Why the "How" is Important

How important is the "how" of origins to you? Since we live in a world in which Darwinian evolution is considered an established fact by the power structures, many believers have concluded that the "how" must be a non-issue and only the "why" is important. They therefore accept the doctrine of "theistic" evolution -- that God somehow worked through the materialistic means of natural selection to create the diversity of life we see around us.

My concern is that those who accept theistic evolution wind up accepting the two-story view of truth (the dualism or dichotomy) that Nancy Pearcey is warning us about in "Total Truth" (See the blog below). Pearcey traces the various flavors of segmented truth (upper and lower story dichotomies) throughout history up to the present time (Ch 3, Keeping Religion in it's Place beginning on page 106, the "Intellectually Fulfilled Atheists" where she describes the FACT/VALUE dichotomy and page 107, the "Secular Leap of Faith")

I ran across an interview with Francis Collins yesterday, which I found confirming of Pearcey's analysis. Here is an excerpt of that interview:

You have said that DNA is "God’s language." Do you mean that in a literal, or more metaphorical, sense?

A little of both. I believe that the universe was created by God with the specific intention of giving rise to intelligent life. Given that we observe DNA to be the information molecule of all living things, one can regard therefore it as the "Logos" that God has used to speak life into being. Don’t misunderstand me, it is clear that the process of evolution by natural selection over hundreds of millions of years is the "how" that explains the marvelous diversity of life. But that doesn’t provide the answer to "why." I think God provides that answer.

As a scientist, you test your assumptions and beliefs. But as a Christian, you have said that you took "a leap of faith." Why the two different paths?

Maybe they aren’t that different. Both science and faith are ways of seeking the truth. Science seeks truth about how the natural world works, and faith seeks answers to more profound questions such as, Why is there something instead of nothing?, or What is the meaning of life?, and Is there a God? All require a certain element of faith—you can’t be a scientist unless you have faith in the fact that there is order in nature, and that nature will behave in reproducible and predictable ways.

When I was an atheist and I decided to explore the rational underpinnings of belief in God, I expected to find none—and was astounded to discover that there are strong arguments from nature and philosophy that point to God’s existence. But those do not constitute a proof—apparently God intended to leave it up to us to make this decision. Perhaps such a leap of faith sounds rash to a committed materialist—but can you prove beauty? love?

Clearly Collins has a two-story view of truth requiring a "leap of faith" to get from the "fact" lower story into the "value" (or "faith") upper story. I would think that any theistic evolutionist would have to take that irrational leap.

Pearcey's segment, "Leftovers from Liberalism," beginning on page 115 then explains the connection between the segmentation of truth and the drift into liberal theology which "rips Christianity from its roots in historical fact and casts it into the upper story, where it is demoted to subjective, content-less symbols and metaphors. It then becomes, in practice, little more than spiritualized window dressing for some other, more substantial system of thought. This segmentation of the concept of truth is completely alien to historic Christianity, which teaches that spiritual truths are firmly rooted in historical events...But the point is that the two are not partitioned off from one another: An event that did not occur can have no spiritual implications. The orthodox Christian holds a unified field of truth, because the God who acts in our hearts is also the God who acts in history."

I believe that (as illustrated by Collins) accepting Darwinian evolution as the "how" requires a segmented truth (two-storied with a leap of faith) rather than a unified (total) truth in which our faith is integrated with the facts.

This is why I think it's important to point out that far from being an established fact (as evolutionists claim), Darwinian evolution is on the ropes. (See my blog, "On the Ropes" below.)