Could God have used evolution to 'create'?

Answer is: NO!

The question presumes that 'evolution', taken as the Neo darwinian evolution theory (NDE), actually occurred, or could occur, as distinct from it being a retrospective effort to justify Darwin's mid-Victorian gross morphology bluster.

It is less a theory and more a set of conjectures that keep manufacturing sets of tendentious illustrative drawings instead of talking about mechanisms that even could orchestrate cross-system coordinated gradual change that both 'improved' the organism, rather than just make it circumstantially more fecund, and did not have adverse effects on any of the involved systems, their interactions or general capabilities.

So, could God have used something that didn't happen and is designed to deny his creative action to create?

What would God be doing to bring the creation from a pea-soup of molecules? Would he be orchestrating the massive continuous culling that would leave the 'last man standing' to carry favorable variations to subsequent generations? Would he be making himself invisible in his creation by mimicking what are supposed to be, but evidently are not 'natural' processes, which deny his action anyway? Would he use a method of 'creation' involving continuous massive culling of creatures to produce a creation that was 'very good'?

Remember, the Genesis description of creation if full of life, beauty and love. There is no hint therein of the corruption that we see in a creation now full of death, struggle and decay. Such a God is not only self-contradictory on the face of it, but has merged himself into the creation. This not in keeping with his own holiness and distinctness from a propositionally rich creation, amenable to propositional explication (i.e. 'science'), but in denial of it. The denial is even worse than contradictory: but directly contrary to Paul in Romans 1:20 and Hebrews 11:3, and in keeping, rather, with his observation in Romans 8:20-23.

Chance based on chance

I came across an old debate of WL Craig's on science and Christian faith.

In the debate Rosenberg completely misunderstands Christian faith, confusing it with animism at best, rather than giving the basis for a rational world view deriving from the direct rational source of creation in propositional information: God thinks of it, speaks it and it happens. What happens is directly related to the words spoken opening up the creation to propositional access.

As an intended creation, propositionally exposed to us, it is accessible to propositional enquiry: we can keep asking and exploring to find out what it is with no limits.

Schaeffer in The God Who Is There in the section on Musique Concrete reports an example of such:

"...The voice is first built up out of chance sounds, reflecting modern man's view that man who verbalizes arose by chance in a chance universe with only a future of chance ahead of him."

Chance here means irrationally, without reason, and so inexplorable and unfathomable.

This is the world, finally ungrounded, the world that Rosenberg unwittingly seeks to build science upon. But his world, the world of mere material with random and information-less interactions, is only the basis for non-science, for the animism that he ironically thinks represents Christianity.

Incidentally, this lies at the heart of the fatal contradiction of theistic evolution: That the God who speaks, didn't in fact speak, but somehow worked into a non-speaking cosmos that denies on its own nature any system of information and 'just happens', undermining any basis for a rational epistemology.

God ain't no use to science!

In a debate against William Lane Craig, the Christian philosopher and theologian, Dr. Alex Rosenberg stated:

God makes no contribution to the predictive power of any (part of any) of any of the the sciences.
...
Therefore no basis on which to invoke God for explanatory or any other purposes in science. Science has no more need for and indeed considerable reason to deny the existence of God than it has to accept the Easter Bunny, etc.

The absence of a role for God in the explanatory and predictive content of science is quite apart from the problem of evil is the principle reason that 95% of the members of the Academy of Sciences are atheists and why science can provide no only no good cases for theism but an excellent argument against it.

Craig's response was to reduce the importance of predictability, which was fine, then to talk about the fine-tuning (so-called) argument (about which I'm sceptical as it seems to be a case of affirming the consequent), the existence of objective moral values and duties and the indirect explanatory benefit of positing things as scientific: Craig put God into this category.

However, God is not 'scientific' while nevertheless giving explanatory context for most of human experience.

The most important point was to go to the heart of Rosenberg's attack, and point out that God is a free agent, and predictability is not applicable to such in the mechanistic terms of science.

Theism doesn't need or rely upon any putative scientific status as it provides a grounding ontology for all of our experience of the real world.

I think Rosenberg is one of the many atheists or anti-theists who think implicitly of the creator God as contained in the cosmos, rather than external to it.

The creator created, we know, by his word, and with rational causality, showing us a world that is propositionally available to us as its stewards and has a reliable relationship with propositional description and understanding (see also Proverbs 3:19, 20). Science is the work of making such descriptions and gaining understanding of the creation, within the nature of the cosmos as a place rationally created for our habitation as rational agents: that is, those in the image of the rational and propositionally communicating God.

This gives us the basis of and means for the pursuit of scientific understanding, but compared to knowing God, is the much like a souped-up version of bicycle repair.

Rosenberg also seems to think that Christians particularly rely on God as some sort of solver of difficult problems, or the 'mystery' behind the physical world. In this is could not be further from the truth. Confidence in the rational creator drives us and encourages us to exploration of a world that must be explicable in propositional terms; it must be because he has given it to us as its stewards, to understand and know it in terms of the completed creation set out in Genesis 1.

This is not a recipe for animism or indolence, which Rosenberg seems to mistake Christian faith for, but for continuous inquiry under the certainty of that inquiry being not in vain.

God used 'evolution'

This often pops up in Christian circles when someone wants to avoid being considered an anti-scientific creationist mystic who isn't up on the latest in anti-biblical theology.

Of course the first thing to ask the claimant is "How?"

How does God 'use' evolution? What happens?

Best also to ask what the person understands by 'evolution'

They probably think that it is a real, observed and calibrated natural process of the formation of unique 'body-plans' and systematic functionality of organisms.

Firstly, if this is so, there simply isn't enough time, even in a 14 billion-year-old universe, let alone a merely 4 billion-year-old earth for the known rate of mutations and the population genetics considerations to produce the divergent body plans and underlying differentiated biotic systems of life.

Secondly, the idea of 'theistic evolution' obscures God in nature. It holds that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. It is at best deist, and more properly pantheistic  While the scriptures tell us that Christ upholds all creation it also tells us that creation declares God's glory, not obscures it in wasteful destruction of his creatures. Furthermore, the state of creation we see now, is not good: Paul tells us that it is in slavery to corruption. Doesn't sound like God at work to me!

See: Problem with Theistic Evolution, Meyer on Theistic-evolution and Theistic-evolution contradiction for starters.

On Neo-Darwinian Evolution (NDE), evolution is a haphazard, yet not properly hypothesized process where random chemical actions produce increasingly complex (consistent with Darwin's Victorian era progressivist ethos) closely coupled interacting biological systems that improve an organism's rate of reproduction (on the Malthusian presumption of food limitation) to ultimately eliminate organisms that are less complexly functional. Yet such organisms do survive and propagate in abundance!

It has no real, observed, valid process for this, just a bunch of words and fanciful diagrams in books. Or deceit, such as Peppered Moths, Embryonic re-capitulation and so on.

That aside, it proceeds by the much vaunted intellectual deceit of 'natural selection'. This is better termed natural non-deselection. Nature culls out the organisms that are comparatively more miss-fitted to a particular ecology than others. Nature has no cognition, so it does not 'select' even by analogy. All it does is kill off some organisms less vigorously than others.

One factor underpinning the contemporary lurch to Theistic-evolution in some Christian circles is a pagan view of the Bible!

What I mean is that the Bible is conceptualized as a 'spiritual' or even worse a 'moral wisdom' book within a world that is of no interest to God, and disconnected to salvation. But the scriptures tell us differently.

Genesis 1 sets out a concrete creation that is an event in history, in the flow of history from creation to incarnation to kingdom and that encapsulates the history of the relationship between creator and creature-in-his-image.

The scriptures frequently connect the material world and God's 'world' and with spiritual implications: Psalms, Proverbs 3:19,20, slabs of Isaiah and other prophets, etc., let alone the NT connections, including notably Colossians 1:16, ff. The New Creation is promised in very material terms, and even Job knew this: 19:25ff.

Time and Chance

 Springing from a video by James Tour: 

I get the impression that people think 'chance' is a process, or a mechanism. 

No.

As JT points out in other words, chance is the probability assessment of some real-life process or mechanism.

If you even want to consider chance in life-sciences, you have to apply it to a something that has known possibility of occurring. It doesn't apply to non-mechanisms. So, first explain the chemical mechanism for the origin of the DNA-RNA system and its immaterial code, then the mechanism for the formation of chemical systems, then the coalescing of chemical systems into the functioning meta-system of the cell. You have to have the mechanisms, otherwise there's nothing to evaluate probabilistically, so 'chance' is inapplicable. All you have is fantasy!

Evolution of Systems? Oh really?

 A comment on a talk by Stephen Meyer

Incremental Change. Neo-Darwinian Evolution ("NDE") relies upon incremental change to create increased functionality. Leaving aside the teleological implications of this quaint Victorian idea of the ever-improving organisms, we have a systems problem. Fortunately biology is now moving to a 'systems' perspective. Organisms, indeed, the cell itself, is a complex orchestration of interacting systems, all with efficiently interacting interfaces and distinct boundaries and in a non-deterministic relationship. This means that one system is not necessarily benefited by the development of a function in another system which needs its input, e.g. muscles don't 'care' if there is a visual system, but are relied upon as a component of the visual system's global operation).

So a 'new' feature is not merely a 'light sensitive skin patch' as per dear Dawkin's supposed evolution of the eye but to afford a putative survival advantage (and why is this important?), the photons incoming need to be processed, the outputs of the process that turn light into neurological input, this output needs to be integrated into a further processing system that can create outputs that benefit the organism: avoid threats, find food, etc. These benefits also need a corresponding interlocking cascade of capabilities to actually achieve the (potential) benefit. Skeletal changes similarly: the autonomic nervous system and its muscle control pathways, connections and formations need to be adapted to the new skeletal geometry to make it functionally beneficial.

As in any system, all this needs to happen without degrading current systems, or imposing an energy burden on the creature. Point mutations won't do it; we need grand scale coupled inter-system changes that at each step confer benefits on the organism. To do this, the DNA-RNA control system needs new control instructions to create the required coordinated changes across multiple inter-acting systems and sub-systems. From whence do they come?

NDE remains at the mercy of Darwin's original naive (Victorian) gross morphology fiction and so provides no credible means of satisfying its own requirements and meeting its own claims. It is dead in the water from the get go and about as unscientific as one could get.

And don't start me on 'natural selection'. This is a tendentious fiction. All nature does is systematically cull those organisms with fewer comparative beneficial 'functions' for a particular environment. Darwin has given us a killing machine, not a flourishing biota.