The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [42]
Sometime later, about 80,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, some improbable event in one large family or small group prompted a handful of its members—certainly less than 150 people— to begin wandering north toward the Horn of Africa. What led to their departure we can only guess at—a feud, a theft, a refusal to share resources, a size too big to be supported by hunting in the area?
Perhaps a generation later, some of their descendants crossed the Red Sea (then much shallower than it is now and so dotted with islands). The ultimate result of this crossing over into Eurasia was the occupation by our species of almost every niche in the world, during which we killed off, directly or indirectly, all the other thousands of hominins whose ancestors had arrived there from Africa a million years before us. The point of this story is how a small number of improbable events moved our species from the threat of extinction to global dominance by taking an unrepresentative, improbable collection of its members out of Africa.
What does the role of low-probability events in evolution have to do with theism? Well, theism asserts the existence of a God of a certain kind, with certain important features. The “usual suspects” for this list of God’s important properties are the three omnis—omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence—along with benevolence, the will to do only good. This list of properties has been getting theism into trouble for a long time. The property that makes it impossible to reconcile theism and Darwinian natural selection is omniscience—God’s complete knowledge of everything.
One feature is arguably indispensable to the theism of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They all say, “God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 27). One thing they all agree on is that we exist and have our features owing to God’s design, based on an idea—an image, a design—of what he wanted. How literally to take this claim remains a matter of debate among the various sects, creeds, churches, divinity schools, madrassas, and biblical exegetes of the Abrahamic religions. There is a spectrum all the way from inerrancy—the Bible is to be taken literally and contains no errors—to a sort of minimal theism, according to which God created the world and everything in it, including us, in accordance with a design, but that thereafter his interventions have been minimal.
Any creed weaker than this minimal theism is hard to distinguish from atheism. Suppose that one holds that there is a God, but denies that God had any designs, intentions, or interests in setting the universe in motion and that our existence is just an interesting unintended by-product or side effect of his creative act. We may argue about whether this view, a kind of deism, differs in any significant way from that of the atheist, who holds that the universe was created by a quantum singularity. A version of theism worth believing must at a minimum attribute to God the intention to produce us and not just some intelligent creature or other, still less just any old life-form at all. Theism can give up on the omnis and maybe even surrender benevolence. Or it can just defend God’s nature as beyond our ken. Theism can certainly deny to us any understanding of why God created us—you and me and every other pusillanimous creature that has ever crawled on Earth or slinked through slimy seas. What it can’t give up is the credo that he created creatures like us, sapient creatures, and that he did so intentionally. Theism cannot accept the notion that we are a side effect, by-product, accident or coincidence, an unanticipated and unintended outcome.
Now, the standard reconciliation of Darwinism and theism goes like this. Everything