A222 - Exploring Philosophy : Evolution of Religion

After listening to Open University audio on the course website for week 9 titled ‘The Modern Argument from Design’, I think I can see undeniable evidence of the evolutionary process at work within the Christian explanation of ‘God's’ role in the creation of our world .

i. At first it was belief in the explanation of the creation of life as told in the bible's book of Genesis, and espoused by Aquinas. 

Belief in this explanation was encouraged through the torture and murder of unbelievers after being accused of the crime of Heresy. Obviously this sort of behaviour, by the church, could not go on for ever, but it did go on for over 1800 years (that's eighteen hundred or one thousand eight hundred years) with the last known heretic executed by sentence of the Roman Catholic Church being Cayetano Ripoll in 1826 (Wikipedia). With more and more people free to question the obvious inaccuracies and flaws in the biblical account, this belief had to evolve.

ii. The original belief  therefore evolved to ‘well your obvioulsy not supposed to take the bible literally, but God did made everything - honest' as put forward by Cleanthis.

This held ground for a while until people now getting used to the ability to question the church without fear of recrimination asked why some bits of the world were just a bit crap.

iii. Belief then underwent a form of natural selection when Paley decided that only the selected good bits of the world were made by God. But he didn't explain who made the bad bits though. 

Then with the growing mountain of evidence for Darwin's theories, and evolution now being taught in schools the next big step was the evolution of Creationism to Intellegent Design.

 After the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court barred the required teaching of creation science from public schools but allowed evolutionary theory on the grounds of scientific validity, some creationists felt that new strategies and language were necessary to return religious notions to science classrooms.The supplementary school textbook Of Pandas and People was altered to change references to creationism to use the term intelligent design. (Wikipedia) 

iv. So the 4th step in this evolutionary process is 'Intelligent Design' within the evolutionary process described as ‘irreducible complexity’ by Behe. 

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the first direct challenge brought in United States federal courts to an attempt to mandate the teaching of intelligent design on First Amendment grounds, Behe was called as a primary witness for the defence and asked to support the idea that intelligent design was legitimate science. Some of the most crucial exchanges in the trial occurred during Behe's cross-examination, where his testimony would prove devastating to the defence. Behe was forced to concede that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred and that his definition of 'theory' as applied to intelligent design was so loose that astrology would also qualify. Earlier during his direct testimony, Behe had argued that a computer simulation of evolution he performed with Snoke shows that evolution is not likely to produce certain complex biochemical systems. Under cross examination however, Behe was forced to agree that "the number of prokaryotes in 1 ton of soil are 7 orders of magnitude higher than the population [it would take] to produce the disulfide bond" and that "it's entirely possible that something that couldn't be produced in the lab in two years... could be produced over three and half billion years."

So Behe’s irreducible complexity of the flagella was shown to be just plain wrong, so this 'belief' then mutated. 

v. The new mutant belief was that 'the infinite complexity of physical set-up' such as the complexity of DNA and RNA proves God's existence, as suggested by Meyer.

However this 'belief' also suffers from the fact that with the earth being an estimated 4.5 BILLION years old, there has been plenty of time of things to get complicated. Some theists have said that the chances of a protein molecule forming are infinitesimally small, they liken it to trying to through a six with a dice a 1000 times in a row - pretty unlikely I'm sure you'll agree........

..........and it would be but for the fact that evolution is an iterative process and so all you have to do is throw a 6 (that's 1six) then you could throw 2,3,4,6 (that's 2 sixes) 1,4,3,2,2,6 (that's 3 sixes) 2,3 6 (that's 4 sixes) - do you see where this is going......

....... so in the 4.5 BILLION years since the earth formed, I think you could imagine throwing over one thousand sixes without any problems at all.

So to the latest version of the explanation of God's involvement in the design of the earth..... 

vi. 'Fine Tuning  - The Goldilocks Principle', everything in the universe had to be ‘just right’ for life to form, and then it sort of cracks on best it can. 

This description doesn't seem to leave much room for the Christian God of the bible to be recognisable as the grand designer. It seems that there is a constant rear-guard action by Christians to try and keep the explanation of God's design ahead of the scientific discoverys that are debunking religion.........

It also seems to have gone full circle to Aquinas' second way that 'something started it all and we, in the absence of  fact or knowledge, shall call this God'.

There is an interesting alternative theory from Naturalists that says that RELIGION is actually part of the Human evolutionary process that Man will transit through. Man created religion and as we evolve so does it, so like the tail and body hair that we all once had, religion will be shed when it is no longer necessary......... I think this time will be soon upon us :-)