A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

God and the evolving universe

I’m glad to see that First Things made Avery Dulles’ article on God and evolution available as this month’s free article.

Dulles distinguishes three (non-creationist) approaches to evolution: theistic evolutionism which sees the process of evolution as the outworking of inherent properties of the universe established by God, Intelligent design, which claims that certain particular facets of the evolutionary process are inexplicable without reference to a divine intelligence, and what we might call “holism” which maintains that the behavior of higher existents (such as organisms) isn’t reducible to or fully explicable by the laws governing lower ones (such as the laws of chemistry or physics).

Dulles cites John Polkinghorne as an example of someone in this third school of thought. In his recent book Exploring Reality Polkinghorne makes that interesting suggestion that the human mind’s access to a realm of intelligible universals such as mathematics and logic, goodness and beauty, could itself be a factor in human evolution. That is, he wants to expand the relevant sense of “environment” to include the non-physical “environment” of the intelligible world.

Polkinghorne writes:

Once one accepts the enrichment beyond the merely material of the context within which human life is lived, one is no longer restricted to the notion of Darwinian survival necessity as providing the sole engine driving hominid development. In these noetic realms of rational skill, moral imperative, and aesthetic delight–of encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful–other forces are at work to draw out and enhance distinctive human potentialities. (p. 56)

Obviously Polkinghorne isn’t suggesting that our cognitive access to the non-material intelligible realm alters the individual genetic structure that is passed on to one’s descendants. Rather, it creates

a language-based Lamarckian ability to transfer information from one generation to the next through a process whose efficiency vastly exceeded the slow and uncertain Darwinian method of differential propagation. It is in these ways that a recognition of the many-layered character of reality, and the variety of modes of response to it, make intelligible the rapid development of the remarkable distinctiveness of human nature. (p. 57)

The idea here is that human development is explained, at least in part, by the responses we make to this more comprehensive “environment” that includes the realm of intelligible truth, goodness, and beauty and thus isn’t reducible to more materialistic accounts.

Dulles cautions against the “God of the gaps” thinking that seems to characterize the Intelligent Design school, but he also warns that “Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic colleagues.”

They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this ­fashion.

The kind of holism championed by thinkers like Polkinghorne (I’d also place Keith Ward somewhere in this school) seeks to show how God can influence the process of evolution without resorting to the kind of tinkering that ID theorists seem to imply. Some process thinkers, for instance, describe God as “luring” creation toward certain states of being. Polkinghorne (as well as Ward, I think) wants to say that God intervenes in more direct ways too. But I have to say that I find Polkinghorne’s concept of “downward” causation as the input of information by which he tries to explain God’s action in the world pretty darn obscure, at least as it pertains to action on non-living/non-intelligent things.*

What Polkinghorne, et al. are up to here, it seems to me, is trying to thread a third way between the deism of the theistic evolution crowd and the God-of-the-gaps tinkering of the ID crowd. They base this partly on the idea that modern science has shown the physical universe to have a “looser” causal structure than that imagined by classic Newtonian physics (and more to the point its philosophical popularizers). If physical events are underdetermined by preceding ones, then there appears to be room for God to exert some kind of influence without “violating” the laws of nature. The trick, or so it seems, is to give some account of how God exerts that influence without conceiving of it in some kind of quasi-physical infusion of energy. That’s what I take Polkinghorne to be getting at in talking about causation by means of “information.”
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*I note that next month the Templeton Foundation Press is reissuing Ward’s Divine Action which seeks to address these questions. That’s one that’s probably worth checking out.

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9 responses to “God and the evolving universe”

  1. gaius sempronius gracchus

    You write,

    Dulles distinguishes three (non-creationist) approaches to evolution: theistic evolutionism which sees the process of evolution as the outworking of inherent properties of the universe established by God, Intelligent design, which claims that certain particular facets of the evolutionary process are inexplicable without reference to a divine intelligence, and what we might call “holism” which maintains that the behavior of higher existents (such as organisms) isn’t reducible to or fully explicable by the laws governing lower ones (such as the laws of chemistry or physics).

    On the face of it, these 3 seem fully compatible. If I believed in matter they would all 3 seem true.

    The ID thesis as represented in this snip does not require any sort of divine intervention, but only that the basic properties of things be well-selected, as it were. Too well-selected not to justify belief.

    And the adversion to emergent capacities seems to allow moral, aesthetic, and other knowledge to result in human action that would be inexplicable in terms solely of laws governing “the lower” but still, as it were, “on the cards from the start.”

    If this last is God’s only ongoing causal relation with the creation, I don’t quite see it unless it’s some sort of leading us thru the good, the true, and the beautiful. Anyway, it looks nothing like direct intervention in the order of efficient causation as understood by physics, chemistry, etc.

    Personally, I think there is a real problem for any theology that denies outright, miraculous intervention by God in the order of things, whether it be in large events (the virgin birth, the resurrection) or in less obtrusive ways (healings, perhaps, that would not otherwise have happened. God as Aesculapius.)

    Without it, “providence” is a metaphor or a fantasy, and the reality is that God started the world running (so to speak) and then walked away, leaving us abandoned, whether or not well provided for.

    And I say that though I am bearing in mind that God’s continuous creative activity is what keeps us and all contingent things in being.

    If he does not intervene, all he does (given omniscience) is watch. God as voyeur?

    Reply
  2. Lee

    I think you’re right that they’re technically compatible positions (and I would fully expect someone who believed 2 or 3 to also believe 1), but there do appear to be some people who believe 1 but not 2 or 3.

    Frankly, I’m not exactly sure what kind of intervention ID theorists are positing when they say, for instance, that DNA couldn’t have occurred on the odds given by sheerly natural processes. Are they saying that the processes which resulted in DNA are natural though “selected” by God for the end result? Or are they saying that God intervenes in those processes at a particular point in order to bring about certain results?

    I agree about providence and intervention – and yet for those interventions to be “miraculous” aren’t we assuming some kind of hands off policy in the general run of things? In other words, does God need to intervene in an extraordinary way in order to get the creatures he intended to come into existence?

    (Love the throwaway line of “if I believed in matter” btw.)

    Reply
  3. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    You write,

    Frankly, I’m not exactly sure what kind of intervention ID theorists are positing when they say, for instance, that DNA couldn’t have occurred on the odds given by sheerly natural processes.

    Are they saying that the processes which resulted in DNA are natural though “selected” by God for the end result?

    Or are they saying that God intervenes in those processes at a particular point in order to bring about certain results?

    Personally, I have always found the traditional presentations of the ancestor of ID, the argument from design, ambiguous in just this way.

    Imagine the world is a watch built out of little brass bits.

    So, is the argument supposed to prove that little brass bits couldn’t get into that shape without a guiding hand (a miraculous interventionist view)?

    Or that the stuff of nature couldn’t have been little brass bits (thus enabling the “natural” occurence of watches!) if God had not created the world so (God stacked the deck by picking convient fundamental properties for the universe “at the outset’)?

    The old-style design argument usually looks more like the first way, I think.

    And ID looks to differ from it by looking more like the second.

    And I was assuming that when I said 1 thru 3 were all compatible, as you noted, I think.

    It’s perfectly possible that, since they don’t seem to trouble to be clear, sometimes they argue for the one view and sometimes for the other.

    And it’s a possible view, I suppose, that God “stacked the deck” wrt some things and still actually intervened wrt others!

    As for me, I’m still an idealist. So there is no real physical nature for any of these views to “get right,” if I’m right.

    Though I could change my mind at any time.

    Reply
  4. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Sorry, got so lost in that I missed your questions. I’m a bit of a scatter-brain, sometimes.

    I was thinking that the natural way to understand that “God is with us” is, or seems to be, for most people, to suppose that, much as the bible stories relate, God is an actual player who does identifiable “mighty deeds” at identifiable places and times, sometimes with witnesses.

    Sometimes very odd and conspicuous things happen that would not have happened in the normal course of things had God not chosen to do something about them, and he did.

    So think the Jews re the parting of the Red Sea. So think many Christians re the Virgin Birth and Jesus walking on water and Jesus raising Lazarus and Jesus rising from the dead.

    And so think many of many different religions regarding medically unexpected and inexplicable cures.

    They think God is a player in space and time, just like us. Is the pen on the table because you put it there? And did the walls of Jericho fall because God gave them a shove?

    Yes, of course, God supports the whole creation, all the time. But, though more “hands on” than this theatrical simile allows, that is a lot like being the producer – or even the writer – of a play. Is he also an actor with a role of his own? Or does he just watch from the wings?

    I realize that many theologians – most? – write of providential governance of the world as though it might not require actual intervention.

    Think of Calvinists with their “meticulous providence” that requires no more – and no less – than that, in effect, God settle the truth value of all contingents, himself alone deciding in all detail what possible world is the actual world.

    Does that require that God, in order to settle all those truth values, intervene where the ordinary processes of nature do not suffice?

    It would if total physical determinism were not true, I think, since then there will be events that were determined by him but were not determined by their physical antecedents.

    I will here boldly be an incompatibilist and say that when we do that and move our arms it’s called “agent causation.” When God does that and moves the walls at Jericho it’s called “a miracle.”

    On the other hand, more than one philosopher has thought of God as the “soul of the world.”

    😉

    PS. A traditional Catholic argument (intended not as deductively compelling but as rationally persuasive) to move deists to accept the whole magilla of Christian orthodoxy appeals to the idea that a loving and omnipotent God who actually created us and all the world certainly could do miracles, and would surely not have put us in a world like this and just left us here.

    Surely, he would “give us a sign” to let us know he was there and loved us, and meant well by us.

    And surely he would have plans to remedy all things, wiping away every tear.

    Whatever you or I may think of such arguments, which are intended to lend credibility to even such things as eschatology, they do have a certain poignance.

    And both giving a sign and wiping away tears would seem to require miracles.

    (Of course, if there is no such thing as matter and idealism is true, then these stories need some adjustment.)

    Reply
  5. bs

    Another fascinating exchange. As to Gaius’s final point: insofar as you mean Kantian Idealism, I don’t think that it stands for the proposition that there is “no such thing as matter,” only that we don’t have access to matter-in-itself. Indeed, one-half of the Kantian antinomy is precisely that it is entirely plausible on appearances that the world is nothing more than matter predictably behaving in accordance with scientific laws (the other half is that it nevertheless really seems like we’re making impactful choices). Don’t mean to be nitpicky. In fact, I’d love to address the merits of the discussion but I have a silly academic thing that I’m terribly behind on.

    Reply
  6. Lee

    Hey, bs, good to hear from you. I imagine that Gaius is referring to something more like Berkeleyean idealism, based on comments he’s made in the past.

    Regarding the question of intervention I think Leibniz (yet another variety of idealist!) argued that miracles are properly seen in the context of God’s entire providential order and not as violations of it. In other words, the “natural order” is only a subset of the entire order which, if we had access to it, would make the miracles entirely explicable in the sense that we would see how they made sense as part of the whole. Whatever the drawbacks this view may have it has the virtue of readjusting our sight a bit so miracles aren’t seen as “interruptions” or “violations” of God’s preestablished order.

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  7. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Pshaw. A rose by any other name . . .

    Reply
  8. bs

    Ah, Berkeley and Leibniz. I haven’t read them since Modern Philosophy I in college. I recall that I really liked them both, particularly the latter. Without my Copleston handy, however, I’m afraid that I just can’t remember enough to comment helpfully.

    Reply
  9. BJ.Coombs

    Read my book on http://www.all-creatures.org/ach

    Reply

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