How Theistic is Theistic Evolution?
One has to admire attempts by religious adherents to allow discoveries in science to effect their theological positions. Often the opposite cannot be said for scientists even though religious sentiment is grounded in intuitions about reality, and science also relies on intuitions. When it comes to evolutionary theory many religious thinkers have also tried to embrace the science and find a theological consilience with it. This has led many adherents to reject young earth creationism and the literal interpretation of scripture with regard to origins and organic change.
For many years from Darwin’s day his theory seemed to be the best explanation how species came to be. This obviously created a challenge for theists because it seemed to undercut God’s activity in the emergence of life. For many the seeming metaphysical underpinnings of Darwinian theory were applied to reality in general, calling into question special providence itself. The theological reaction to this among prominent theistic theologians resulted in attempts to “save” divine providence. In my view, theistic evolution is among these attempts. For those theologians who accepted the notion of Darwinian theory that evolutionary change is the result of chance and necessity, how can divine action which is so fundamental to theism be “saved” and do these attempts really fit systematically within a theistic framework?
If one looks at the theology of theistic evolutionists it is obvious that there is a tremendous struggle going on. How can the God of theism be seen as personally engaged in reality in general and biotic reality in particular when only chance and necessity are the causal factors? This struggle resulted in theological language where one must question how systematic it is and if it is really theistic.
Perhaps the first way to approach this issue is to examine the difference between theism and deism. In deism God creates the world but after that is no longer involved. The cosmos just takes the structure given it and does its own thing. Theism by contrast claims that God is engaged in the cosmos, typically characterized as in general and special providence. In general providence God acts universally in sustaining creation. In special providence God acts in specific events to bring about God’s will. In other words God acts specifically and intentionally. It is in this area of special providence that the challenge emerges. It is my view that theistic evolution theology either loses this sense of special providence or creates unsystematic contrivances to save it.
In trying to make Darwinian theory theistic instead of deistic, theistic evolutionists emphasize general providence. In this approach God is intimately involved (over against a deism) in the cosmos but God’s role is one of sustainer of “natural process”. The way that Arthur Peacocke puts it God acts “in, with and under” the natural processes of chance and natural selection. Another way it is put is that God sustains secondary causes which do all the work. Perhaps a metaphor might illustrate this. Within this framework God could be represented as a superintendent of a residential building. God keeps the water flowing and the heat on but does not interact personally with the tenants. Here’s a sample from A CATECHISM OF CREATION, An Episcopal Understanding
“Theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes that God uses random genetic mutations to ensure variety, resilience, novelty and freedom in the world. At the same time, the universe operates by certain natural laws or “secondary causes” by which God, the Primary Cause, ensures regularity and reliability in nature.”
and
“As the nineteenth-century Anglican minister Charles Kingsley put it, God has made a world that is able to make itself.”
What we don’t see in theistic evolutionary theology is clear cut reference to a strong divine intentionality involved in evolution. Instead God’s intent is relegated to the role of sustainer of chance and necessity. Is this enough to “save” theism or is this really a neo-deism being disguised as a theistic approach? That is for theists to decide.
The other issue that arises from this view of divine activity by theistic evolutionists is what to say about the representations of God’s activity found in scripture. Scriptures of all kind talk about God acting specifically both in history and in personal lives. If God merely sustains or works only “in, with, and under” chance and necessity in evolution, how can the special acts of God found in scripture be resolved? Are they really just metaphors for the activity of secondary causes. Howard Van Till claims that God “fully gifts” nature and that no “intervention” is needed. (Of course an interventionist view is only one theological view where God can act but that is another post) Or does God act only with secondary causes in evolution but directly in other aspects of life? The systematic difficulty here is one of demarcation. Where would one draw the line? And is this just a contrivance to save both Darwinian theory and theism? Biologist and theistic evolutionist, Kenneth Miller opts for this approach where, although he is a staunch Darwinist, he also affirms miraculous events caused by God:
“The Christian God isn’t a deist one; neither is Allah, or the God of Abraham. Any God worthy of the name has to be capable of miracles, and each of the great Western religions attributes a number very specific miracles to their conception of God. What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense–there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense. They are specific acts of God, designed in most cases to get a message across. Their very rarity is what makes them so remarkable.” _Finding Darwin’s God_ p. 230-240.
From a systematic theology point of view this is appears to be a contrivance. Consistency is the hallmark of systematic theology. Does this inconsistently survive examination? I think not.
There has been a lot written in support of theistic evolution by prominent theologians in the literature. However, the dicey issue of how to reconcile it with the rest of theology(prayer, revelation, salvation schemes, etc.) is largely ignored and probably for good reason. To do so would require stripping the vernier off of, in my opinion, very weak theological assertions. At the very least, theists should require theologians to fully treat the implications of theistic evolution. Then they can decide for themselves how theistic, theistic evolution is.
Since the time of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution has changed the way we see both the world we live in and ourselves. Today evolutionary thought permeates and shapes our understanding of everything about us. Every branch of our science is based upon it. It has altered and molded the scientific worldview at all levels. While this is especially true for the biological sciences, it is not limited to them. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: “Blind indeed are those who do not see the sweep of a movement whose orb infinitely transcends the natural sciences and has successfully invaded and conquered the surrounding territory-chemistry, physics, sociology, and even mathematics and the history of religions. One after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been shaken and carried away by the same under-water current in the direction of some development. Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illumining all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”
Theology has been the most reluctant of the great disciplines to embrace evolution as a fundamental part of its doctrines. Organized religions have either grudgingly admitted that evolution exists and then try to ignore the implications this presents, or else they hide behind creationism, a pseudo-scientific world view which carefully chooses and interprets scientific data out of context to prove pre-conceived religious doctrines. For many religious groups today, evolution is at the least an embarrassing word if not actually a dirty one. They still believe in a transcendent God and in an instantaneous creation. They see the natural world as the deficient reflection of a perfection that exists beyond time. Evolutionary change with its process of becoming is a meaningless aberration that deviates from this fixed perfection. God is the prime mover existing outside of the universe which itself is viewed as static and materialistic. Modern science, on the other hand, accepts a typically mechanistic view of evolution. For both modern science and organized religion, evolution still lacks its own God.
As in all theories, there are extremists who seize upon them and accept them uncritically and without reservation. For some people, a type of atheistic neo-darwinianism has become a transcendent religion. Carried away by the great discoveries in evolution, they have attempted to explain all of reality by its premises. They have posited a scientific materialism that goes far beyond what science actually knows. For these true believers, the blind force of nature is not really blind at all. Natural selection becomes supernatural selection. The survival of the fittest becomes the perpetuation of the chosen. They believe that nature operates by principles that transcend the natural, though they will seldom admit it. For them, the seemingly random occurrences in nature are guided by physical principles that seem to have a supernatural ability to design and shape our universe. A mysterious force that serves the same purpose replaces God as creator. Ethical values become relative and changing as they seek to make temporary adjustments to this force in order to go along with it. People who embrace scientific materialism are the high priests of a cult that finds its deity in a new emergent principle that gives conscious life to natural forces.
While fifteen billion years may seem like a long time, our universe and the life force within it could not have spontaneously evolved as they have in that short a period of time without some kind of intelligent design and direction. It would have been a statistical impossibility. The origination of any particular protein molecule by chance, for example, is inconceivably improbable. There are twenty different amino acids. To construct a protein chain of one hundred amino acids, the number of possible combinations is enormous. If they were randomly shuffled a billion times a second, it would take many times the history of the universe to exhaust all of the combinations. Random throws of the dice will yield nothing, unless the dice are loaded. Then it becomes a question of who has loaded them. Is it a purposeful God who has loaded them or is it some emergent principle that lets specific attractive forces and combinations take precedence over blind chance?
Scientific materialists solve this problem by attributing a supernatural designing ability to the forces of nature. Atheists usually try to resolve the problem by saying that the universe and everything in it has just been here forever, despite the findings of science to the contrary. Both believe that anything can happen, if you just give it enough time. According to their premises, an orangutan dancing a soft-shoe routine upon a computer keyboard would eventually produce a perfect copy of MARY POPPINS. Two orangutans dancing a minuet upon the same keyboard would produce it in half that time. But some things never happen, no matter how long you wait. Eternity without God just sits there. Half of never is still never. When you have no place to go, you stay home.
Directive evolution is the process God is using to build the Cosmos. This process began operating at the moment of creation. It started functioning with that first elemental explosion of space/time into an ever-expanding universe. It is the method by which God is fashioning all of space-time, from the tiniest building blocks of energy to the most massive galaxies. God is operating within all of reality. This gives direction to the arrow of time.
Directive evolution is a process of cumulative change that is going someplace. Overall, it is characterized by an increasing complexity of organization. The process of directive evolution has seen the development of the Cosmos from lower to higher states of complexity, differentiation and organization. It follows immutable laws step by step. It is the logical, methodical building process of God’s stupendous intellect. As vast and great as this process is, it is a perfectly natural one. It is consistent with all of the laws of science. These laws come from God and do not have an existence separate from God. This process is never capricious, illogical or dependent upon suspending the natural order of the universe. Fundamentally, it is in accord with the second law of thermodynamics. Each succeeding step forwards is the natural outcome of what has preceded it. Tiny alterations of direction by God at the quantum level can result over time in major changes at the macro level. An immanent God working naturally within the system does not need the miracles that a transcendent God working supernaturally from the outside requires to effect changes in direction.
Evolution’s God expanded from eternity to create space-time. God is immanent in a dynamic, organic universe that is still in the process of becoming. Creation is alive and continuous. God is drawing us into the future. The Cosmos presents us with a reality which combines the past and present into an arrow pointing to the yet to be. The strong version of the anthropic principle claims that the first moments of the Big Bang demonstrated how uniquely contingent the initial conditions were that permitted a universe like ours to develop. This principle tells us that the universe must have had, unconditionally from the beginning, the properties for intelligent life. It is a theological affirmation that the universe is the work of God whose purposes included the tribe of humanity.
For scientific materialists whose philosophical outlook has been shaped by the materialistic reductionism of modern science, atheistic neo-darwinianism appears to provide a simplistic explanation for life. Their claims to have solved all of the secrets of life completely by applying the same types of causal analysis to them that are used in physics and chemistry seem very shallow when their results are studied. Whether they appeal to the algorithmic necessity of natural selection or stress the role of contingency, they raise more questions than they answer. They skirt all around the questions that matter most without ever really grappling with them in earnest. They don’t even attempt to answer why there is anything at all. They believe that everything is materialistic and can be explained by a process of epistemological reductionism. They try to break things up into tiny little pieces, thinking in this way to see what makes them what they are. But in the hierarchy of creation, higher complexities contain relationships and processes that are not found in those of lower order complexity. Evolutionary history has seen the emergence of novel forms of order and activity that could not have been predicted from previous forms. As molecules, cells and organisms appeared successively, they brought with them new properties and kinds of behavior. They cannot be reduced to smaller bits without losing vital aspects of their totality. When a living frog is dissected into fragments of bone, blood and tissue, and then sewn back up, it is immediately obvious to the dullest among us that that frog is no longer going to hop. Something has been left out.
Directive evolution is characterized by a metaphysics of the future. This is the religious belief that the past and present are way stations on a continuing journey whose destination we can only perceive dimly. Continuing creation gives us a new view of nature as a dynamic, interdependent, evolutionary process of which humanity is a fundamental part. Because it is part of the real world, the evolutionary process is not without trial and error. This is part of the learning process, for God is learning also. God has experimented many times and has tried many different things. Some of them haven’t worked out and have had to be discarded. When God goes down a blind alley, the built-in forces of natural law suggest a return to a more proven path. At each wrong turn, warning signals say ‘go back’. Design is built into the laws and processes that science describes. God has created a self-organizing system that is a multi-faceted ongoing process of chance, necessity and novelty. But God has loaded the dice. Working within the system at the tiniest level of reality, God can guide and change the process of evolution. Evolution is a vital, dynamic method for creating real things in the real world of space-time. It is always new and it never repeats itself. It is definitely going someplace. Teleology is displayed in the process as a whole, but not necessarily in the design of particular structures.
John Swanson
Comment by John Swanson —
Hm, my experience, limited as it is, tells me that generally speaking, attempting to reconcile darwinian theory and theism is a mistake. As a comparison, that is like trying to reconcile Christianity and Islam, while they have points of similarity, the differences are such that it can’t be done.
The points of similarity between darwininian theory and theology, or at least the main one, is faith. Science in general, it seems, and darwinian theory specifically, require a certain level of faith just as any system of theology or religion.
The reason that there is such difficulty in reconciling the two is that in theology (as my understanding of it goes) faith (belief with out proof, but not neccearilly without evidence) is an integral, organic part of the system, where as in science generally, and darwinian theory specifically, faith is denied as beleif with out proof but with evidence and instead is called random and chance and relabeled as fact.
I think where many theologians and theists get into trouble is they forget that faith is a key part of any theological system (not blind faith btw, belief without either proof or evidence) and they begin to try to make their theology or theism look more like science thus losing coherence…
thats my take on this so far
Comment by carbon14atom —
Hi carbon14atom,
The points of similarity between darwininian theory and theology, or at least the main one, is faith. Science in general, it seems, and darwinian theory specifically, require a certain level of faith just as any system of theology or religion.
I agree. In my view religious faith can be framed as a faithing fallibilism. As you say religious beliefs may not be based on “proof” but they are also not necessarily devoid of evidence. If there is no evidence then the charge of fideism is warranted. However, there is evidence for religious belief. This is commonly called natural theology which can include scientific evidence. While a natural theology may not provide a knock-down proof neither does Darwinism. This is becoming more and more clear, especially as ID progresses.
Comment by Steve Petermann —
just re-read the article, skimmed through Mssr Swanson’s comment and re-read what I said. something I find interesting is that it is possible to look at the ‘miracle’ of the christian creation story from a scientific view point and find that it generally follows accepted scientific principles. As an example, read the order of creation for plants, it follows the well known and documented order of progression from simple to complex that plant life uses to take over bare ground and even rock. Even though I am not trying to actively promote my faith I do think it is a fascinating study of Intelligent Design, to go through and compare what is stated in various holy writings of various religious beleifs to what ID predicts…
Comment by carbon14atom —
It might be worthwhile to substitute Mendelian genetics for evolutionary biology and see whether it changes the theological argument at all? It seems to me, that Mendel has the same implications for theology as Darwin.
Most Christians believe that each individual is created by God as part of the working out of God’s sovereign will. At the same time, one can study real pedigrees and show that inheritance of traits is statistically indistinguishable from the predictions made by geneticists. Furthermore, population genetics serves as a link between Mendelian genetics of individual pedigrees and the evolution of populations.
So, does Mendelian genetics lead inexorably to deism? If Christians can reconcile the apparently impersonal and mechanistic inheritance of genetic traits with special and general providence, why would evolution require additional rationalization?
Comment by Nick P. —
Hi Nick,
Welcome.
So, does Mendelian genetics lead inexorably to deism? If Christians can reconcile the apparently impersonal and mechanistic inheritance of genetic traits with special and general providence, why would evolution require additional rationalization?
But in my view Christians or other theists, for that matter, cannot in a good systematic sense reconcile the view that that biotic change is impersonal and mechanic with special providence. The only way to do that is adopt some form of deism w.r.t (with respect to) evolution and theist w.r.t. God’s personal activity. How would a theologian justify that sort of demarcation?
Comment by Steve Petermann —
Hi Steve,
But in my view Christians or other theists, for that matter, cannot in a good systematic sense reconcile the view that that biotic change is impersonal and mechanic with special providence.
So, given that, do you have any idea why so many trees and electrons have been consumed to debate the issue wrt evolution, but no one seems to care about genetics? The problem of reconciling special providence with an apparently impersonal scientific theory seems identical in both cases. Since genetics deals directly with who we are as individuals, it could be seen as an even more personal and intimate threat than evolution. Yet, we don’t see theological arguments against Mendel. Why?
Comment by Nick P. —
Nick,
I don’t think there really are many theological arguments against evolution or even population genetics, per se, except those coming from the young earth creationists. What is argued theologically is that religious insight, whether from scripture, natural theology, or personal religious experience, leads one to believe that biotic emergence in particular and reality in general have a teleological grounding. This, of course, is not a scientific argument. However, if these theological argruments have no basis in some sort of experiential evidence then they would rightly be classified as fideistic. It’s just that the sorts of evidence for special providence do not readily find a happy validation in science. Even ID, which in my view is analogically based probably will never become a “science” as it is normally understood. It is enough for many religious adherents, myself included, that there is enough “evidence” to make belief reasonable. In fact, some of the things I see emerging from cell biology absolutely scream teleology to me as a design engineer. When I read descriptions of what is happening in the cell by biologists like James Shapiro who is not an IDist, as a design engineer my mind is boggled at how all this could have come about in some undirected fashion. However, that intuition cannot rule out that some undirected mechanism will be found at some point. I just don’t think it is reasonable to expect it.
Comment by Steve Petermann —
As a theist who accepts evolution (yet flirts with OEC), I personally find no problem reconciling a God of miracles and evolution (even if entirely naturalistic).
It is critical to remember what the theological understanding of miracles is. Namely, that it is a tool of authentication that communicates God’s will. Of course, when considering creation, there was no need for miraculous intervention for the communication of God’s will, for there was no one else present. This, of course, does not mean that God could not have intervened during the evolution of Creation out of his sovereign will (is the problems involving the origin of life evidence of such?). It is, however, to say that there was lacking a critical element virtually always involved in miracles otherwise. While I don’t necessarily defend the perspectives of other theistic evolutionists, I can find no problem why God does not have the omnipotence or omniscience, to create a universe that has the intrinsic properties to bring forth specifically what He decrees without additional intervention. Furthermore, I have no problem reconciling this concept with a God who intervenes miraculously to reveal himself to mankind.
Comment by Dane Parker —
Hi Dane,
Welcome.
It may be true that the biblical miracles were thought of as such, but I don’t think that would fully represent religious sentiment for divine activity in general. There is much in religious sentiment that points to God’s activity within a person’s life and history in general, that is unknown. Is communication all that God’s will is about? Or is it as many theologians claim that God’s activity is the purposeful guiding of reality? This is found in all the eschatological language of scripture as well as non-traditional theologies like process theology.
The problem, as I see it, is where and why one would would draw the line between “fully natural” and the “supernatural” activity. For example if God was not active in the emergence of biotic reality but is active in both physical and mental healing, as many believe, doesn’t this seem an arbitrary place to demarc God’s activity? In the case of prayer, aren’t many people asking God for something that is not inherent in “natural processes”?
[Note: I am not arguing for supernaturalism. I merely offer the sentiments of many theistic evolutionists. That is why I put scare quotes around a lot of terms. Those need to be fleshed out in detail and will be explored in subsequent threads.]
Comment by Steve Petermann —