It Takes More Faith To Believe in God Than In Evolution

One of the more common jabs at evolution is the reverse of the title of this post, namely the quip that "it takes more faith to believe in evolution than in God." The attempted "clever" meaning of the statement is clear: evolution is so unlikely that God is actually the easier option to accept.

The first thing wrong with this argument is that it is fallacious. The more serious problem is that it is unbiblical.

It is fallacious because it is an argument from incredulity, which is indeed a fallacy. Wikipedia notes: 

Arguments from incredulity can take the form:

1. I cannot imagine how F could be true; therefore F must be false.
2. I cannot imagine how F could be false; therefore F must be true

Such arguments are not valid (even when accidentally correct). While you imagine that you have refuted or confirmed an position, you have in fact done nothing with any actual value.

"It takes more faith to believe in evolution than in God" as an argument against evolution is a logical error of the first type.

Generally this argument also uses the common straw-man caricatures of evolution, namely that is an undirected process of random mutations and survival of the fittest. Actually evolution is highly directed, and there are other important processes involved, including the most obvious: genetic variation as a result of sexual reproduction. There is also genetic drift and migration.

How is evolution highly directed? We mimic evolution in computer programs to solve nonlinear, multivariable optimizations with many local extrema that are not amenable to traditional derivative methods. The programs are called genetic algorithms. The idea is simple. You create some trial solutions (they don't have to be very good) and you specify a "fitness function." For example, in the famous Traveling Salesman problem, the solutions are paths taking us to all the cities in our territory, and the fitness function is the path length, the shorter the better. You then apply the methods of evolution to your solutions and evaluate the new generation.  The ones that do the best survive, the others die. This is not a random stroll, It is highly directed to find solutions with shorter paths. Only those solutions reproduce.

Actual evolution is even more directed, because the fitness function is the mother of all fitness functions: literal survival.

Okay, sorry for that rabbit trail. This post isn't really about the mechanisms of evolution. It's about the quantity of faith needed to accept evolution compared to the faith needed to believe in God.

How much faith do I need to believe in evolution?

Well, I need faith that the universe and the earth are old. We have many different sources for estimates of these ages, to include

1. Radiometric dating with different radio isotopes
2. Stellar evolution
3. The expansion of the universe (Hubble's Law)
4. Geography of strata
5. Plate techtonics
6. The cosmic microwave background 
7. The discovery of gravitational waves, and their agreement with theory

What do these all say? The say the universe and earth are billions of years old. Does it take more faith to believe in billions of years or to believe all these different approaches, which rely of different scientific theories, all conspire to give the same wrong answer? You tell me.

If we accept the earth is billions of years old, I still have to have faith that evolution occurred during that time period. To that end we have:

1. A huge fossil record including (despite weird claims to the contrary) transitional fossils.
2. Examples of evolution in the lab, including speciation.
3. The presence of vestigial organs, limbs, wings, etc.
4. Predictions of evolutionary theory, including (but not limited to) the fusion of a human chromosome (number 2) and the predicted (where and when) transitional fossil of the Tiktallik.

In short, it doesn't take much faith to believe ^[1] in evolution.

Now, how much faith does it take to believe in God? According to the Bible it might was well be infinite, because you will never muster enough faith without supernatural intervention:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8)

It takes nothing more than following the evidence to believe in evolution. (Which, by the way, doesn't prove that it is correct. Scientific theories are not really ever proven correct.) By contrast, it takes a supernatural act of God to acquire a saving faith.

By the way, I am a theistic evolutionist. I believe that God used evolution as his secondary means to create the diversity of life. I believe in God's sovereignty, and as such I believe that evolution was never outside of his control. This sometimes gets characterized as a form of deism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Deism would say that God set up the initial conditions and stood back as the universe marched forward in time, never intervening. Whatever happened, happened. Theistic evolution says that if God did not intervene in the evolutionary process,^[2] it wouldn't be that he has the disinterest of a deistic god, or that he couldn't have intervened if needed. It would be because he didn't have to. 

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^[1] By "believe" we mean "to accept as the current best scientific theory." 

^[2] And of course he might have intervened, but it would not have been because things were taking off in a direction he didn't intend or foresee, but rather because the intervention was always planned.