Does God Create by Evolution?
by Jack Hoehn
Does Creation evolve? Yes.
Does Evolution create? No.
by Jack Hoehn, September 1, 2014
| A major problem in discussing origins both within the church and without the church is that we use words that have different meanings to different people. So when I say Canadian, you think bare frozen tundra with caribou kicking through the permafrost that you have seen on the Discovery Channel, and I might be thinking of the rich, warm, fertile soil of beautiful Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island. Same word but different emotional and conceptual concepts unless we clarify which “Canada” we are talking about.
So when I say the word “evolution,” it has many different meanings and many different emotional responses unless we clarify which “evolution” we are talking about. |
1 Acorn by Doug NC
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Adventists do believe in some kinds of Evolution
When an acorn planted in the ground sprouts, grows, and turns into a mighty oak tree, to say “it has evolved” from a small nut into a mighty oak tree is a quite proper use of the term.
- OK Evolution: Change over time. A sequence of events in nature involving growth, expansion, change.
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Then most people have little problem with knowing that one kind of dog had puppies, some of which had characteristics that were selected and bred for, so that we can say all present Wirehaired Pointing Griffons evolved from an ancestor dog whose offspring were selectively selected and bred until the present dog is quite unlike the ancestor dog (German Shorthaired Pointer? Spaniel? Otterhound? French Barbet? or from the first two dogs who jumped from the Ark?) It evolved from that ancestor dog over time with the assistance of breeders. (In this dog’s case, relatively recently!)1 |
| 2 Wirehaired Pointing Griffon |
- OK Evolution: Limited common descent. Particular groups of organisms have descended with modifications from a common ancestor, by selection, breeding, or chance.
| Many can also understand how plant or animals or humans were modified over generations by natural selection of certain characteristics. We can see that weak plants died out when climate changed, and how elephants with little insulating hair survive in India and Africa, but those Mammoth elephants whose carcasses we find frozen under Russian tundra had thick fur. Clearly animals and plants adapt to climate, drought, or heavy precipitation. Those that adapt survive; those that don’t adapt migrate away or die. This is an understandable kind of “evolution.” It doesn’t create completely new things, but adapts functions of created things. |  |
| 3 Wolly Mammoth from Siberia |
- OK Evolution: A mechanism responsible for limited changes in organisms where circumstances act upon random variations or mutations, chiefly by natural selection.
Darwin evolves
4 Italian Postage Stamp 2009
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Taking the above examples another giant philosophical step, Darwin expanded the above mechanisms for evolving seen in growth, selective breeding, and adaptation to postulate that ALL the diversity we see started with one single cell, and that cell has evolved into everything that is alive today.This is the “Evolution” that many creationists, as well as some scientists, have a problem with. In fact, almost all modern scientists, while liking Darwin’s idea, have found those ideas inadequate based on the scientific evidence alone. So Darwinian evolutionists have themselves evolved to “Neo-Darwinian evolution,” and then to the “New Synthesis evolution,” and now recognizing the problems with all previous types of evolution some scientists are now seeking a “Third Way of Evolution.”2 |
- Darwinian Evolution: A thesis or theory (although we all know that everyone believing this thesis claims it is “more than a theory”) that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through material processes such as natural selection, random variation, and mutations.
Because Darwinian Evolution and its offspring claim that the processes needed are “unguided,”“unintelligent,” “purposeless,” it has no need of a plan; it just happened.All these events are presumed to be due to natural laws (although why there are “natural laws” or where they came from is usually not discussed), so they conclude that no Creator or Intelligent Designer is needed.Many of this kind of Evolutionist are agnostics or atheists (94.5% by one survey of biologists).As one snippy evolutionist said, “God?I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Could God have used evolution in the 4th Darwinian sense?
Not all Evolutionists are atheists or agnostics, however. Some “Evolutionists” are God believers, who think that Evolution #4 did in fact happen, but that it was God proposed and intended, and that God started or nudged things to evolve along some sort of lines leading to his purposes. There are some Adventist scientists, and not a few theologians, who have come to accept Theistic Evolution (or put another way they might be called Evolutionary Creationists). They propose to Adventists that this might be a way to accept Darwin’s ideas without being an atheist. This person could say, “I believe that evolution is God’s way of creating.”
The answer, of course, is Yes, God could have…
God could have created using evolution. He might have created the laws that govern life, the chemicals that support life, placed a planet in just the right place for life, placed the magnetic field to protect life from the powerful but dangerous emissions from the sun, placed the moon as our defender from other solar debris, and by slow chance or gently nudged chances let us climb out of the slime starting with one magic cell he implanted in a primordial ocean.
To see how that might have worked, just watch the award-winning NOVA series called COSMOS—a very nicely produced propaganda piece for Darwinian Evolution, but a Theistic Evolutionist would just use God as the reason the unknown, or difficult to explain, events of Evolution happened. (Theistic Evolution, or TE, in some ways is really a “God of the gaps” view of life, just supposedly with few acknowledged gaps.)3 Everything mostly happened by itself, but where it didn’t or couldn’t, just have God give it a secret nudge! Otherwise, God just sits back and watches things evolve, until it finally reaches his standards, and then he gets back into the picture to encourage us to be good and kind.
But He Didn’t!
Obviously, this is only a caricature of Theistic Evolution. But I do not accept Theistic Evolution or Evolutionary Creationism as adequate, either as theology or as science, and to explain why, I want to list what I can agree with, and what I cannot agree with.
I can agree with TE:
- That not only the universe, but its laws are the Creation of God, who established and maintains these “laws” so obviously fine-tuned that even agnostics recognize how remarkable this is. Stephen Hawking: “Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us, and if we are to exist leaves little room for alteration…the extreme-fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea…”4 which “old but true” idea he does not want us to go to, of course! But at least he recognizes the fact of the fine-tuned “natural” laws that TE acknowledges as God’s laws.
- That God could and would use his laws to design and propagate life.
- That many wonderful things that happen are natural, due to those laws in an orderly universe.
I must disagree with TE:
- That God would not or could not act independently of those laws (miracles are permitted to the law giver).
- That Evolution without special creations (at least 6 days’ worth, and perhaps many more!) does not work. So called self-organizing, self-replicating abilities of matter are hopeful fictions, not science. The ability of random mutations to create useful complex novelty has never been demonstrated.
- There is no adequate materialistic explanation for the origin of information (DNA and its supporting cast) necessary for life.
- There is no adequate materialistic explanation for major innovations in body plans in biologic life (the Cambrian Explosion).
- For me, the main theological objection to TE besides the scientific ones is that in its reluctance to see the active hand of God in the creation and maintenance of life, it completely dismisses the Great Controversy and accepts the diseases, plagues, and catastrophes of life as “part of God’s great plan through Evolution” instead of the work of God’s great enemy! TE trivializes natural evil with a shrug and reduces morality from a truth to a mere adaptation.
I do understand why some Adventist scientists, who have been raised in a rigid Young Earth Creationism (YEC), would accept the present church-promoted bipolar proposition that it is either YEC or Evolution.
Sadly, I don’t find Theistic Evolution to be a satisfactory solution. There are many more reasons than those stated above, but to put it short, to suggest that God would use a mechanism of creation (random, undirected or barely directed chance selected only by fitness) that hasn’t been shown to really work to create anything, doesn’t work for me as a mechanism of Creation suitable for the God of the Bible. Created things surely evolve, but evolving things are adapting, not creating.
Faith seeking Reason should explore other avenues. Progressive Creationism, Old-earth Creationism or, more broadly, Intelligent Design may be a more fruitful avenue for Adventist inquiry than Theistic Evolution. More to come on this later.
[Photo Credits6]
1My son owns one of these clever dogs. This breed was developed by a Dutchman in Germany after 1873.
2https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com
3 Intelligent Design on the other hand is often quickly dismissed by opponents as a “God of the gaps” argument, but in fact it is precisely the opposite. ID doesn’t find the need for or evidence of God in the gaps in our knowledge, it finds the fingerprints of God all over the scientific knowledge we do understand and can all see, in the design and huge amounts of information visible in the known, not in the bits we still don’t understand or gaps in our knowledge at all.
4 Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design. (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 162, 164.
5 This bog is informed by several authors in a book evaluating Theistic Evolution by believing Christian and Jewish scientists and theologians. Jay W. Richards, editor. God and Evolution—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews Explore Darwin’s Challenge to Faith. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2010), 302.
6 Photo 1: Doug NC—with permission. https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougalug2005/1349783309/
Photo 2: American Kennel Association–https://www.akc.org/breeds/wirehaired_pointing_griffon/index.cfm
Photo 3: Wikipedia—free use.
Photo 4: Italian Postage Stamp, 2009—public domain
Thanks for putting new stuff up for discussion. It seems to me that there is ample Biblical evidence that God used natural processes to his own end. He destroyed the Earth with a flood—a natural phenomenon. He could have just spoke and the preflood world would have disappeared. He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with a volcanic eruption, a natural process. Again He could have spoken and they would have disappeared. He sent an earthquake to destroy the rebellious Israelite’s because of the golden calf. He could have spoken and it was done. Later he sent snakes and quail all of these were natural phenomena. Why couldn’t God have used natural processes in creation?
Here are measured phenomena not accounted for using a non-evolution model. 1) The universe is expanding; 2) they Hydrogen to Helium ratio, 3) 2.3o K back ground radiation. 4) Quasars found at 10 billion light years + away but not nearby. All of these observations are explained by an evolutionary model (the big Bang). Can you give me a non-evolutionary explanation for these observations?
Jack, you are right to draw attention to the way that words can mean vastly different things to different people. In many senses, Darwin was not an 'atheistic evolutionist' either. He was in fact a deeply religious man, who delayed publication of his work as long as he could, as he feared the effect it would have on people of faith. His work makes no attempt to explain the origins of Life. He was only concerned with the Origins of Species. In that sense, you, and I, are Darwinists. It is when we attempt to take Darwin's theories and work back to origins of Life, DNA, etc, that divisions arise between faith and science.
But also to clarify a point re the 'God hypothesis.' I'm not sure if one would call the originator of that saying an evolutionist, at least not a biologist. He was a mathematician/physicist. From this interesting website: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/
comes this:
"Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827) was one of the great French mathematical physicists…. Laplace presented his definitive work on the properties of the solar system to Napoleon. Napoleon, liking to embarrass people, asked Laplace if it was true that there was no mention of the solar system’s Creator (ie God) in his opus magus. Laplace, on this occasion at least, was not obsequious and replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”….
Laplace was not just a whistlin’ Dixie. Newton had needed that hypothesis, ie God, to make the solar system work. Newton believed that the planetary orbits were unstable and unless God intervened periodically, the planets would wander off into space. Newton had not done the mathematical analysis sufficiently completely. Laplace rectified the problem. Newton also had no model for the origin of the solar system. Laplace eliminated these two gaps that Newton had God fill.
Back to Napoleon—he told Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another of the great French mathematicians/physicists, Laplace’s comment about no need for the God hypothesis. Lagrange’s reply was, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s apocryphal reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions.” This is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing. Explanations are a dime a dozen; if you want explanations, read Kipling’s Just so Stories."
The author goes on to describe the principle of 'parsimony,' (rather like Occam's razor, I gather), ie, that the simplest explanations are to be preferred. Seems 'God' is rather too complex an idea to be included in 'scientific' thinking.
I would suggest that in scientific terms, parsimony should serve as a warning to those of faith who even feel the need to 'seek Reason,' as you put it. Reason, (ratio) both for the Greeks, and for Paul, is a lesser quality than faith. Faith has no reason to seek Reason, particularly as it relates to any material phenomena. This is but one of the reasons why SDAs should avoid trying to use literalist, pseudo-scientific interpretations of Gen 1,2 to explain the origins of things, as a means of supporting a religious belief, in this case, the keeping of Shabbat. Materialism is separated from Spirituality by a 'great gulf, fixed.' (Luke 16.26)
In the vertebrate world a new organism begins when a sperm penetrates an egg to form a zygote which begins to divide to form a blastula then a gastrula, an embryo, a fetus and eventually a baby. In the case of man that process takes 9 mo. Yet God says, “I formed you in the womb” Isa 44:2, 24. God used a 9 mo. physical process to form (create) each of us, so why not evolution? Darwin was a creationist when he boarded the HMS Beagle and remained a creationist for most if not all of the voyage. It was the evidence that he gleaned from the fossils and animals he collected that led him to reject the special creation of his day. He saw change in the fossils. All one has to do is go to a natural history museum and look at the animals of the past to see that they are different than the animals living today. That difference to me says evolution. SDA’ seem to accept microevolution but reject macroevolution. Yet how did we get from the animals of the past to those of today? How many micro changes does it take to make a macro change?
Jack,
Why more argument? What enlightenment could you possibly hope to share by adding another chapter to the never-ending discussion? Is there nothing else God wants you to do than stimulate endless discussion that distracts us from doing other things like spreading the Gospel?
Please, Jack! You're never going to settle the issue. Get over it. Move along to something that will actually help build the Kingdom of God.
Surely the "Kingdom of God" is not grounded in misinformation and ignorance of nature.
I sometimes wonder whether those who are most anxious to advance the "Kingdom of God"
even know what it is they are trying to advance.
If they are trying to promote love, peace, harmony, etc., fine, but I am always suspicious of
those who seek to replace a search for truth with authoritarian ignorance.
While I do not agree with some of Jack's conclusions, I think he seeks truth and tries to be
a peacemaker. Those are honorable goals that should be encouraged, in my opinion. I'm
hoping he never gets over trying to find and advance truth–which might be closer to
advancing the "Kingdom of God" than what some others are doing.
In answer to another question: what does it take for microevolution to become macroevolution?
The answer is simple. TIME!
And that is one of the reasons recognizing that the process has been going on for more than a few
thousand years matters. When we recognize the reality of life changing across tens and hundreds
of millions of years, we can see that there was enough time for macroevolution to occur.
The geological and fossil record clearly provides the solid evidence for a lengthy process. There
is no need at all to make up unnecessarily complicated explanations to try to negate the long
time period. Things are plenty complicated without doing that.
Joe,
In contrast with your experience, I have had the rich blessing of knowing what God has called me to do and seeing how He has empowered me to do it. One of the lessons he had taught me is that endless debate with people who are unable to reach a conclusion is one of Satan's most effective tools for diverting people who claim to be God's followers from doing anything effective for Him, or ever really knowing him. They are lost in discussion of theory and wasting the breath God has so graciously given them instead of getting lost in the wonderful redemptive love that God offers us and asks us to share with the world.
Why does the universe expanding or a big bang theory require an evolutionary model? Couldn’t God have spoken and “the big bang” occurred as a direct result thereof?
My bewilderment is with those who believe that Christ was God in bodily form and was born of a virgin and resurrected the dead, and was Himself resurrected from death. If you believe all that, why is it even a stretch to believe that God could speak things and life forms into existence at His discretion; and why would this necessarily require eons?
Yes, William, my many nights of prayer for direction did not result in "knowing what God called me to do." The only impression I got as a result of all that agonizing, struggling, and praying to know what to do was that I should grow up, become a man, use my brain, and take responsibility for my life. And I discovered that was a sensible direction to take, and I have not been the least bit disappointed by doing that. Mine has been a productive, fulfilling, and honest life, and that is enough for me.
Perhaps Almighty God could have done anything in any way at any time, Stephen. Science can only study what exists, and can, from tangible reality estimate what happened, when it happened, and how it happened. We are able to see and measure what does exist, and that does eliminate some scenarios–at least as naturally occurring. Essentially, what we can see is that if God did it all, He did it more this way than that way. We can see it from our perspective of time, which is almost certainly not God's perspective on time (probing the Mind of God is not something I claim to be able to do, but if He exists everywhere, you know, as in "omnipresent," what could time mean for Him? Maybe somewhere between nothing and everything).
Are incredibly Magical, Mysterious, and Miraculous phenomena nature's God's way of communicating truth to His creatures? Seriously?
But, no, I think an "evolutionary model" (at least of life) does not necessarily derive support from knowledge of an expanding universe or a big bang theory. I'm just not very interested in cosmology. I'm much more interested in what happened during the hundreds of millions of years after life began, and especially the last 100 million years, during which the Primate Order emerged.
Could an omnipotent God have made it all happen in an instant? When we decide to have a God who is omnipotent, we assign to Him the ability to do anything. Even so, the best we can do with scientific methods is see what exists and what appears to have happened (not what God COULD do, but what occurred, whether God made it happen that way, or not). Some scientists in the past and present have seen their mission as studying nature to reveal what God did and how He did it. That does not seem like such a bad attitude.
"The only impression I got as a result of all that agonizing, struggling, and praying to know what to do was that I should grow up, become a man, use my brain, and take responsibility for my life." Joe, why was this message NOT God speaking to you? Does God always tells "nice" things?
Darrel, you may have a point there. Perhaps that was God's message to me. But, some would say that I was listening to the voice of Satan and could not tell the difference. I recall often telling others, in my youth, that it is not so much that God does not answer prayer as that the answer to our requests is often "no." Essentially, that we only claim prayer has been answered if we get the answer we want. So, are you suggesting that perhaps God's plan for me has been to be the one out exploring and using science to seek truth? Or that that would be "not nice?" It seems hard to know. And I do not know. That is why I honestly report being agnostic.
Mankind started without God, so he invented him. There are many articles and books that trace the footprints of his birthing. God's absence is profound, his presence isn't. The God of our dreams is the imaginary elephant we fondle in our blindness hoping to identify him. That's why there are endless versions of him. So, everyone is "right"! (Including me, of course)!
Cosmology does matter. It is the grandstand from which humans peer to understand and address the existential questions. What we see from our seat is entirely different than what men saw in past eons. The view began to change in the last millennium and has been transformed in the last one hundred fifty years (I call these recent observers, moderns). The language used by pre-moderns explained the universe they saw and described their role in it. Since God didn't seem to have a visible presence they invented scenarios to explain him as a kind of peek-a-boo ultimate power. The stars, the sun, the seasons, the cities, and much more, became evidence of his being somewhere out there. His presence was an interpretation of their vision of the universe. A development in thought grew to see that It must have had a beginning and he must have done it.
And that is where the Titanic of Creationism collides with the ice berg of reality. The pre-modern language based on a mythical view of the universe doesn’t work from our view. More than that, the entire descriptions of "God" developed from that old grandstand are faulty because the premise is now known to be faulty, now defunct. Believers have several choices. Stick fast. Move the goal posts.
God as Superguy is the creation of Him out of ages of mythical comprehension of the universe and humans imaginary role it. He is an evolutionary creation of human hopes and desires as an explanation of our position.
The attempt to correlate Adventist theology and modern cosmology using language developed in a different one results in endless wrangling over ideas.
Larry, your reference to 'moderns' reminded me of something I read recently in regards to Gothic literature (apart from vampire stories, Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a classic example). Alison Milbank is an English lit and theological academic, and her hsuband is a founder of the 'Radical Orthodoxy' school. Here is her view of the evolution of modern v pre-modern thinking, from this article:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/gothic-fiction-divided-selves
"What allows this kind of critique is the development of a particular form of subjectivity, which the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age calls the "buffered self". In his extensive study of how the secular emerged in the modern world, Taylor locates the heart of the change in a seismic shift from the "porous" to the "buffered" self. In pre-modern societies, people inhabit a divinely created cosmos, full of spirits, good and bad, fairies, angels and natural forces, which are seen also to have agency as "acts of God". Even inanimate objects, such as holy relics, can have power over us. Similarly, all levels of social organisation, from realm to parish and guild, are liturgically ordered and are grounded in a higher reality. The self in all this is open to the world, vulnerable and easily affected and possessed by outside forces, natural or supernatural, although the distinction itself is not easily made, since only gradually does an actual "natural" evolve.
Following Max Weber, Taylor uses the term, "disenchantment" to describe the dismantling of this social imaginary, by science and the Enlightenment, industrialisation and so on. In the process the self becomes "buffered", no longer vulnerable to the power of forces beyond the self. He no longer fears demons and thunderstorms and, more radically, they no longer exist for him. He possesses his own selfhood: even God is displaced as he becomes his own centre, with boundaries, social and metaphysical. Self-consciously, we are aware of the magical past, and we count ourselves lucky to have won through. We call the past "backward" and assume we have progressed.
In this account, the modern self is a secular one, deriving causation from scientific accounts, which are intelligible to the mind, which therefore, in a sense, remains emperor of its own experience."
I think most 'moderns,' even religious ones, definitely think of themselves as 'emperors of their own experience.' (It is, imho, what keeps us away from the kind of mystical thinking which is found throughout the NT, eg).
However, Milbank goes on to say that our modern interest in the Gothic is because we somehow know in ourselves that this 'buffering' of the self doesn't work. The remainder of her article is well worth reading for her take on how to deal with this.
I think her assessment of moderns v premoderns forms a nice basis for showing us where SDA thinking sits. And I reckon it sits very much in premodern forms. The book EG White, a Phenomenon of Religious Materialism does a great job of documenting how the naturalist philosophy simply known as Materialism informs the whole thinking of the founding fathers and mother, James WHite in particular. It is a very simplistic and quite unsophisticated way of viewing both the cosmos and scripture. It is what holds SDAism back in pre-modern thinking.
Jack, your seem to want a hands on God, so you suggest progressive creation or an ID model or something similar to be considered. Wikipedia defines progressive creationism as a belief that God created new forms of life gradually over a period of hundreds of millions of years. You lump these various models under the heading of ID. In analyzing these models one must ask what predictions they make and look at nature to see if that is what really is. It seems to me that an all knowing God designer would create something that would approach a high level in not absolute perfection, similar to the infallible scripture idea. My point is that one should expect to see a real difference between organisms that were consciously designed rather than if they evolved by natural selection.
Natural selection is a tinker it doesn’t produce perfection you would expect from a master designer. It yields only improvements over what came before. It produces a fitter organism but not the fittest. What you get is often imperfect. So what do you see in nature. 99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct. It doesn’t seem so intelligent to design millions of species destined to go extinct and then replace them with other species most of which will go extinct. The ID model never addresses this problem.
Many examples of bad design in nature can be given. However, I will address only one. This is the recurrent laryngeal nerve found in mammals. It runs from the brain to the larynx and controls our speaking and swallowing. Rather than going directly from the brain to the larynx, a distance of about 1 foot in man, it runs down into our chest, loops around the aorta and then travels back up to the larynx. The nerve is three feet longer than it needs to be. In a giraffe it is about 15 feet longer than a direct route. The ID and related models have no adequate explanation for this nerve, but evolution does. I do not accept the ID and related models because the evidence is against them.
Hi Larry, It seems that I know you from a past life of about 60 years ago in Pueblo Co.. If you are the same Larry I extend my greeting, if not then greetings anyway.
Yes, Paul the one and same! Enjoy your posts! Looks like we have some resonance goin on round here!
Yes, Paul the one and same! Enjoy your posts! Looks like we have some resonance goin on round here!
Paul, even if coyne's explanation as to why the RLN is rapped the way it is, would say nothing Design of the nerve itself. "I don't see why it is rapped that way, therefore the thing itself was not designed!" ????? This is terrible reasoning!
Anyway, Functions for the RLN nerve can be seen in the old authority, Gray's Anatomy, which states regarding the normal human design:
"As the recurrent nerve hooks around the subclavian artery or aorta, it gives off several cardiac filaments to the deep part of the cardiac plexus. As it ascends in the neck it gives off branches, more numerous on the left than on the right side, to the mucous membrane and muscular coat of the esophagus; branches to the mucous membrane and muscular fibers of the trachea; and some pharyngeal filaments to the Constrictor pharyngis inferior."
So it seems that the RLN is innervating a lot more than just the larynx. Biologist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, in his article "The Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe: Does it Prove Evolution?," quotes a passage from a much more recent 1980 edition of Gray's Anatomy stating much the same thing:
"As the recurrent laryngeal nerve curves around the subclavian artery or the arch of aorta, it gives several cardiac filaments to the deep part of the cardiac plexus. As it ascends in the neck it gives off branches, more numerous on the left than on the right side, to the mucous membrane and muscular coat of the oesophagus; branches to the mucous membrane and muscular fibers of the trachea and some filaments to the inferior constrictor [Constrictor pharyngis inferior].
(Gray's Anatomy, 1980, p. 1081, similarly also in the 40th edition of 2008, pp. 459, 588/589)
"The vagus nerve in the stage 16 embryo is very large in relation to the aortic arch system. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch. It has been suggested that tension applied by the left recurrent laryngeal nerve as it wraps around the ductus arteriosus could provide a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery, rather than an elastic artery" – Gray's Anatomy, 39th edition 2005, p. 1053.
So according to this description, nerve filaments emanate along its length from the cardiac plexus to the esophagus, which if accurate might well dictate its positioning. Whether due to a requisite embryogenic sequence, for optimal nerve routing, or even an developmental carryover, it is a workable routing in all mammals, and therefore lacks substance as an argument against design based upon "poor design."
Hi Darrel, thanks for the argument. That the RLN does all the things that Grays Anatomy says it does is not the point. It could have accomplished the same functions in a straight shot. It didn’t have to go down loop the Aorta and come back up. My point is that what is, looks more like the work of evolution rather than the work of an intelligent designer.
If you accept and old earth which I do, what are your options? 1) God created the earth 4.5 B years ago but created life 6000 years ago. This model doesn’t fit the evidence. Astrophysics of the earth-moon system shows a deceleration in the earth’s rotation causing the days to get longer. Consequently, there would be about 395 days /yr. in the middle Devonian. X-ray analysis of massive coral heads from the middle Devonian gave the number of days per year ranging between 385 and 410 days. 2) The Progressive Creationism that Jack suggests is nothing more that special creation spread over millions of years. It holds that God created in stages over hundreds of millions of years. In each stage God created new organisms by divine intervention (special creation). PC holds that species do not gradually appear by steady changes in ancestors. It accepts microevolution, but rejects macroevolution, and the idea of a universal common ancestor. The evidence doesn’t support this model either.