26 Nov 2014

The improbability of theistic evolution - A palaeontologist’s perspective

As a follow on from the essay I posted last week, “The improbability of theistic evolution - A geologist's perspective”, I thought I would look at the concept of Theistic Evolution from an evolutionary perspective and evaluate how theistic concepts fit in with the current scientific understanding of evolution.

Just to be clear on a few definitions, the “Theistic Evolution” I am talking of is the view that regards religious teachings about a theistic deity as compatible with modern scientific understanding about biological evolution. Francis Collins describes theistic evolution as the position that "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God" and "Theistic Evolution, which accepts that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God”. This is the view in my understanding is supported by mainstream Christianity.

Theists are constantly on about this nebulous entity they call the soul. It is at the core of many theistic traditions, since it is the soul that is ultimately rewarded or that pays the ultimate price.

What is a soul exactly and how did it come to be in humans and at what precise moment in our “creation” did we receive (evolve?) a soul? Do humans exclusively have souls or do some other species also have souls? Are we born with souls or are they supernaturally inserted into our bodies? These are some questions, with reference to evolution; I will be investigating with this essay.

I must add that I am addressing a very wide topic with many divergent views among theists. I am attempting in the essay, to address the bulk view.

Let’s start off by getting a few concepts under the belt.

What is a soul? Well it appears the definition of a soul depends on who you ask, but for now let’s go with the one from Wikipedia. “The soul, in many mythological, religious, philosophical, and psychological traditions, is the incorporeal and, in many conceptions, immortal essence of a person, living thing, or object. According to some religions (including the Abrahamic religions in most of their forms), souls—or at least immortal souls capable of union with the divine - belong only to human beings. For example, the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas attributed "soul" (anima) to all organisms but taught that only human souls are immortal.”

Depending on your respective theistic faith, you could also have widely differing views on the fate of the human soul at death.

Do animals have souls? Or more to the point do animals have souls like human beings? Again this question depends on the theist you happen to ask. In short theistic consensus on this question appears to be a yes, with a few dissenters. But there is generally agreement on the fact, and this is key to our discussion later, that the human soul survives physical death, as opposed to animal souls that cease to exist on physical death. Alternatively if animal souls survive death, they are not subject to the same laws that govern human souls.

What is the origin of the soul? The major theories (obviously in the non-scientific sense) put forward by theists include:

· Soul Creationism - each individual soul is created directly by God, either at the moment of conception or some later time (identical twins arise several cell divisions after conception, but no creationist would deny that they have whole souls).

· Traducianism - the soul comes from the parents by natural generation.

· Pre-existence - the soul exists before the moment of conception. (Hence Catholic dislike of condoms).

The important thing to take away from origin of the soul concept for our discussion is that the human soul is either transmitted through our parents or provided (newly created or pre-existed) by the theistic deity at the moment of conception.

So from our brief discussion on concepts we can conclude the following:

· Both animals and humans have souls

· Only human souls are capable of union with the divine

· Human souls and animal souls have separate fates at the moment of physical bodily death

· The origin of souls could be ascribed to one of three possibilities; creationism, Traduciansm or pre-existence

What we have not dealt with so far is the evidence for souls and perhaps that is for another discussion. Suffice to say there is none. It’s taken on faith by theists, hence the wide discrepancies in opinion on various aspects of the soul.

Now that we have established some concepts about souls in humans and animals, we can view these concepts in relation to what we know about human evolution.

To explain human evolution in simple terms I am going to use an analogy or parallel thinking. Something we can all relate to because it happens in our daily lives. We were all once babies. Now we are adults. We did not go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning as adults it happened by a gradual process over a period of several years. If I were to ask you put your finger on the precise day, hour, minute and second you ceased being a baby and become an adult I would imagine you would invariably say that’s not possible or at the very least that’s extremely difficult to pin point. Yet here you have it in front of your eyes. You were born on day X and here you are on day Y and you are an adult. Two end members of the same person. Parents would have experienced this when seeing someone they have not seen for a long time and that someone comments on how the children have grown. The parents are of course oblivious to the changes.

Now let’s use the same analogy to explain the evolution of humans. We have two end members a distant ancestor, we can use a fish (or a mammal ancestor, or a single cell ancestor it does not matter for our analogy) and Homo Sapiens. As we walk through time each immediate ancestor and descendent looks precisely the same. Each fish and its immediate descendants looked just as fishy as one another. The difference now is that you have to cast your mind not over days in a human lifespan but over millions upon millions of years. As we walk through time so the immediate ancestors all look the same but when we cast our eyes back even a few million years (days in our baby-adult analogy) we would notice changes. To pinpoint the exact day, hour, minute and second the fish became a reptile, became a mammal-like reptile, became a mammal, became a Homo Sapien is virtually impossible. The changes are so gradual and occur over such a long time span it would be difficult to pin point the day Homo Sapiens ceased being some precursor hominid species and became human.

This understanding of evolution raises some difficult questions for Theistic Evolution. At what precise moment did Homo Sapiens cease being animals? Or more precisely when did our ancestors cease having an animal soul and start having a human soul? Did this change come about through evolution? Or was there direct intervention from the theistic deity? Clearly this question needs answering because it has profound implications as to whether that living being (animal/human) has an animal soul doomed to end its existence at death (or some other unknown fate) or whether that soul gets to live on for an eternity. Our current understanding of evolution also has dire implications for the concept of Original Sin, perhaps a whole other discussion for another day.

More concerning, if our precursors did have human souls why did a loving God sit and watch his creations eek an existence, while dying young from horrendous disease, rotten teeth and starvation in fear of everything around them for several hundred thousand years before intervening a few thousand years ago.

As a theist you have to believe that on some specific day in the human evolutionary path, the theistic deity unfolded his arms, said that’s enough of that, these animals are no longer animals, I now deem them to be humans (human-like Homo Sapiens), stopped dishing out animal spirits and instead dished out human spirits to newly conceived non-animal Homo Sapiens either from the human spirits piggy bank or some freshly created ones. Alternatively the theistic entity “designed” or directed evolution to pass on the human soul at precisely the right time in the evolutionary tract. Prior to this moment in time, all the millions of animal-like Homo Sapiens have souls destroyed at the moment of bodily death.

Recently science has been very actively discovering that tens of thousands of years ago modern humans crossed paths with the group of hominids known as the Neanderthals. Researchers now think humans also met another (and perhaps a third), lesser-known group called the Denisovans. DNA evidence has now confirmed that Denisovans appear to have been more closely related to Neanderthals than to humans and most surprisingly of all, the DNA evidence suggests that these three groups of hominid may have interbred.

This of course begs the question; did these all of these hominids have souls? They were clearly not what we would call human, but they almost certainly interbred with early humans and displayed human characteristics (such as painting and ceremonial burial traditions) often associated with having a “soul”. If they had souls were they animal souls or human souls and why is it they are also not the centre of creation? Why were they abruptly removed from creation by an all powerful, all knowing and all benevolent theistic deity? Perhaps the “original sin” they committed was too terrible to contemplate…….

Perhaps theists can answer some of these questions. Science and Theistic Evolution are incompatible. The theistic concepts of the soul, original sin and the anthropic principal are simply not supported by the scientific understanding of evolution.

Unfortunately for the theist extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and as we have seen Theistic Evolution is not a satisfactory answer, instead it opens can of evolutionary worms for the theist. Theistic Evolution is simply a lame attempt by theists to “keep” up with scientific explanations, while maintaining unsupported wishful thinking.