Is There Purpose in Biology?

Denis Alexander

Description

Atheists assert that the natural world has no meaning or purpose. Dr Denis Alexander, Emeritus Director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmunds College, Cambridge, draws a different conclusion. Not only do recent evolutionary biological data appear inconsistent with the claim that the world is purposeless, but the Christian doctrine of creation has provided and continues to provide both context and stimulus for the study of the natural world. Christians started biology! However, is a belief in an omnipotent, benign Creator consistent with a world of pain and suffering? From a lifetime's study in the biological sciences, Denis Alexander believes that whilst the cost of existence is extremely high, it can nonetheless be squared with the idea of a God of love whose ultimate purposes for humankind render that cost more comprehensible.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Relationship between religion and science

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 22 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9780857217158
• Langue: English

Extrait

In this thoroughly engaging and highly informative book, Dr Denis Alexander writes with great clarity and accessible scholarship to bring us face to face with the latest understanding of the mechanisms underlying evolution. The surprise is that random processes driven by chance are actually constrained by the underlying mechanisms and innate properties of matter. Such inherent fine-tuning inevitably results in a biological world of immense variety and complexity that gives every suggestion of being designed for a purpose; one which we can both marvel at and explore through science.
The author argues that the most coherent explanation for this fine-tuning is that it reflects the activity of a divine creator, who does indeed create with a purpose. Key to this is that human beings, the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, can have a relationship with their creator, and so fulfil their purpose.
This book will have a wide appeal. It will help Christians who struggle to reconcile the randomness of evolutionary theory with a purposeful creator God, but also provides an ideal starting point for those who believe evolution is incompatible with God yet are open to exploring further.
Andrew Halestrap, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry, University of Bristol, UK
There is perhaps no issue in contemporary science as challenging as the question of whether commitment to evolution is consistent with the idea that life has a purpose, and perhaps no author as well-equipped to shed light on this question as the distinguished molecular biologist Denis Alexander.
In this approachable, insightful, and wide-ranging book, Alexander brings his expertise in biology, history, and theology to bear on this most difficult of questions. While evolutionary biology has routinely been appropriated by pessimistic prophets of a purposeless universe, Alexander makes a careful and convincing case that modern biology is also consistent with belief in a world imbued with divine meaning and purpose.
Peter Harrison, Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia
What a wonderful book this is! Some might think the title of the book provocative, as most biologists consider it a settled issue that evolutionary biology does not exhibit any purpose. Yet Denis Alexander examines this very question of purpose in biology.
First, using his in-depth knowledge of evolutionary biology and genetics, as well as his broad familiarity with the relevant discussions in philosophy and theology, he calmly examines the arguments and deconstructs the notion that evolutionary history must necessarily be without purpose. In the second part of the book, Alexander shifts the focus to world views and convincingly shows that evolution fits the Christian understanding of creation particularly well.
Finally, he addresses the problem of pain and suffering, arguing that these are necessarily part of a world that will produce beings of free will and moral responsibility who are equipped to enter into a loving relationship with the creator, who is a Trinitarian God of love. Written in an engaging style, with tongue-in-cheek British humor, this book corrects the popular bleak view of a pitiless, indifferent universe, and instead presents the most welcome view of a world of purpose.
Cees Dekker, Professor of Nanobiology, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
This is a compelling argument for the conclusion that Christian belief in divine purpose and evolutionary theory are fully compatible. It is historically informed, philosophically sensitive, and more science-based than any other argument for this conclusion I have seen before. Alexander s book breathes wonder for God s creation, and love for the science that studies it.
Ren van Woudenberg, Professor of Epistemology and Metaphysics, Free University of Amsterdam
Denis Alexander has written a book that clears away a great deal of woolly-headed thinking about a crucial topic. On the one hand, does what we know about the biological world indicate that at bottom the world lacks purpose, as New Atheists claim? If on the other, as Christians affirm, a loving God is the creator of all, how are we to think well about how He interacts with the world He has created? Is the evolutionary history of life really as driven by random chance as so many would have us believe?
As in his other writings, Is There Purpose in Biology? addresses these challenging questions in an honest, accessible way that Christians, and those curious about Christian faith and the remarkable world of biology, will find immensely helpful.
Jeff Hardin, Professor of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, USA
Text copyright 2018 Denis Alexander
This edition copyright 2018 Lion Hudson IP Limited
The right of Denis Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by
Lion Hudson Limited
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Business Park,
Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England
www.lionhudson.com
ISBN 978 0 85721 714 1
e-ISBN 978 0 85721 715 8
First edition 2018
Cover image AdrianHancu/iStockPhoto.com
Text acknowledgments
p. 22, Quotes from Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity , D. N. Sedley, published by University of California Press. Copyright 2007 D. N. Sedley. Used by permission of the copyright holder through Rightslink.
pp. 29, 31, Quotes from Islam s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science , N. Guessoum, published by I.B. Tauris. Copyright 2011 N. Guessoum. Used by permission of the copyright holder through PLSClear.
pp. 31-32, 36-40, 43-46, Quotes from The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science , P. Harrison, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright 1998 P. Harrison. Used by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Scripture quotations taken from the New International Version, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan and Hodder Stoughton Limited. All rights reserved. The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society. UK trademark number 1448790.
Figure acknowledgments
Can be found on pp. 286-287.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is dedicated to my many colleagues
in the biological sciences with whom I have enjoyed
working purposefully over the years.
Also by Denis Alexander :
Beyond Science (Lion Publishing, 1972)
Rebuilding the Matrix: Science and Faith in the 21st Century (Lion Publishing, 2001)
(with Robert White) Beyond Belief: Science, Faith and Ethical Challenges (Lion Publishing, 2004)
Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? 2nd edition (Monarch, 2014)
The Language of Genetics: An Introduction (Templeton Foundation Press, 2011)
Genes, Determinism and God (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Contents
Figures
Preface
Introduction

1 The Historical Roots of Purpose in Biology

2 Biology s Grand Narrative

3 Biology s Molecular Constraints

4 Biology, Randomness, Chance, and Purpose

5 The Christian Matrix Within Which Biology Flourishes

6 Death, Pain, Suffering, and the God of Love

Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FIGURES
1 The development of single-cell volvocine algae into multicellular organisms
2 Increase in diversity of biological families over a 545-million-year period since the Cambrian explosion
3 Zachary Blount used all these petri dishes to show how one colony of bacteria evolved to use citrate
4 Kleiber s law: metabolism scales in proportion to the three-quarter power
5 A comparison between the structure of a cephalopod eye and a vertebrate eye
6 Convergent eyes in different branches of the tree of life
7 Evolutionary convergence in the sabre-tooth between the marsupial species and the placental cat
8 European placental mole and Australian marsupial mole
9 Marsupial Tasmanian wolf and placental Mexican grey wolf
10 Tenrec hedgehog and shrew Tenrec, and their placental counterparts
11 Example of a fish with an adipose fin
12 The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster: normal and ultrabithorax mutant
13 Increasing brain size in hominin evolution over the past 7 million years
14 The genetic code
15 Transcription and translation
16 Various ways in which an enzyme can evolve to achieve optimal fitness for a particular task
17 Conversion of a valine to an alanine in IDH2 at position 186 in three independent evolutionary lineages
18 Phylogenetic tree showing when and where CypA2 and CypA3 were inserted into the evolutionary history of the species shown
19 A mutation cluster caused by chronic damage to the DNA of proliferating yeast cells
Preface
This book started life as a series of three Herrmann Lectures given in honour of Bob Herrmann at Gordon College, USA, in November 2014. Bob Herrmann was a close friend of the late Sir John Templeton and they wrote books together (Templeton and Herrmann, 1989, 1994). Bob Herrmann lectured in biochemistry to medical students for 22 years and was one of the founder members of the John Templeton Foundation, also writing the biography of Sir John (Herrmann, 2004). It was an honour to have Professor Herrmann present at the lectures, and I am most grateful to the Foundation for their financial support for this lecture series.
I am also grateful to those who kindly provided comments and corrections on an earlier complete draft of this book: Graeme Finlay, Keith Fox, Andrew Jackson, Simon Con