Junk DNA

    Recently a commentator on another blog (Choice in Dying – www.choiceindying.com) cited the example of the vitamin C pseudogene and challenged us to explain why "an intelligent designer would give us apes a perfectly good gene for making vitamin C, but then borked it at a single locus so it's inactive." This, of course, is one of the arguments in favor of evolution, the presence of "junk DNA", DNA that has no apparent function. Dr. Collins uses this evidence as well in his argument for theistic evolution.
    As we noted earlier in our review of Dr. Collins' book, The Language of God, the argument from junk DNA is similar to the older argument from vestigial organs. Presumably a wise and all-powerful Creator would not have created us with useless organs and DNA, whereas evolution seeming offers us a plausible explanation for their existence. Presumably they were functioning organs in some ancestral species. Arguments of this sort, however, overlook an important biblical detail: the Bible makes it clear that nature, as it exists now, is not the way it was originally created. "For the creation was subjected to futility . . ." (Rom. 8:20; NKJV). The fact of the fall, combined with possible climate change in conjunction with the flood, would mean that a certain amount of devolution has likely taken place. We were originally created to live, but now we die. Something obviously had to have happened to change our biochemistry. Hence we should not be surprised to find damaged chromosomes and apparently useless DNA in our cells. That is very far from proving macroevolution, which would require a progression from simpler to more complex forms of life, with all the genetic changes that would require, including the appearance of entirely new genetic material.
     In the Christian theistic worldview, nature is sort of like the ruins of an ancient Greek temple.  The evolutionist looks at the ruins and says, "This could not possibly have been designed by an intelligent being.  What architect would design a temple with the columns broken off and fallen down"?  But the Christian looks at exactly the same ruins and asks, "How did they get there in the first place?  There is obvious evidence of design"!  The obvious answer, of course, is that the architect did not design the temple with the columns broken off and fallen down.  Something else happened, after the temple was built, to bring it to its present ruined condition.  And that, of course, is exactly what the Bible says happened to nature.
    At the end of his book Dr. Collins resumes the story of his conversion and then concludes with moving appeals to both believers and scientists to end their internecine war.
    Dr. Collins is to be applauded for trying to advance science while preserving spiritual values. He comes across as a very reasonable person, as well as compassionate, a person who cares deeply about both science and his faith, anxious to do justice to all aspects of life. And yet, as Christians, we cannot help but feel that he conceded too much to Darwin and did not give sufficient weight to Scripture. His book is, nevertheless, a valuable contribution to the discussion and well worth reading.

Theistic Evolution: the Philosophical Problem

    So far in our review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God we have considered some of the theological problems involved in his version of theistic evolution. But there are philosophical problems as well.. The central question in the debate is whether or not there is such a thing as design in nature, and this, in turn, lies at the heart of the much broader question of whether or not life itself has meaning and purpose.
    Like Darwin, Dr. Collins conceives of evolution as a naturalistic process, but he also asserts the "Anthropic Principle." At the moment of the "Big Bang" 14 billion years ago the universe was precisely tuned to sustain life and ultimately produce man. But this seems to imply a kind of mechanistic determinism of the type once advocated by Laplace: by a very long chain of cause and effect the outcome of the process is determined by the beginning. But that would leave no room for the kind of moral responsibility Dr. Collins says is the distinctive feature of humankind. Moreover, as Dr. Collins points out, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle undermines any notion of mechanistic determinism. That would mean that "God plays dice," as Einstein complained, and it would also mean that the evolution of Homo sapiens is would have been far from certain. Dr. Collins tries to tell us "evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process" (p. 205).
    But Dr. Collins still has not answered the question, is there design in nature? There would appear to be three possibilities: 1) God controls each step of the process to ensure the desired outcome; 2) Evolution proceeds in a deterministic fashion, so that God can foresee the outcome without directly controlling the process; or 3)Evolution really is a random and undirected process. Dr. Collins tells us how it appears, but he is not at all clear about how it actually is. Is the design real, or is it merely apparent?