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In
his book Genes, Genesis and God: Values
and their Origins in Natural and Human History philosopher
Holmes Rolston III develops a nuanced account of providence and biological
history. Well versed in the environmental sciences he points to the robustness
of life, particularly the ability it has shown to recover from cataclysmic
events such as the K-T extinction. This leads him to support a mild account of
convergence. Echoing Leigh Van Valen and opposing Gould, he proposes that if we
were to run the ‘tape of life’ several times, consistent themes would appear.However, he considers the Darwinian account of biological history to be
“modestly incomplete.” He
describes this deficiency in terms of ‘possibility spaces.’ For Rolston,
contemporary knowledge of evolutionary biology enables us to say that some
adaptations are in the ‘possibility space’ of the precursors, but this becomes
meaningless over longer ranges. For example, we cannot reasonably say that
Trilobites are in the ‘possibility space’ of DNA. Rolston
proposes that in order to get from DNA to Trilobites there is a need for “the
creation of new possibility spaces” over time. Until
we account for this, he says, evolution has “possibilities floating in from
nowhere.”He sees this as opening the way for accounts of divine providence; it is God
who opens up certain possibilities.
Rolston
suggests that this change of possibility spaces would be undetectable: “God
does not intervene as a causal force in the world, not at least of such kind as
science can detect.” This is
because God’s influence occurs at the level of chance. He explains that “if
once a year God loaded the dice, that would be difficult to detect.”Rolston’s position is interesting because he presents God’s action as
simultaneously undetectable by science and yet evident from an assessment of
reasonable possibilities. He also characterises God’s activity in temporal
terms; God opens up this possibility
at a certain time and a different possibility
at another time.
It
is at first difficult to see how God’s temporally variable detectable influence
can be viewed in terms other than intervention. However, it is important to
remember that some statistical results can be highly suggestive without
automatically implicating divine intervention. For example, if two fair die
were thrown and happened to land on the same face this would not be surprising.
However, if they both landed on the same random face on many subsequent throws,
this would be highly improbable and suggestive, but would not automatically
imply that God intervened since no laws were broken. It is not yet known if
biological history includes statistically suggestive events of this type.
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| Feedback | Contributed by: Adrian Wyard
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