Slifkin, Klinghoffer and Evolution

Slifkin discusses the religious implications of evolution. He says there are two views among the biologists – those that consider evolution from mud to human as an incredibly fortuitous, unlikely event and those that consider it inevitable. He accepts both as a possibility.

Life – inevitable?? Earlier he said they have no idea how life could have developed from mud. How could incredibly complex self-replicating RNA or protiens form randomly (and violate the 2^nd law of thermodynamics)? No one knows, but “life was bound to arise… and it will arise simlarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain”! [quote on p. 256] And a single cell would inevitably turn into a human, brains and all! Why slifkin considers such a view is beyond me.

He says the religious interpretation of this school of thought would be like the “Chanukah story, the ideological victory of which was that the laws of nature are seen to be programmed by God.” I’m not really sure what he’s saying; I would think the religious implication of such a weird idea is Deism.

The other “possibility”, the fact that the development of life was an amazingly unlikely process, clearly points to a Guiding Hand. But not everyone sees it this way. I can’t find the quote in Slifkin’s book, but read this quote from David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew writing about Slifkin and Collins:

Something you'll often hear people say is, "Well, Darwinism doesn't mean God isn't the creator. Maybe evolution was programmed into the universe from the start. So He had no need to guide the process." The problem with such thinking is that it's directly contradicted by a major current in Darwinian evolutionary theory. In his book Wonderful Life (1989), the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated what he called the "contingency" of life's history. Gould explained what an incredibly lucky break it was that Earth ever cast up intelligent life forms.
Wisely turning away from this doomed approach to showing God's hand…

It seems Klinghoffer is saying G-d couldn’t have done it, because the evolution from mud to humans was too unlikely for a designer to know it would happen. Klinghoffer then quotes a ‘brilliant’ solution:

In his most satisfying defense of belief, Collins brings forward a clever way of reconciling an unguided evolutionary process with God as the Creator. He points out that God resides beyond the limits of time. Hence, what appears to us as evolution's unpredictable course was, from God's perspective, entirely predictable. It's a neat perspective--except, perhaps, if we ask whether an unguided process of "creation" is still "creation" even if its results were foreseen.

Klinghoffer appears to be a deist, who doesn’t believe G-d could guide nature! And what exactlty is the havamina about G-d knowing the future? And what’s his difficulty with that? Maybe someone can explain it.

To Be Cont…(?)