thoughts out !oud

a Christian’s news, views, opinions and occasional poetry …

Dinesh D’Souza and evolutionary theory - a short take on his evolutionary defence

Posted by Mathew | 18 June 08

What’s so great about Christianity, by Dinesh D’Souza, has so far been a great read. He provides a detailed account of historical Christianity and proceeds to demonstrate the positives that Christianity has since brought into the world - and which, he argues, would not have come if Christianity did not exist. He claims that Western society today has benefited greatly from a Christian heritage - and that it is this same heritage that society has slowly - and voraciously - been turning against.

Our Western cultures today now bite the hands that fed them - the irony is that the tools in which anti-theists in general, and anti-Christians in particular, now wield have been afforded to them by the spread of Christianity. The cherished freedom of thought, scientific methodology, our courts and laws and political systems are due largely to a predominantly Christian influence. Yet anti-theists today claim that rationality and reason is their domain alone and that science is a bludgeon used to discredit such ‘nonsensical’ notions as a belief in God. D’Souza convincingly demonstrates that this is not the case and that the anti-theists even owe the formation of these intellectual attributes to a Christian influence. (D’Souza also mentions the equality of women and the abolition of the slave-trade - two other chief hallmarks that were sparked by a Christian understanding of the nature of mankind and of his importance as a special and much loved creation of God.)

It is a very detailed read and well argued and researched. Little wonder that D’Souza is an admirable opponent of the current atheistic intellectual heavyweights of the likes of Hitchens, Dennet and Dawkins.

D’Souza then postulates the negativity that atheistic regimes such as communism have wreaked upon the world, contrasting this with clarifications of the ill-effects of the Spanish Inquisitions and the trials of ‘witches’ by the Christian church. When you read his account, you will be left with no doubt of how scandalously exaggerated the Inquisition and witch trials had been made when atheistic ideologies have murdered hundreds of thousands more people within the space of mere decades compared to the few thousand killed by the former over a period of four centuries.

One aspect of D’Souza’s book that I was not prepared for was his stance on evolution. He is quick to make a distinction between evolution and Darwinism, citing Darwinism as ‘the atheistic spin imposed on the theory of evolution’. [p.152] Hence, in D’Souza’s mind, Darwinism - the ideological framework - is the threat to Christian belief, not evolutionary theory and further that evolution is in no way contradictory to the Bible or to Christian faith.

Well, he would receive plenty of opposition on this front from many Christians - even from those Christians in fields of science. On the sections I’ve just read of his book, he’s left me with a number of questions in which to follow up and to test his thinking. D’Souza cites scientific evidence as his reason for believing in evolution (of both the macro and micro kinds), though does leave the door open somewhat inferring that if new evidence comes to light that he would reconsider his position.

So in summary, D’Souza still maintains the argument of belief in the Christian God of the Bible as the ultimate Creator of the universe and of all things in it. And it’s on this front that he tackles Darwinism by arguing that behind all matter in the universe that the most logical explanation is that there is a designer. Even allowing for macro evolution, at some point in time, there had to a defined, ‘hardware’ set in which all the various forms of life we now have have been produced from. He uses the trumpeted allegory of Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, rightly claiming that Dawkins himself had unwittingly provided a stronger case for the argument from design in his attempted refutation of Paley’s argument. ‘Evolution itself requires a finely tuned designer universe’, [p.151] writes D’Souza, who then cites physicist Stephen Barr who says of Dawkins’s argument:

Paley finds a ‘watch’ and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves? [p.152, emphasis mine]

The simple implication is that Dawkins’s argument against design has just moved the peg a step further back - his argument does not explain the origins of life and, in fact, it provides no explanation of anything at all. This is the limits of evolutionary theory and of Darwinism, D’Souza says.

Coming back to D’Souza’s stance, he believes that science has proven that life evolved from a single point of origin and that this point of origin was designed with all the applicable data sets and programming required in order to produce life as we have it today. Further, the universe is such that is so finely balanced that there is no possibility at all that life could have turned out any differently than it has. The universe and it’s laws of physics are what D’Souza defines as the ‘hardware’ (created by God - and had to be created by God) on which the software of evolutionary theory takes its course. Voila! Billions of years of just the right conditions and here we are today.

The grievances this theistic evolutionary view has on staunch creationists revolves, I think, around the account of creation as written in the Book of Genesis - specifically, the entry of sin into the world. Prior to the introduction of sin (and of man), God created and claimed that everything was good. There is no fault in God’s design or His creation. Yet, if man wasn’t ‘created’ until billions of years after the beginning of the universe, we presumably then have billions of years of death and of suffering while species develop into other species and ‘fine-tune themselves’ within the parameters of the universe’s hardware. And this is what God calls ‘good’? How can death be ‘good’ in God’s eyes? Moreover, if God just set the up the domino table, as it were, and gave the initial flick and then left everything else up to evolutionary processes, how is it that He is personal if He is not attributed to creating us personally? I’m not sure where D’Souza’s logic goes from here, theologically speaking. I have more questions than answers from him at this point.

Yet, I am only just over the half-way mark of this book with much ground yet to cover. I am looking forward to D’Souza’s dismantling of Darwinian morals and for the time being will put aside the reservations that I have regarding his apparently open stance as a theistic evolutionist.

Despite such reservations, I would heartily recommend this book.

[What's so great about Christianity, Dinesh D'Souza, Regnery Publishing (October 16, 2007)]

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • StumbleUpon
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

Related Thoughts out !oud posts

Tags: > > >

Filed Under Apologetics, Books, Reviews |

Comments