A Thinking Reed

Category: Science and Religion

  • Is theistic evolution incoherent?

    At the First Things blog, Joe Carter has a post challenging the coherence of “theistic evolution.” This view, held by people like Kenneth Miller, accepts the orthodox Darwinist position that the evolution of human beings did not require any special intervention by God (contra both old-school creationists and Intelligent Design proponents). Further, according to an article that Carter quotes, Miller denies that God has human beings specifically in mind. Instead, God “set up” the evolutionary process so that some intelligent creatures capable of offering praise to their Creator would emerge, but not necessarily human beings.

    Carter writes:

    If God did not have a plan for the specific outcome of evolution, as MIller contends, then he must have at least had a general plan for the process to create some form of creature with “exceptional mental capabilities.” But then the process would no longer be undirected, which means that it is not compatible with the Darwinian view of evolution.

    Ironically, the view held by [Francis] Collins and Miller shares much in common with the position of creationists. If evolution is random and undirected then the probability of a “creature capable of praising Him” (i.e., a being similar to humans) coming into existence is extremely low. God would likely need to run the experiment a number of times to get the desired outcome and then select that instantiation (maybe that’s why we have the multiverse). This special selection of results, however, is not so different than creationist’s view of special creation—in each God simply chooses the outcome he desires. Also, Collins’ view of God making evolution appear undirected is similar to the idea that he planted dinosaur fossils and created geological strata to fool us into thinking the earth has been around more than 6,000 years. Creationists have to interpret the evidence to fit their theological preconceptions; Collins has to interpret the evidence to fit his theoretical preconceptions.

    I think Carter goes astray here by taking the language of “random and undirected” too literally. Clearly, evolution is not random in any absolute sense: it operates within the constraints provided locally by the environment and the qualities possessed by organisms, and globally by the fundamental constituents of the universe (e.g, the laws that govern the behavior of subatomic particles). There are reasons–which have been widely canvassed–for thinking that the emergence of intelligent life is, if not inevitable, then at least intelligible given the nature of our universe. All a theistic evolutionist is committed to is that God set up those fundamental constraints in such a way that He could foresee–at least with a high degree of probability–that intelligent life would emerge at some point.

    The difference between the theistic evolutionist and the ID proponent is that the former doesn’t think we need to appeal to special divine intervention to explain how life (including human life) evolved. We can ask why the universe has the fundamental constituents it does and not others, and this is where the theistic evolutionist might bring in God. But it’s important to note that this doesn’t present a conflict with orthodox Darwinism; biologists qua biologists don’t ask, much less answer, the question of why the universe has the basic features it does. That’s a properly philosophical (and perhaps theological) question. The fact that a high percentage of evolutionary biologists are atheists isn’t particularly relevant. The theistic evolution position is an interpretation of the process as a whole, not an appeal to God as one causal input among others.

    I should add that I’m not personally dogmatically committed to the view that God never intervenes in the evolutionary process. There are a variety of models on offer for thinking about how God might do that without giving up the idea of a basically law-like process. Nevertheless, the methodological naturalism of biology is entirely appropriate; I just don’t see how ID constitutes a research program. What we can and should do as Christians is offer a way of integrating the findings of the sciences with a richer picture of reality that takes account of all our experience (moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.). Reality is a many-layered thing.

    It also strikes me that Kenneth Miller’s statement that human beings are “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out” is a salutary and properly humbling one. Christian theology has been entirely too anthropocentric, and a more theocentric and creation-centric perspective is urgently needed.

    UPDATE: See also this post from the ubiquitous John Schwenkler who, in addition to his other gigs, is now blogging at “dotCommonweal,” the Commonweal magazine blog. I should note, in clarification, that I was assuming, for the purposes of this post, that God is not eternal in the traditional sense of being “outside” of time altogether. I have some problems with the traditional view of God’s timelessness, and I think attributing temporality to God can be combined with a sufficiently robust notion of divine transcendence. I recognize that this is a minority position in the tradition, and John’s approach is certainly a legitimate one to take.

  • This is your brain on God

    Marvin hits the nail on the head here: just because an experience can be artificially reproduced doesn’t mean it isn’t genuine or veridical when it occurs under other circumstances.

    Why would we expect that religious or mystical experiences, if genuine, would bypass the brain anyway? In fact, why would we even think that’s possible?

  • God and the multiverse

    An interesting article dealing with how some religious believers are dealing with the idea, suggested from some of the more speculative corners of contemporary physics, that our universe is simply one part of a vast “multiverse” (via the First Things blog, I think).

    Among other things, the multiverse hypothesis seems to pose a challenge for certain modern arguments for God’s existence based on the so-called anthropic principle, or the appearance that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. People have suggested that the fact of this apparent fine-tuning provides some kind of evidence for the existence of God (how much evidence is a matter of debate). However, if our universe is just one among many (an infinity?) of actualized universes, then the emergence of a universe fit for life would seem to be inevitalbe, or at least much more likely, without requiring an intelligent creator.

    Interestingly, Arthur Peacocke addressed this issue some time ago in his Gifford Lecutres, collected in his book Theology for a Scientific Age. He argues that you can avoid the multiverse problem by simply taking the argument up a level:

    Whatever the constraints and framework of meta-laws and supervening relations that operate in bringing about the range constituting any postulated ensemble of universes, they must be of such a kind as to enable in one of the universes (this one) the combination of parameters, fundamental constants, etc., to be such that living organisms, including ourselves, could come into existence in some corner of it. So, on this argument, it is as significant that the ensemble of universes should be of such a kind that persons have emerged as it would be if ours were the only universe. (p. 109)

    One possible problem I see with Peacocke’s argument is that it seems to depend on whether the multiverse is supposed to contain all merely physical possibilities (i.e. those universes which are possible given the fundamental “constraints and framework” of the multiverse, whatever those are) or to exhaust all logically possible universes. If the latter, then there would be no anthropic coincidence to explain, since the actually existing multiverse would be the only one that could exist. On the other hand, I’m not sure how we could establish that whatever fundamental framework governs the multiverse was the only logically possible (i.e., self-consistent) one. I also don’t have a terribly firm grasp on what motivates the entire theory, so I’m not sure how its proponents would characterize it given these options.

  • BSG and green anarchy

    An interesting–though somewhat spoiler-y!–analysis of some of the themes in the Battlestar Galactica finale. (Via Jim Henley; also see Jim’s thoughts here.)

  • Salvation as re-creation

    A while back I wrote about Keith Ward’s understanding of how God acts in the world, as explained in his book Divine Action. Later in the book he devotes a chapter to the incarnation and offers an interpretation of the atonement.

    Ward argues that Jesus is properly seen as the enfleshment or embodiment of God’s love in the world: “We could then say that Jesus does not only tell us about God’s love or even act out a living parable for the distinctly existing love of God. Rather, what he enacts is the very love of God itself, as embodied in this human world and for us human beings” (p. 215).

    However, the incarnation isn’t merely a lesson for us about God’s love. Or, as Ward says, “Jesus is not primarily an educator, who comes to bring salvation through knowledge, achieved in meditation and stilling of the individual mind” (p. 221). The human predicament is more radical than that; “liberal” views of the atonement sometimes suggest that we merely need to see or learn what is right in order to do it, reducing Jesus to an example:

    [God] cannot simply forgive us, while we are unable to turn from our sin — that would be to say that it does not really matter; that somehow we can love God while at the same time continuing to hate him! He cannot compel us to love him, without depriving us of the very freedom that has cost so much to give us. He cannot leave us in sin; for then his purpose in creation would be wholly frustrated. (p. 222)

    What Ward suggests instead is that the atonement is God re-creating human nature in the life of Jesus. In his life, obedience, suffering, passion, and death, Jesus re-enacts the drama of human life, but in a way that maintains its complete fidelity to God. He thus overcomes sin and the powers of evil to which we are subject. “He takes human nature through the valley of the shadow of death, and in him alone that nature is not corrupted. He is the one victor over evil; he has experienced the worst it can do, and he has overcome it” (p. 223).

    In Jesus, human nature is made anew, the way God intends for it to be. But how can this help us? Aren’t we still stuck in our sins? Ward contends that Christ can help us because he “has remade human nature in an uncorrupted form” (p. 223), and we can participate in that nature, or have it implanted in us through faith in Christ. As St. Paul puts it, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).

    The nature that we receive from God is a human nature that has triumphed over evil, that has entered into its heart and remained uncorrupted. It is not that God simply creates a new nature in us when we ask; but that he takes human nature to himself, shows what it truly is and what its destiny is and shows that it cannot be conquered by sin and death. That is the nature he places within us, making us sons by adoption, taken into the life of the Son.

    This view seems to have more affinities with the Eastern Christian emphasis on theosis than certain substitutionary or retributive models of the atonement promulgated in the West, particularly since the Reformation.

    The idea of incarnation and atonement as “new creation” also, it can be argued, fits better with an evolutionary view of the development of human nature. As I’ve argued before, evolution seems to require that we relinquish the supposition that humans existed in a state of perfect righteousness prior to a historical fall. Instead, we might propose that early human beings were immature and undeveloped and that God intended them to develop along a certain path. Instead, however, humanity has taken the wrong road, preferring self-seeking, greed, and violence to altruism, justice and peace. Atonement, then, consists of setting us back on the right road.

    A view very much like this has been developed by George L. Murphy, a physicist and Lutheran pastor, in two interesting articles: “Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin” and “Chiasmic Cosmology and Atonement.” Regarding atonement as re-creation, Murphy writes:

    Atonement comes about because God in Christ actually does something to change the status of people who “were dead through the trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). To be effective, the work of Christ must overcome the nothingness toward which sinful humanity is headed, a nothingness which through its terror of death, guilt, and meaninglessness, it already experiences. If humanity and (as we shall note later) the rest of creation with it, is on the way to nothingness, God must re-create from nothing. Atonement parallels in a precise way the divine creatio ex nihilo.

    One benefit of this view of salvation is that it puts humanity back in its proper place as part of creation. As Lutheran “eco” theologian H. Paul Santmire says:

    The Incarnation of the Word is thus a response to the human condition of alienation from God and rebellion against God, as well as a divine cosmic unfolding intended to move the whole of cosmic history into its final stage. United with the Word made flesh, human creatures are restored to their proper place in the unfolding history of God with the cosmos. Thus united, they are free to live in peace with one another and with all other creatures, according to the imperfect canon’s of creation’s goodness. Now they may live as an exemplary human community, as a city set upon a hill, whose light cannot be hidden. (Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, p. 60)

    I think this provides one fruitful way for thinking about salvation that avoids some of the pitfalls of both a forensic and merely exemplarist view and has a certain consonance with an evolutionary picture of the world.

  • Ward on God’s action in the world

    I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same time natural laws describable by science can provide a full account of what happens in the world.

    In differentiating his position from Peacocke’s account, Ward suggests that we live in an “open and emergent” universe that leaves room for God to act. The indeterminacies of quantum mechanics and complex systems theory show that the Laplacian universe of strict, mechanistic determinism is an unwarranted extrapolation from the success of Newtonian physics. The universe has a “loose,” probabilistic structure–or at least it looks that way, and this means that divine action in the universe can’t be ruled out.

    Is this a return to the much-maligned “god of the gaps”? Ward argues that it’s not. The point isn’t that there are causal nooks and crannies where God can intervene. It’s that science is, by its very nature, an abstraction from the fullness of reality. Physics, for example, takes as its subject matter one slice of reality–that aspect of it which is describable in quantifiable, law-like terms. But, logically, this can’t show that all of reality has this character. An exhaustive account of reality would have to include all the non-quantifiable, qualitative aspects too. To the extent that physics (and other natural sciences) abstracts from the totality of reality, there is something it doesn’t capture. Thus, in principle, God’s acting in the universe can’t be ruled out.

    This isn’t to say that science can positively show that God acts in the universe; on the contrary, given the limitations of its method it couldn’t pick up on divine action. This is because God’s action couldn’t be subject to repeatable, controlled experiment. As the ultimate subject, God’s activity can’t be captured in any kind of regular, law-like conceptual scheme. It would be missed by any natural science acting according to its own prescribed methodology. Evidence for God’s activity comes instead from historical and personal religious experience.

  • What could Jesus have been wrong about?

    One Christian anti-evolution argument that I came across recently goes something like this: evolution can’t be true because Jesus believed in a historical Adam and Eve, a historical fall, etc., and this is incompatible with evolution. Clearly this is an argument aimed only at convincing other Christians.

    What’s interesting here is the implicit view of Jesus. In olden times there were indeed Christian writers who seemed to think that the man Jesus possessed divine omniscience. But more recently this view has been abandoned by most theologians for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that it contradicts the Nicene Creed itself: if Jesus is truly human, then his knowledge must have been limited. Strict omniscience isn’t, as far as we know, a potential human capability.

    Jesus was a man of his time; his mind was formed by the concepts and language available to him in his particular context, and so on. It would be absurd–wouldn’t it?–to think that Jesus knew, for instance, all of modern physics, or that Barack Obama would be elected the 44th president of the U.S.A., or that he was familiar with post-structuralist literary theory.

    Maybe I’m naive, but surely no one wants to defend the omniscience of the historical Jesus in this strong sense. So, at least on first blush, it would seem that there’s no problem with saying that Jesus likewise was unfamiliar with evolution and probably had a view of the development of living things that he inherited from his culture and its sacred stories, most prominently the creation narrative in Genesis. More speculatively, Jesus may not even have had the conceptual apparatus for clearly distinguishing between “myth,” history, sacred story, and scientific explanation that we take for granted.

    Still, I imagine the idea that Jesus was wrong about Adam and Eve (assuming for the sake of argument that he did believe in what we’d call a “historical” Adam and Eve) may not sit well with a lot of people. Maybe the discomfort here comes from the suggestion that Jesus was wrong about something of specifically religious importance. Sure, we may say, Jesus can’t have been expected to know everything there was to know about science, history, geography, and so on. But surely the Son of God knew all there was to know about moral and religious subjects!

    What this objection assumes, though, is that the “religious truth” of the Genesis story is identical, or at least inextricably bound up with, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve. If we deny this (as I think we should), then we can say that Jesus was correct about the “religious” issue–in this case his diagnosis of the human condition–while admitting that his apprehension of this truth might have been expressed in a way that we can’t share. In other words, Jesus was right about sin even if he was wrong about Adam and Eve.*
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    *For what it’s worth–and I’m well out of my depth here–my impression is that Judaism has a very different understanding of the significance of the story of Adam and Eve from the one that has prevailed in Christian churches; so, what Jesus understood as the significance of that story may well not be identical, or even very similar, to how most Christians have understood it.

  • Asking the right question

    In comments to my previous post, John corrected my understanding of Dennett’s views. It’s not, apparently, that Dennett denies that theism is logically compatible with evolution, it’s just that theism doesn’t explain or add anything to our understanding of evolution.

    But I’m not sure this is really a bad thing. I’m perfectly content to assume that evolution can be explained entirely with reference to natural processes and that it doesn’t require appeal to an “intelligent designer.” I don’t see any reason that Christians or other theists should fight on that particular hill. After all, there are good theological reasons to think that God imbued created being with the properties to unfold in a certain direction without requiring God’s occasional intervention.

    Where I think theists do have something useful to contribute is in stepping back and looking at the broader picture. We know that the possibility for the evolution of life as we know it is tied into the basic properties of the cosmos at a very fundamental level, as revealed by modern physics. Almost as though the universe has a built-in tendency toward evolution. So, we can usefully ask, I think, why the universe has this tendency to give rise to organic life, and to conscious, purposive beings.

    Rowan Williams puts it well in his book Tokens of Trust:

    Faith doesn’t try and give you an alternative theory about the mechanics of the world; it invites you to take a step further, beyond the nuts and bolts, even beyond the Big Bang, to imagine an activity so unrestricted, so supremely itself, that it depends on nothing and is constantly pouring itself out so that the reality we know depends on it. Creation isn’t a theory about how things started; as St Thomas Aquinas said, it’s a way of seeing everything in relation to God. (p. 37)

    I don’t know that asking the question of creation as a whole compels a “theistic” answer, but it locates the question at the right place: at the borders of what we can understand about the processes of the world, the place where explanations internal to the workings of the cosmos break down. Why the laws or processes of the universe are what they are at their most fundamental level doesn’t seem to be a question that can be intelligibly answered by appealing to those laws or processes themselves. Is there something that gives meaning and intelligibility to the whole shooting match? That, I take it, is the right question to ask.

  • Evolution, creation, and human uniqueness

    There’s an account making the rounds of a recent debate between atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett and Christian theist Alvin Plantinga. One of the issues that comes up is the compatibility between Christianity (or theism more generally) and evolution, a perennial topic of interest here at ATR.

    Dennett seems to see them as incompatible. Plantinga not only thinks they are compatible, but makes the stronger argument that believers in evolution ought also be theists, because only theism adequately accounts for our ability to understand the world in the ways required by modern science, as opposed to being just adaptive enough to get by. In other words: if naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our ability to know that it’s true!

    That’s a difficult argument to evaluate, and I’m not particularly interested in trying right now. In fact, I probably disagree with Plantinga almost as much as I would with Dennett, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. However, I do have a dog in the fight about the compatibility between theism and evolution.

    Some critics point out that evolution would seem to be a circuitous and wasteful means of bringing humans into existence if that was the creator’s sole intention. But there’s no reason for a Christian, or any other variety of theist, to think that creating human beings was God’s sole purpose in creating.

    It’s quite plausible–and indeed I think true–that God’s purposes, so far as we can discern them, include bringing into existence the entire array of creatures that exist and have existed for their own sake, not just as a means to the end of creating humans. I see no reason, for example, to think that God isn’t quite fond of dinosaurs, considering they were around for a lot longer than we have been.

    Clearly Christian theology is committed to some kind of unique status for human beings. Though we should be wary of confidently stating what that is. After all, the gospels teach that God goes to excessive lengths precisely for the ones who least deserve it. So it could be that we’re special in our unique ability to ruin things.

    However we come out on that issue, though, it’s perfectly consistent with Christianity to say that the purpose of the evolutionary process is to bring into existence not only humans but the entire bewildering array of creatures, each of whom in their own way reflect something of God’s glory. Humans, with our intelligence and potential for spiritual awareness, are one, but by no means the only, reflection of that glory.

    (Link via John Schwenkler)

  • Darwin and the deity

    Check out Kim Fabricius’s ten propositions on the subject.