Natural Selection, Sparrows, and a Stochastic God

AUTHOR: Allen D. MacNeill

SOURCE: Original essay

COMMENTARY: That's up to you...

A priest and a nun are out playing golf; that is, he's playing, and she's carrying his clubs. The priest tees off, and slices his ball into the rough. "Damn." he says. The nun upbraids him, saying that the Lord God forbids such profanity. The priest trudges over to his ball, addresses it with a mashie-niblick, and hooks it across the fairway into the trees on the other side. "Damn!" he says again, and again the nun upbraids him. He searches for the ball among the trees, finally finding it in the underbrush. He smacks it once again, clearing the rough, but landing in a bunker just short of the green. "Damn!" he says once again, and now the nun dogs him to the sand trap, chewing him out for his repeated blasphemy. As he steps up to the ball, now nestled in a deep crater in the sand, the nun tells him that if he uses profanity one more time, the Lord God will surely smite him. Then she hands him his sand wedge.

He whacks the ball again, blasting it through a cloud of sand across the green and into the bunker on the other side. "Damn, damn, DAMN!" he shouts, and of course the nun lays into him, warning him of the imminence of Hellfire. Suddenly, there is an incandescent blast of purple lighting and an explosion of thunder...and the nun is instantly reduced to a pile of smoking cinders beside the priest. And from out of the rumble of thunder in the sky, an immense and overwhelming voice in the clouds (in a deep basso profundo) says "DAMN!"

Why is this joke funny (at least to some people)? One reason might be the incongruity of a priest and a nun playing golf. Another reason some find it funny is that the nun "gets what's coming to her." Furthermore, the priest gets away with his blasphemy, and at the expense of the nun. But funniest of all (in a way that may also send a slight shiver up the spine) is the idea that God's aim is as bad as the priest's.

Why does this last implication raise the hackles? Because it implies that God is a stochastic agent; He aims, but sometimes misses. A stochastic process (from the Greek stochos, meaning "a target") is any process that includes a random component; one aims at a target, but doesn't always hit it in the gold. In other words, a stochastic process is a probabilistic process, rather than an entirely determined one - there is a small, but irreducible probability that one will miss the target.

According to many who profess belief in the Western (i.e. Judeo-Christian-Muslim, or "JCM") concept of God, the idea that God operates stochastically is anathema. God is, according to this tradition, omnibenevolent ("all good"), omniscient ("all-knowing"), omnipotent ("all powerful"), and omnipresent ("present everywhere and everywhen"). To paraphrase Matthew 10:29, "not a sparrow falls, but that Thou art mindful of it." Even Albert Einstein, certainly not a believer in the mainstream JCM concept of God, believed that "God does not play dice."[1] An omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent deity (call Him the "omni God") is ultimately responsible for all events in the universe, at all times and in all places.

Humor, according to Aristotle (among others), can arise from the juxtaposition of two mutually exclusive ideas. This is one of the sources of the humor in the "golfing God" joke - the God who aims at the priest but blasts the nun is not omnipotent. Funny, but perhaps not so funny, if one is a Christian Fundamentalist, or anyone who holds a belief in the existence of an omni God. To a Fundamentalist, the belief that their omni God "never misses" is a basic article of faith; an axiom, if you will.

Which brings me to the main point of this essay: the majority of soi-disant "creation scientists" (CS) accept the observable fact that natural selection happens. Indeed, natural selection (of a very limited sort) is absolutely necessary for most theories of "creation science." Rather than driving the characteristics present in a population of organisms away from the population mean and toward some new equilibrium state (i.e. an adaptation, according to evolutionary theory), natural selection operates to maintain the "created kind" or "type" of each species by means of "stabilizing selection." That is, all deviations from the original "created kind" are winnowed away, leaving the supernaturally specified "kind."

The new breed of creation scientists, those who devise and promulgate theories of "intelligent design," are believers in the same underlying idea: that an "intelligent designer" (identity usually unspecified...at least, in public) guides the evolution of groups all living organisms via some (also unspecified) quasi-magical means. Natural selection is also integral to their ID theories, but again it is resolutely not the source of "specified complexity" - the exquisite adaptations of living organisms to the contingencies of their environments. In ID theory, as in the older (and perhaps more intellectually honest) theories of "creation science," the only genuine function of natural selection is to "fix" the various characteristics of organisms within an "adaptive landscape" whose topography is specified essentially by an intelligent designer (i.e. an omni God).

But there's the rub: to believe the foregoing is perforce to believe that God "misses:" that He specifies the characteristics of organisms within an intentional boundary, but allows individuals to deviate sufficiently from that boundary that they...well, not to put too fine a point on it, they die (or fail to reproduce, which is effectively the same thing). This is the essence of stabilizing selection: although there are deviations from the population mean, such deviants are eliminated, thereby maintaining the population mean in perpetuity. To paraphrase Darwin, out of "famine and death," the creationist/ID "kinds" are specified and maintained.[2]

That would be scanned: a deity kills the deviants, and for that, He does the survivors maintain in perpetuity? Surely not impossible for an omni deity, but just as surely a fundamental contradiction in terms. To operate in such a fashion, this deity must be a utilitarian, whose intention (yes, intentions are essential to the argument) is to specify the ideal "kind" by first creating (or at least "specifying") a range of no-so-ideal individuals, and then mercilessly (even mindlessly?) eliminating all but the few that conform to the intended ideal. True, a lot of sparrows thereby "fall," and in the CS/ID version of this explanation, the JCM God is indeed "mindful" of them, at least insofar as He creates them in order to destroy all but a few of them.

And not just sparrows; most if not all intelligent design theorists (such as Michael Behe, William Dembski, Phillip Johnson, et al) willingly embrace the idea that natural selection operates upon humans. They just don't believe that it can possibly specify all of the complex attributes of humans. So, by the logic heretofore developed, ID theorists willingly embrace a utilitarian, stochastic deity who intentionally designs humans with sufficient genetic and developmental plasticity that some (the exact proportion is irrelevant) deviate from the population mean, and then causes them (indirectly or directly, it matters not) to suffer and die, in order to bring about and maintain that paragon of animals - ourselves.

Fundamentalists, creation scientists, intelligent design theorists, and their fellow travelers are therefore stuck. If they accept the operation of natural selection at any level, they must perforce accept that God (or the unidentified "Intelligent Designer") is a fundamentally stochastic entity, who of necessity obliterates the occasional nun and creates a skyfull of falling sparrows, an entity who is manifestly not omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, nor omnipresent, but is a utilitarian whose ends justify His means. Or, they must deny the operation of natural selection at any level; in other words, they must stare reality in the face and deny it. Either those individuals who deviate from the specified population mean are created in order to die, or they die by accident...they fall, and while He may be mindful, He just doesn't give a damn.

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NOTES:

[1] Einstein, A. (1926) Letter to Max Born: "God does not play dice with the universe."
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Born

[2] Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, London, England. Ch. 14, pg. 490 URL: http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/texts/origin1859/origin14.html

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AUTHOR'S' BIOGRAPHICAL & CONTACT INFORMATION:

Allen D. MacNeill
adm6@cornell.edu

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