Ensign and Natural Theology

The January 2008 issue of the Ensign contains an article titled, "Our God Truly is God," by Elder Douglas L Callister of the Seventy [link not available yet]. It is adapted from a talk he gave at BYU-Idaho in 2005. His discussion of God involves a somewhat lengthy detour into natural theology.

Of course this got my attention, so I looked a little closer. In the way of general comment I will just say that, although they find the universe to be an amazing place, many people do not find such arguments convincing. This is because the listed wonders often have a post hoc and Panglossian sense to them. (In Voltaire's Candide, Dr. Pangloss explains that "the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles.)

But more specifically, I noticed a few other things.

1. Darwin's quote about the eye is removed from its context. Darwin goes on to explain,

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.

And so on. Readers may get the impression that Darwin was confounded by the eye.

2. The quote comes from On the Origin of Species, Chapter 6. However, the citation in the article is to a secondary source. That's not a sin, but why not reference the origin of the quote?

3. That secondary source is The Case for the Existence of God, by Bert Thompson and Wayne Jackson. The second edition is available here (pdf). A slightly different version is here (pdf), and a shorter three-part essay is available (i)here, (ii)here and (iii)here. Background information on one of the authors, a young-earth creationist, is available here.

4. One passage highlighted by an editor asserts that "The passage of time, even long intervals of time, is not a 'cause'..." I agree with that, and I would be interested to know if anybody--including Richard Dawkins--disagrees. Unfortunately Ensign readers may get a strawman impression.

5. Although Elder Callister makes reference to an "intelligent designer," I think the context suggests that he is using the term in a general sense rather than referring specifically to the recent movement led by the Discovery Institute.

6. The paragraph about the orbit of the earth appears to be a bit garbled. (The earth departs from its own orbit?) The original paragraph from his reference states:

Interestingly, however, as the Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun, it departs from a straight line by only one-ninth of an inch every eighteen miles. If it departed by one-eighth of an inch, we would come so close to the Sun that we would be incinerated; if it departed by one-tenth of an inch, we would find ourselves so far from the Sun that we would all freeze to death (Science Digest, 1981, 89[1]:124)

As I understand it, what they are saying is that the orbit of the earth is so large that if you were to trace it for 18 miles (about the distance the earth travels in one second), you would find that the earth deviates only 1/9 of an inch from a straight line. You could play a similar game with the curvature of the earth. And, of course, the smallness of the numbers look more impressive the shorter length of the orbit you consider. Incidentally, 18 miles is minuscule compared to the total length of the orbit, which is about 585 million miles.

That passage got me thinking further:

One-ninth of an inch must be an average, because the orbit of the earth is elliptical, so the deviation from a straight line will vary throughout the orbit. Putting aside the question of whether the calculation is correct, the thrust of the argument is that the earth is in just the right spot. Certainly it is in the habitable zone, but I think there is more wiggle room than is first apparent.

Because the orbit is elliptical, the distance of the earth from the sun varies by about 3.1 million miles. And it may surprise you that the earth is closest to the sun in January and farthest in July. From what I've found poking around the Internet, proximity to the sun has a relatively minor effect on temperature compared to the atmosphere and reflectivity of the planet. In other words, Venus is so much hotter than the earth more because of its greenhouse gases than because it is closer to the sun. In fact, it is also hotter than Mercury, which is twice as close to the sun as Venus. (Note that the seasons are a result of the tilt of the earth and how that affects the distribution of the sun's radiation. It is not simply a result of one part of the earth being closer to the sun.) Furthermore, the fact of the matter is that life on earth exists in a broad range of environments--from the freezing cold of the poles, to the boiling acid of Yellowstone, to the extreme depths of the sea. That we cannot survive under such conditions says nothing about whether life in general can, or whether God could adapt us to those conditions if he so chose. Finally, even if God engineered life in a detailed way, could it not be that he chose a planet with the right characteristics, rather than enforcing those characteristics on a planet?

Elder Callister's perspective is certainly understandable, and I do not altogether disagree with it. However I regret that readers of the Ensign are not given alternative "faithful" perspectives, but are led to think that the issue is so simple and clear that only obstinate Korihors don't get it.

(Gary, at No Death Before the Fall, and Lincoln at the Mormon Transhumanist Association have also commented on this article. For extra entertainment, be sure to read the screed following the MTA post.)

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