This is a bit late for the Darwin 200th birthday bash, but I thought it might be worth jotting down some thoughts on Christianity and evolution. This post could serve as a kind of summary of things I’ve been thinking and reading about over the last few years, though naturally they’re all subject to revision:

1. The argument over “literal” vs. “non-literal” readings of Genesis 1-3 is, in my view, a total red herring. It just seems clear from the text itself that what we’re dealing with there is myth or “saga” (to use Karl Barth’s term). That doesn’t mean that the stories don’t contain memories of some historical events, but their main point is to illustrate key truths about God’s relationship to creation and to humankind.

2. “Young earth creationism” is an intellectually bankrupt position and not worth taking seriously. Not only does it require rejecting virtually all modern biology, but also geology and astrophysics. A “young earth” is simply not tenable given current knowledge about the physical world. Moreover, as noted above, nothing in the Bible compels us to posit a young earth.

3. “Intelligent design” has always struck me as completely beside the point. Once you grant that life evolved through a gradual process, it seems unnecessary–or at least premature–to assert that God tinkered with the process at various observable points. Better to think that God superintends the entire evolutionary process.

4. A common response to evolution among mainline Christians–at least in my experience–is to accept it, but to keep the scientific and religious outlooks in hermetically sealed compartments. Apart from rejecting “literal” readings of Genesis, evolution has too often been prevented affect theology’s content.

5. Specifically, there are several particular areas where evolution poses a challenge to traditional Christian beliefs that are still taken for granted, even among people who reject creationism.

5a. The problem of evil: traditionally (though not unanimously) Christians often held that death and suffering only entered the world when human beings sinned. Thus God could be relieved from any responsibility for the world’s suffering. But modern biology tells us that death and suffering not only pre-dated human beings, they are inextricable parts of the evolutionary process itself. Without them, life wouldn’t have been able to develop. This would seem to require a re-thinking of God’s relation to these processes.

5b. Humans as part of creation: Christian theology has usually emphasized humanity’s transcendence over nature, focusing on our reason or free will or some other capacity that sets us decisively apart from the rest of the animal kingdom (though the Bible itself has a more balanced and “earthy” view). But we now know not only that we emerged from animal life, but that many of the differences we once thought were unique to humankind have been shown to be present to some degree in other animals, including reason and morality. This challenges the anthropocentrism of much traditional theology, but opens the possibility of a truly theocentric theology, which only seems proper.

5c. Original sin: Just as evolutionary theory denies that suffering entered the world with humanity, it also denies that humans lived in a paradisiacal state of innocence prior to a historic “fall.” And if there was no historic fall, then it’s difficult to know what to make of the teaching that, because of Adam’s transgression, humanity was cursed with death and incurred an inherited guilt, with the implication that each one of us would be properly damned were it not for Christ’s atoning death. This isn’t to deny that human beings are “turned in on themselves,” to borrow Luther’s phrase. But this should probably be seen as a legacy of our evolutionary heritage and/or cultural transmission.

5d: Atonement: The abandonment of a “forensic” account of original guilt would also seem to require re-thinking the atonement as a sacrifice for human sin required to balance the books with God. We might say instead that, in the Incarnation, God pledges God’s love to creation by identifying with it, including with the suffering victims of the evolutionary process, and re-creates human nature in Jesus, making possible our participation in a new humanity lived in restored relationship with God, each other, and the rest of creation.

5e. Eschatology: if humans are embedded in the physical world in a much more profound way than we previously imagined, we can begin to recover aspects of the Christian tradition which hold out hope for a redemption of all creation.

6. Some Christians have tried to avoid some of the apparent implications of evolution by positing a “cosmic fall”: sin and suffering entered the world through the actions of supra-human intelligences (the devil or his minions), and this accounts for the evil we see in the world. I think this is untenable for a variety of reasons, preeminently because it implies that the world isn’t really God’s creation, since it developed from a primal state of affairs that was corrupted at a fundamental level. This view skates too close to gnosticism and is contrary to the balance of the biblical witness.

7. Other Christians have gone to the opposite extreme and embraced a kind of nature mysticism. They view the natural world almost as ultimate reality itself, thinking that whatever happens in nature is right and embracing a kind of ethical Darwinism. The error here is to treat nature not just as God’s good creation, but as a finished product. Instead, we should see nature as “in process” and “groaning in travail,” destined for a redemption where suffering and evil will be banished and all God’s creatures will be given the opportunity to flourish. Nature by itself doesn’t provide the standard for morality, though the study of nature can provide us with knowledge about what’s good for us and for other creatures.

In a sense, I think some very conservative Christians have sound instincts in rejecting evolution, since it does pose challenges to certain traditional formulations of the faith and requires a significant re-thinking of what is essential and what isn’t in Christian belief. But if rejection isn’t an option, as it’s not for me, it’s not enough to treat science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” as Stephen Jay Gould suggested. Religion makes truth claims, and Christianity in particular makes claims about God’s relation to and involvement with the world. Consequently, as our knowledge of the world changes, our understanding of how God relates to it may have to change too.