Eugene Volokh asks, "Is evolution a threat to religious belief?" His answer is confused, and the more he thrashes around, the more he muddles his argument. He's responding to a post by Michael Shermer that takes Intelligent Design creationism to task, and is specifically reacting to a poll question and some general comments by Shermer that reject the existence of God.

Well, if "the standard scientific theory" is that "God had no part" in the process of evolution -- not just that human beings developed in a particular way, but that God didn't guide this -- then it seems to me that the theory of evolution is a challenge to many people's deeply held religious convictions. And that's so not just as to the young-earthers who believe the Earth was created several thousand years ago, but also to people who are willing to embrace the scientific evidence but see the guiding hand of God in the process.

He's got one thing wrong and one thing right. "The standard scientific theory" does not say anything at all about God. It doesn't say he exists or doesn't, it doesn't even mention him; you can read through book after book, rummage through all the primary research papers in the scientific literature, and his name simply does not come up. I think that's telling in itself, but Volokh is arguing over the wording of some comments in the popular press, not the actual scientific interpretation.

What he has right, though, is that science does challenge religious convictions. Literalism is nonsense; the young earth malarkey is idiocy; any claim of direct, observable divine action in the history of life on earth is extremely dubious and steadily decreasing in probability. The religious are going to have to get used to it. Where reality conflicts with dogma and doctrine, I know what side I'm going to be on.

Although this is the kind of debate on which reasonable people can have an interesting discussion, some things are just annoying and need to be cleanly squashed. Like this:

What's more, how exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that "God had no part in this process"? What's their proof? That's the sort of thing that can't really be proved, it seems to me -- which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can't prove.

Complete drivel. Scientists don't talk about "proof", period. We leave that to the mathematicians. This is something I yell at my freshman biology majors, by the way. I know it's out of the purview of a scholar of constitutional law, but if he's going to make claims about science, shouldn't he know the bare basics of the discipline?

Change the word "proof" to "evidence", and it makes more sense. It's still wrong, but at least he isn't railing against a straw man anymore.

And on top of that, if the standard scientific theory is that "God had no part in this process," then the opponents of evolution are right -- the standard theory of evolution may not be taught in the schools. The Court has repeatedly said that the Establishment Clause bars both government endorsement and disapproval of religion. Teaching that God exists and teaching that God doesn't exist are both unconstitutional in government-run schools. Likewise, if teaching that God created humans is unconstitutional, so is teaching that God had no part in creating humans.

Then we can't teach anything that shows a material cause for any action, because that would show that God was unnecessary. There goes physics, chemistry, geology, biology…. Volokh is asking us to paralyze our critical thinking facilities lest we contradict religious zealots.

Here's a simple example of the nature of the evidence against any god's role in various processes. Take a coin and flip it a hundred times; you'll get somewhere around 50 heads, and somewhere around 50 tails. You won't see predictable patterns; you can do multiple trials; you can do statistics. All we see are the outcomes of some fairly consistent laws of probability. Now, if you want, you can argue for a rule-bound god that is the laws of probability, and that's one common "out"—that's the kind of pantheistic deity Einstein had in mind.

What would be silly, though, is what the creationists want to do. What they want to argue is the equivalent of saying that in our trial of 100 coin flips, that third one that came up heads and the 87th one that came up tails were willed by God. They have no evidence for the assertion, they just say it is so. Can scientists "prove" that claim is false? No. We can say, though, that it is an unnecessary hypothesis, that the observations all fit within standard probabilities, and that the claimant is going to have to come up with better evidence for an extraordinary claim than voices whispering in his head.

Ultimately what this kind of argument means is that the proponent is favoring a God of the Noise, a deity who slips into random variation and makes minute tweaks, always in balance, so that the net outcome is unbiased. I should think that is even more theologically demeaning than the God of the Gaps.

Now here's what I think Mr. Shermer is driving at by saying that "God had no part in this process" is the standard scientific theory: The standard theory tries to explain how humans might have evolved without calling on God as an explanation. This isn't because scientists can prove that God doesn't exist in any logical or even empirical sense of "prove." Nor is it because assuming that God had no part in the process is more consistent with the facts than assuming that he did have a part in the process; the God assumption is perfecty consistent with the facts. Nor is it even because in some abstract sense omitting God yields the simplest explanation; "God did it" (3 words!) is a much simpler explanation than the theory of evolution.

More drivel. First, do I have to repeat myself on the naive use of the word "prove" again? Second, parsimony is not defined by the number of words behind an explanation, especially not when one of the words is a galumphing mega-colossus like "god". Nor is a vague, superficial consistency of any value: "God did it" is also a consistent explanation of the reality of how kidneys work, I suppose, but you'd damn well better hope your doctor knows something about salt regulation, nephric function, and renal circulation if you're in kidney failure.

I would also add that for a theory to be of any use, details are important. "God did it" does not tell us anything about why we have kidneys instead of salt-secreting lachrymal glands, or what ADH, aldosterone, renin and angiotensin do. So why should anyone settle for such a useless, empty phrase? Why should it be an acceptable substitute for evolution, but not for physiology?

I'm being hard on Volokh, because I think most of his argument is incoherent babble. I do think, though, that eventually he settles on a reasonable conclusion.

In that sense, the theory may be described as "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, and we can explain that without bringing in God's intervention." Many scientists conclude that this explanation makes it more plausible that God had no part in the process. Others may conclude that if there's no evidence supporting the existence of some influence, it's methodologically more useful to assume that the influence doesn't exist until some supporting evidence is found. Still others may use "God had no part in this process" as shorthand for "God had no observable part in this process."

Yes, exactly. There is no evidence for gods of any kind, so it would be exceedingly silly to incorporate them into our theories. There's also no evidence for Cthulhu, Thor, Marvin the Martian, or sentient gas clouds spitting DNA at us. Science doesn't bother with those hypotheses, either, but neither do scientists mince words when someone comes whining that we have to teach our kids about their great theory of Martian Marvintervention—we just say no. Come back when you've got some reasonable evidence.

Until then, we should teach that naturalism and materialism are adequate explanations for worldly phenomena. Does Volokh know that that is what Phillip Johnson and his cronies at the Discovery Institute are actually attacking, beyond evolution? Their goal is to get the supernatural accepted as legitimate forces in science, sans evidence.

In answer to Volokh's question about whether evolution is a threat to religious belief, I'd have to say yes, it definitely is, to most forms of religious belief. But that's because reality is a threat to those same beliefs.

Ophelia Benson makes a similar point: what it's all about is how well our ideas accord with reality.