Thank God for Evolution?

Anyone else encountered the Rev. Michael Dowd?  He reminds me of the renowned cell biologist, Ken Miller, who also proclaims a happy marriage between evolution and belief in God.  We owe a lot to Miller for fighting creationism in the Dover, PA schools case.  But he leaves room for God, which at best is unnecessary.  And at worst, incredibly callous.

http://thankgodforevolution.com/book

How shortsighted does someone have to be to say “Thank God for evolution”?  It’s hard to think of a greater engine of suffering than natural selection and the food chain.  If any god had any choice in the matter, and set up this scheme on purpose anyway, then we live in a ghastly, Malthusian petri dish.  Even if God is loving to some, he isn’t equally loving to everyone.  We just know that some people suffer more than others.

For most people, beliefs are about feeling good and getting along with others.  Many scientific facts run counter to these aims, and in most of the people, most of the time, it is the facts which are relaxed.

It seems Dowd thinks God could have used evolution to create humans.  But this would not be Darwinian evolution, which is unguided and without foresight.  So to say that ‘evolution could be the way God did it’ is a contradiction.  The most a theist could say is that God created humanity by using the ‘method we call evolution by natural selection, and made it look exactly like he was not involved’.

Religion and faith can be defended as ways to ‘know’.  Alvin Plantinga views it like this:

“Plantinga compares the difference in justified beliefs to a case where you are accused of a crime on the basis of very convincing evidence, but you know that you didn’t do it. For you, the immediate evidence of your memory is not defeated by the public evidence against you, even though your memory is not available to others.”

But this is pretty weak.  Of course a religious belief could turn out to be true.  But a psychotic in an institution might be right about something, too.  The issue is whether a method such as faith is a reliable way to knowledge, and not just something that is present in people who are sometimes right for other reasons or due to chance.  When a religious belief is correct, it is by accident.

While we don’t do science on consensus, the social aspect of how we acquire knowledge is paramount.  When we make claims on anything other than a scientific foundation, we make ourselves unconversable to others.  Religion hides this by getting large numbers to accept its claims, but those claims are unjustifiable outside each tradition.  Science is an evolving set of methods, not a set of claims.  Because it listens to nature and counts on revision, it is as unbiased as we can get.  Listening to nature, as revealed by science, is the only approach I know of that has the potential to unify humanity in a common worldview.