President Obama's nomination this week of Francis Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health was politically smart. Collins, an evolutionist and an evangelical Christian, has wide appeal. One day he can be speaking at an international gathering of leading scientists and the next at a suburban mega-church. In fact Collins is quite interested in maintaining the harmony between these two worlds. It is true that many Christians are evolutionists, but many others are not. Collins seeks to remedy the misconceptions he sees as motivating such skepticism.

All of this seems entirely politically correct. Do evolutionists have any grounds for complaint against the long-time NIH scientist and leader of the high-profile Human Genome Project? Yes they do.

Like the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, Collins gets stuck on the moral law within. Can evolution really describe altruism? Indeed the evolutionary explanations are rather silly, and for all of his promotion of evolution Collins cannot go the full distance. The moral law remains an enigma in the twenty first century.

For this breach of faith Collins is attacked by his fellow evolutionists. PZ Myers and others cannot tolerate such skepticism. Doesn't Collins know that evolution has plenty of just-so stories to explain behavior such as altruism?

Furthermore, Myers and other evolutionists point out that Collins' skepticism is a gods-of-the-gaps argument. This is yet another one of evolution's religious arguments. Dating back to certain seventeenth century Anglicans, it is a general-purpose religious argument that can be used to rebuke any and all scientific problems with evolution. The empirical evidence is inconsequential--no matter how contradictory are the data, evolutionists mandate naturalistic explanations. We may not know how altruism evolved, but it must have evolved. To think otherwise is to commit the sin of gap thinking.

So evolutionists such as Myers use non scientific concerns to mute the science. Their scientific "method" overrules the evidence. There is no option for contemplating possibilities; no allowance for tentatively considering alternatives. Evolution is a fact. As one evolutionist typically put it:

If a given problem appears to be merely unsolved, then he'll leave it to the realm of science; if, on the other hand, Collins deems a question to be unsolvable, it's fair game for inclusion in a spiritual interpretation of the universe.

And that's a no-no for evolutionists. They mandate that all phenomena can be accurately explained naturalistically. One need not be a philosopher to see that this claim to completeness, realism and naturalism does not come from science.

But the criticism of Collins ceases when he uses the standard religious arguments for evolution. For instance, appealing to the genetic data he is familiar with, Collins makes the usual "God wouldn't do it that way" arguments:

Most mammals, for example, do not need dietary sources of vitamin C because they can make their own using an enzyme encoded in their genomes. But primates, including humans, require vitamin C in their diet, or they will suffer a disease called scurvy. What happened here? Well, if you search through the human genome, you will find a degenerated copy of the gene for this vitamin C synthesizing enzyme. But it has sustained a knockout blow, losing more than half of its coding sequence. A claim that the human genome was created by God independently rather than being part of descent from a common ancestor would mean God intentionally inserted a nonfunctioning piece of DNA into our genomes to test our faith. Unless you are willing to contemplate the idea of God as a deceiver, this is not a comfortable explanation.

Collins' logic is faulty (common ancestry is not the only naturalistic explanation), but more importantly, as Elliott Sober has pointed out, the strength of the evolutionary argument comes not from its premises about common ancestry, but from its premises about separate ancestry. It always comes down to judgments about God.

This is a standard evolutionary argument and it is no surprise that evolutionists, though harsh in their criticism of Collins' skepticism of evolutionary explanations for altruism, stand mute as Collins promotes the usual religious arguments that mandate evolution.

It is the ultimate display of hypocrisy. Religion drives evolution, and yet evolutionists don the white lab coat and point fingers at anyone who dare make inferences from the data, castigating them as "religiously-driven." As evolutionist Jerry Coyne wrote, "I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science." Translation: "I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was evolution."

New research is providing a fascinating new perspective on fine-tuning and a three hundred year old debate. First for the context. When Isaac Newton figured out how the solar system worked he also detected a stability problem. Could the smooth-running machine go unstable, with planets smashing into each other? This is what the math indicated. But on the other hand, we're still here. How could that be?

According to the Whig historians, Newton, a theist, solved the problem by invoking a divine finger. God must occasionally tweak the controls to keep things from getting out of control. It explained why the solar system hasn't come to ruin, and it provided a role for divine providence which, otherwise, might not be needed for the cosmic machine that ran on its own.

About a century later, Whig history tells us, the French mathematician and scientist Pierre Laplace solved the stability problem when he figured out that Newton's bothersome instabilities would iron themselves out over the long run. The solar system was inherently stable after all, with no need of divine adjustment, thank you.

Newton's sin was to use god to plug a gap in our knowledge. What a terrible idea. First, using god to plug gaps is a science-stopper. Why investigate further if god fixes the tough problems? And second, it damages our faith when science eventually solves the problem and the divine role is further diminished. The key to avoiding this problem is to sequester religious thinking to its proper role. Science and religion must be separated lest both be damaged.

That's the Whig history. Now for what actually happened. Newton was less the doctrinaire and Laplace was less the savior than the Whigs would have it. Newton was more circumspect than is told, and Laplace didn't actually solve the problem. True, he thought he had solved the problem, but his claim may indicate more about evolutionary thinking than anything to do with science.

You see, Newton's allowing for divine adjustments never shut down scientific inquiry. The brightest minds were all over the problem (though it is a difficult problem and would take many years to even get the wrong answer). And no one's faith was shattered when Laplace produced his incredibly complicated calculus solution because they were banking on some Newtonian interventionism.

But what did raise tempers was the very thought of God not only creating a system in need of repair, but then stooping so low as to adjust the controls of the errant machine. The early evolutionary thinker and Newton rival, Gottfried Leibniz found the idea more than disgraceful. The Lutheran intellectual accused Newton of disrespect for God in proposing the idea the God was not sufficiently skilled to create a self-sufficient clockwork universe.

The problem with Newton's notion of divine providence was not that it is a science stopper (if anything such thinking spurs on scientific curiosity) or a faith killer when solutions are found. The problem is that it violates our deeply held gnosticism, which is at the foundation of evolutionary thought. Darwin and later evolutionists have echoed Leibniz' religious sentiment time and again. Everyone knew what the "right answer" was, and one wonders if the cultural-religious mandate for stability of the solar system influenced Laplace.

Today the question of the solar system's stability remains a difficult problem. It does appear, however, that its stability is a consequence of some rather fine-tuning. Fascinating new research seems to add to this story. The new results indicate that the solar system could become unstable if diminutive Mercury, the inner most planet, enters into a dance with Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest of all. The resulting upheaval could leave several planets in rubble, including our own.

Using Newton's model of gravity, the chances of such a catastrophe were estimated to be greater than 50/50 over the next 5 billion years. But interestingly, accounting for Albert Einstein's minor adjustments (according to his theory of relativity), reduce the chances to just 1%.

Like so much of evolutionary theory, this is an intriguing story because not only is the science interesting, but it is part of a larger confluence involving history, philosophy and theology.