A Darwin quote for Darwin Day

For Darwin Day, I thought I'd (re)post one of my favorite Darwin quotes. Here it is:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. -- From a letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860

The Ichneumonidae is a family of wasps. A very big family. It is, in fact, one of the largest families in the largest class of animals, the insects. There are over 60,000 species of ichneumonid wasps, each one, according to creationists, specially designed by God. My question for them is the same as Charles Darwin's: Why? Why would a beneficent and omnipotent God do such a thing?

To understand the question, it is necessary to know a bit about the ichneumonids. First of all, most are parasitoids, which means that their larvae develop inside the body of a living host, which they slowly eat alive. Eventually, when the wasp larvae pupate, they erupt out of the body of the host that they have gradually consumed, tormented, and destroyed as larvae.

It is easy to see how such a thing could exist from an evolutionary standpoint. The body of a caterpillar is good food for larvae. It's not surprising that some organisms have evolved to take advantage of it. But what kind of a God would purposefully design it to be that way?

I have heard five different answers:

1. God originally made everything good; there was no suffering or death until the fall of Adam. Then all hell broke loose. Animals immediately began to kill and eat each other, and predators, parasites, parasitoids, and pathogens roamed the earth. (Creation Ministries)

2. God made things nasty right from the start just to show us how important we are to him. He knew that Adam would sin, so he made nature cruel to show us the serious nature of sin. (Dembski's Defective Design Inference)

3. God made everything good and then Satan messed everything up. (Gregory Boyd's Cosmic Warfare Theodicy)

4. God likes it just fine the way it is. He created it that way for is own pleasure. He likes to watch things suffer. (David Snoke)

5. God couldn't help it and had nothing to do with it. He would have liked to create a kind and peaceful world, but he had to let things play out according to the laws of nature, over which he had no control. So the ichneumonid wasps just evolved, along with everything else, over millions of years while God sadly watched from a distance, unable to affect the outcome. (Ken Miller)

For each of these answers, though, I have a question.

1. How did things change so quickly? Were the 60,000 ichneumonid species specially created by God the moment Adam sinned? Or did God magically turn 60,000 butterfly species into parasitic wasps? Or did they all evolve (super)naturally in a few thousand years?

2. How do the ichneumonids teach us about sin? Until about the time of Darwin no one (except God) even knew they existed? Yet God created them just for us, just to teach us a lesson?

3. So Satan created the Ichneumonids? Along with scorpions, spiders, snakes, and sharks? He must have been a busy guy!

4. How could a kind and loving God create things just to watch them suffer?

5. A God who can't create or control anything isn't a God at all.

Here are some cool videos about the Ichneumonids.

The first one is from David Attenborough's marvelous "Life in the Undergrowth."

And here's one showing a Ichneumonid wasp (Megarhyssa sp.) drilling through the bark of an oak tree to deposit an egg in the tunnel of the siricid wood wasp, whose larva the Maegarhyssa lava will eat alive from the inside in the traditional Ichneumonid fashion (just like God intended it to be).

Expelled Exposed!

Visit the National Center for Science Education's new website (ExpelledExposed.com) for updates on Ben Stein's latest fiasco.

Evolution Creationist Style: It all happened in 1656 years

In the beginning, God created everything good. No predators, parasites, pathogens, pain, disease, or death for any of God's creatures. Every living thing (except for maybe the plants) lived forever in a vegan paradise that was all "very good."

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Genesis 1:30-31

But Adam screwed all that up by sinning (or whatever) and God cursed the ground causing thorns and thistles to grow (Genesis 3:17-18), creating the cruel and brutal place that we see today. It went from "very good" to "no country for old men" in just 1656 years.

How do we know this? The Bible tells us so. Here's how.

	Years after the creation of Adam
And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son ... and called his name Seth: Genesis 5:3	130
And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos. Genesis 5:6	235
And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan. Genesis 5:9	325
And Cainan lived seventy years and begat Mahalaleel. Genesis 5:12	395
And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared.Genesis 5:15	460
And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch. Genesis 5:18	622
And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: Genesis 5:21	687
And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech. Genesis 5:25	874
And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son: Genesis 5:28	1056
And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth. Genesis 7:6	1656

Okay, so the flood happened 1656 years after the creation of Adam. But how do we know that creation had completed its transformation (evolution?) from kind and gentle to cruel and brutal by the time of the flood?

Well, again the Bible tells us so.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Genesis 6:11-13

The whole earth "was filled with violence" (God made it that way), so God had to kill everything on earth to make it less violent. Fair is fair.

So nature was "filled with violence" by the time of the flood. The only question is how did it get that way? Did God re-create it immediately after Adam's fall in a second "there will be blood" creation? Of did it evolve naturally without God's involvement in the 1656 years between fall and flood?

Can some Bible believer clarify this for me?

To torture little children just for the fun of it: The Hitchens-Richards ID debate

I wish I could have seen yesterday's Intelligent Design debate between Christopher Hitchens and Jay Richards at Stanford University. (If anyone can find a transcript or a webcast, please let me know.) But from the report in the Stanford Daily, it was another bad day for ID.

The first bit of evidence that Richards presented in favor of ID was the fact that we all feel "simple moral truths." As an example, he pointed to the fact that "we all know that it’s wrong to torture little children just for the fun of it."

And I agree, we pretty much all know that. Which is why we also know that life wasn't designed by a kind and loving God. Because the designer, if there is one, purposefully designed creatures that "torture little children" and he did so "just for the fun of it." Or so says Revelation 4:11, anyway.

Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

Here's what Sir David Attenborough said when asked about ID.

When people talk about God and creation, they always think of beautiful things, like roses and hummingbirds. But I also think of a little African boy sitting on a river bank in West Africa with a worm eating its way through his eyeball, which will make him blind in the next few years. Now if you are telling me that God created the rose and the hummingbird, presumably he also created this thing in his eye. And it didn't evolve the way that I believe that it did, but it was created by God. Some way or another, God said, "I will make a worm that can only live by boring through peoples' eyes." Now I don't find that compatible with the Christian idea of a God who cares for the well being of each of us.

Here is the interview with David Attenborough.

And here is a Wikipedia article on River Blindness.

David Snoke's "A Biblical Case for an Old Earth"

David Snoke is a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. His latest book is A Biblical Case for an Old Earth.

Facing the facts

First of all, I must say that I like the way Dr. Snoke is thinking, when he says:

We must face the facts: if the Bible is wrong, utterly wrong, about the history of our origins, then we should dump it. (p.120)

Of course the Bible is wrong, utterly wrong, about the history of our origins (and just about everything else). But Dr. Snoke is reluctant to dump it. His challenge, then, is to try to find a way, any way, to interpret the Bible so that it does not conflict with science.

In many people's eyes, I have probably lost before I begin, because no matter what I argue from the Bible, they will say, "But you have come up with this just because you want the Bible to agree with science." I freely confess to this charge. (p.9)

Saying as little as possible

Snoke's little book is remarkable for how little it says about the history of life or the age of the earth. You'd think that a book about an old earth would say how old it is. But if the author has an opinion on the subject, he doesn't say so in his book. The closest he comes is this:

In this chapter [Chapter 2: The Scientific Case] I have argued that the world looks as though animals and plants have been living and dying for millions of years. (p.43)

From which, I guess, he (sort of) thinks that life on earth is at least several million years old. It seems that Dr. Snoke, like Ann Coulter, is not particularly interested in the details.

Here are just a few questions that he doesn't address:

• How long has life existed on earth?
• How old is the earth?
• How old is the universe?
• Is the fossil record reliable and what does it say?
• How long have humans existed?
• Were all of the species created in the beginning, or did God intervene periodically by creating a bunch of new species while causing others to go extinct?

Old Earth Creationism

Throughout the book, Dr. Snoke makes it clear that although he accepts an old earth, he rejects evolution.

Many people seem to assume that if the earth is as old as science indicates, and animals have lived and died during that time, then evolution must have occurred. Not so! (p.44)

An old-earth view is not synonymous with evolution. (p.193)

...evolution, which I reject... (p.164)

Lord of the Fleas

Dr. Snoke spends two chapters on the important scientific question of whether animals suffered and died before Adam and Eve sinned. Evangelical Christians are divided on this issue. I discussed his views in a previous post (For thy pleasure they were created), so I’ll skip over them here, except to say that he believes that God purposefully designed animals to prey on one another from the very beginning.

God … is not just the way we would like him to be. We may hate the wrath of God, but we cannot say it is illogical to believe in it. What is illogical is to believe in a God who would never harm a flea when we see lots of harmed fleas around us. (p.96)

Utterly wrong non-negotiables

Dr. Snoke admits that he "wants the Bible to agree with science." But he says there are three biblical "nonnegotiables" which science cannot contradict.

1. "Adam was one, real, historical man."
   (Adam was specially created by God just like it says in Genesis. And all humans are descended from him.)

2. "Noah was one, real, historical man."
   (Snoke thinks the flood was local, making biogeography a bit less embarrassing. But he insists "that the flood killed every other person on earth except those on the ark, so that every person today is descended from one of Noah's sons.")

3. "Life in al its diversity was created by sovereign, miraculous acts of God."
   (Evolution did not occur.)

Dumping the Bible

"If the Bible is wrong, utterly wrong, about the history of our origins, then we should dump it.” His non-negotiables are utterly wrong about the history of our origins. I guess it’s time to dump the Bible.

Ann Coulter on ID

There's an interesting Ann Coulter interview at Beliefnet. Most of the others that I've seen have focused on her nasty name-calling habits, rather than her ideas, which are even worse. Here, for example, is what she says about creation, evolution, and intelligent design.

Beliefnet: You devote four of your eleven chapters to evolution, and say that Darwin's theory of evolution is "about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor." So what do you think really happened? Did God create the world in six days? Did he create each species separately? Did he set a chain of causation in motion? Did he "cause" evolution in the sense that all the species are related to each other but God guided their descent?

Coulter: These are unanswerable questions--except the latter. God did not "cause" evolution because evolution doesn't exist. Thus, for example, He also didn't "cause" unicorns. My faith and reason tell me that God created the world and I'm not particularly interested in the details. I'll find out when I meet my Maker.

Did God create the world in six days? Did he create each species separately? Did he set a chain of causation in motion?

She doesn't know or care. She's not interested in the details.

Are any creationists or IDers interested in the details? It reminds me of the dialog in the movie "Inherit the Wind."

Drummond: Now listen to this. This is Genesis 4:16: "And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife." Now where the hell did she come from?

Brady: Who?

Drummond: Mrs. Cain. Cain's wife. If, in the beginning, there were just Cain and Abel, and Adam and Eve, where did this extra woman come from? Did you ever stop to think about that?

Brady: No, sir. I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.

Drummond: Never bothered you?

Brady: Never bothered me.

Drummond: Never tried to find out?

Brady: No.

Drummond: You figure somebody else pulled another creation over in the next county somewhere?

Brady: The Bible satisfies me. It is enough.

Drummond: It frightens me to think of the state of learning in the world if everybody had your driving curiosity.

For thy pleasure they were created

The Intelligent Design movement has its own wedge issue: natural evil. Its existence is hard to deny, but what do you do with it? If cruelty is designed into creation, then how can the creator be good?

Most IDers solve this problem by shifting the blame from the designer to humans or demons -- anything but God. But of course that's cheating. We should clearly see the existence and nature of God from his creation. After all, Paul says we're going to hell if we don't.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. -- Romans 1:20

There are a few Christians, though, that take God at his word. He is, after all, the proud creator of evil.

I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. -- Isaiah 45:6-7

He made predator and prey, host and parasite, and did it all for his own amusement.

The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. -- Psalm 104:21

Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. -- Revelation 4:11

An ASA article by David Snoke puts it this way:

God does claim direct responsibility for the creation of natural evil.... God neither apologizes for making these things, nor weeps over them -- he glories in them.

God didn't create a world full of misery to punish Adam and Eve, and the devil didn't make him do it. He did it because he wanted to. He just likes to watch things suffer.

Dembski's Defective Design Inference

To make us realize the full extent of human sin, God does not merely allow personal evils (i.e. the disordering of our souls and the sins we commit as a result) to run their course subsequent to the Fall. In addition, God allows natural evils (e.g. death, predation, parasitism, disease, drought, floods, famines, earthquakes, and hurricanes) to run their course prior to the Fall. Thus, God himself wills the disordering of creation, making it defective on purpose. William Dembski, The End of Christianity, p.145

Notice that according to Dembski, God purposefully designed the evils of the natural world, "making it defective on purpose."

What a valuable concept! Defective Design (DD)! It will be interesting to see how Dembski and others who believe in DD will incorporate it into their "design inference."