concedes that young earth creationists are mistaken in denying the evidence for evolution, and that much of what creation scientists have done so far is not real science.  But Wood has devoted his life to trying to develop a creation science based on testable hypotheses that will be true science (The Fool and the Heretic [FH], 29, 62-63, 105-106, 112-13, 151-56).

Wood's disagreement with Falk is not so much about evolutionary science as it is about the Bible.  They agree that the science of evolution is well-supported by the evidence.  But they disagree about what this means for our interpretation of the Bible's creation story in Genesis.  For Falk, this means that we must read Genesis 1-11 as a poetic story that conveys a theological teaching rather than as a literal history of the natural world, because this will accommodate the truth of evolutionary science as compatible with the Bible.  But for Wood, his faith in the Bible as literal truth means that he must read Genesis as literal history, and therefore if evolutionary science contradicts this literal history, there must be something wrong with the science, and it should be possible to develop a creation science that confirms the natural history of the Bible.

Another way to explain this is that while Falk accepts Galileo's hermeneutics for interpreting the Bible, Wood rejects it (see Wood, The Quest: Exploring Creation's Hardest Problems [2018], 45-52).  As I have indicated previously, Galileo suggested that apparent conflicts between Biblical religion and natural science could be resolved by understanding that if the clear findings of natural science contradict the literal meaning of the Bible, then we must assume that the literal interpretation of the Bible is mistaken, because what the Bible says about the natural world has often been accommodated to the understanding of the audience.  So, for example, if the Bible speaks of the Sun moving around the Earth, that's because in ordinary human experience, we easily speak of the Sun rising and setting, as if it is moving around the Earth, but that is not literally true.  If the Bible had attempted to explain Copernican heliocentric astronomy, that would have been incomprehensible to the Bible's original audience.  After all, the Bible is not a science textbook but a divinely inspired theological teaching about salvation.  In Galileo's clever aphorism, "the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes."

Wood agrees that when the Bible speaks of the Sun moving around the Earth, this should not be interpreted as literally true, because we don't want to see the Bible as denying the scientific truth of Copernican heliocentric astronomy.  But Wood denies the Galilean principle that we should always read the Bible so that it accommodates whatever natural science seems to teach.  Particularly, when it comes to the creation story in Genesis, we must believe it to be literal history; and if this Biblical history contradicts the teaching of natural science, then the science must be mistaken, and we must look for a creation science that conforms to the Biblical teaching.

Galileo and Wood are attempting to resolve the debate between Reason and Revelation by synthesizing the two.  As with any such attempt at synthesis, they both fail because they cannot give equal authority to Reason and Revelation.  Galileo gives higher authority to Reason.  Wood gives higher authority to Revelation.

Falk accepts the Galilean principle in saying that we must not interpret Genesis literally if that literal meaning conflicts with modern evolutionary science.  We can see that the Genesis creation story is very similar to other creation myths in the ancient near east, and therefore the Genesis story was accommodated to the understanding of ancient people.  Like Galileo, Falk subordinates Revelation to Reason.  (I have written previously about Darwin's place in the Reason/Revelation debate.)

For Wood, this is a dangerous teaching that harms the church (FH, 30, 32, 35, 106, 174).  If Christians are taught that Genesis 1-11 is not literally true but only a poetic story similar to other creation myths, then won't they wonder whether other stories in the Bible--like the story of Jesus being resurrected from the dead--are only poetic stories?  If they can't believe the miracles in Genesis are true, then how can they believe the miracles in the New Testament are true?  Won't this tempt Christians to abandon their faith in the truth of the Bible?

And yet Falk thinks it is Wood who is harming the church.  To claim that Genesis is literal history--that everything was created in six days 6,000 years ago and that the Global Flood created the geological record of today--makes the Bible sound ridiculously contrary to all modern science.  And won't that drive people away from the church because of the perceived absurdity of the Bible?

Rob Barrett of the Colossian Forum has admitted that the attempt to resolve the dispute between Wood and Falk and bring them to Christian unity failed:

"We are stuck in a messy place.  I once asked our two scientists if they saw each other as friends or enemies.  I was confident, after all of our time together, that they would agree that they were friends.  Todd disappointed me when he answered, 'Not just enemies.  Mortal enemies.'  I looked pleadingly to gentle Darrel for the correction Todd needed.  He failed me too: 'Yes, Todd's right.'" (FH, 163-64)

Barrett reported:

"In one meeting, Todd expressed his frustration at the deadlock.  He had come to know that Darrel is a Christian, but then he said that this 'makes it a thousand times more awkward, because I wonder why the God who convicts me for my position isn't convicting him.  I don't know how to answer that question.  So it leaves me uneasy.'  Darrel answered, 'Like you, I puzzle a little bit: Why doesn't God sort things out for you and reveal truth to you in the way it seems he reveals it to me?'" (FH, 189-90)

Well, yes, that's the point, I would say:  The Holy Spirit has failed to convey the teaching of Biblical Revelation to Christians like Wood and Falk, even though they have made the most faithful effort to open themselves to that Revelation.

Or should we consider the possibility that while people like Wood and Falk have failed to accept the clear meaning of Biblical Revelation about origins in Genesis, Ken Ham has succeeded in uncovering the true meaning of Genesis?

Remarkably, even though Ham and Wood both identify themselves as young-earth creationists, Ham has criticized Wood for teaching "young-earth evolution," because Wood has conceded too much to evolutionary science by saying: "There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it."

Whether Ham presents the correct reading of the Biblical Revelation about origins at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter will be the question for my next post.