Accommodationist and Proud of It, Part IV: Science and Religion

"The BioLogos Forum" is pleased to feature essays from various guest voices in the science-and-religion dialogue. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what we believe here.

Today's entry was written by Michael Ruse. Michael Ruse is an author and philosopher of biology well known for his works on the creationism and evolution debate. Though not a believer in God, he takes the position that Christianity and evolution are not incompatible. Ruse's latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, published by Cambridge University Press, argues against the extremes of both creationism and "new atheism".

Intro: This blog post is the fourth entry in a series of excerpts from a recent autobiographical essay by Michael Ruse. The first of these posts can be found here. Between Ruse’s last entry and the excerpt that follows, Ruse’s essay recounts several instances of being “attacked by friendly fire” as a result of his involvement in the 1981 Arkansas Creationism Trial, as well as the controversy surrounding E.O. Wilson’s publication of On Human Nature. In the first instance, Ruse was brought into contact with a number of liberal Christians who were interested in the relationship between science and religion. In the latter, Ruse learned the hard way that extending Darwinian evolution the human species was not a welcome proposition in the United States, as compared to the UK at that time. Ruse goes on to explain how these two experiences led him to produce a considerable amount of material on the evolutionary implications for values and ethics, as well as the notion of purpose or progress in evolutionary science. In the excerpt below, Ruse describes his transition from these areas to the more general compatibility of biological evolution and theistic belief –– in particular Christianity.

Engaging in Science-and-Religion

I am not quite sure why I moved in the last decade to work seriously on the science and religion relationship. Although I have many good friends in the field, at the risk of making myself unpopular with yet another group who should be natural allies, I think the quality of the work is abysmally poor. Not the work of the people who are working on the history of the relationship between science and religion. There is some really terrific work in this direction, all of whom owe a huge debt to the leader in the field, Ronald L. Numbers at Wisconsin University. I am thinking more of the people working at the philosophical interface between the two.

After a decade of relative quiet following the Creationist debacle in Arkansas, the coming of the Intelligent Design movement in the 1990s had started again to bring the pot to the boil. I wanted to get involved one more time, but I sensed that what was needed was less a direct attack on Intelligent Design (others were already at work on this) and more something general, drawing on my expertise.

Expectedly from one who writes as much as I, there tends to be overlap between books, and I do not pretend that I have never tackled the science-religion relationship in other books. However, I chose now to write directly on the topic.

My first work in this area was Can a Darwinian be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion, in which I lay out in a fairly standard way what it is to be a Darwinian and then I go through the main claims of Christianity as they might be impacted by the science.

I say little about American Creationism, because obviously Darwinism and Creationism clash. The interesting question is whether Darwinism and traditional Christianity clash, and it turns out that most of us do not know the answer to that and this is interesting.

Can a Darwinian be a Christian?

One of the big complaints I have about the science-religion literature is that there is an unwillingness to engage with the theology of the great religions, Christianity in particular. In part this is because many of the science-religion participants come from science and basically are not well-schooled in theology, or philosophy for that matter, and tend as scientists do to think that you can mug these things up in a couple of hours if that.

In part, I also think it is because participants are a bit embarrassed about pushing their own faith and want to appear ecumenical and not tied down to specific items of belief. So one thing I tried to do in my book, since it was explicitly about Christianity, was to take the theology seriously.

In writing the book, I thought the big issue for the Christian in the light of Darwinism – actually the big issue for the Christian, period – would be the problem of evil. How do you speak of a loving, all-powerful God in the face of the struggle for existence? This was a problem that Darwin himself had and it is one that others, including Richard Dawkins, have written on more recently.

I cannot say that I felt that I got on top of the problem of evil, indeed I am not sure that one can get on top of the problem of evil, but in the context I did not find it as worrisome as I thought I would. Put it this way. If you think one can speak successfully to the problem, then I don’t think Darwinism adds to the problem. Indeed, if you argue that there were reasons why God should create through law rather than miraculously at every step, and I think this can be defended theologically, then it may be that the only way to get organisms is through natural selection and this implies a struggle.

Purpose and Progress

However, what I did find worrisome was the matter of evolution and direction – I guess with all of my work on progress I should have anticipated this. It seems to me that an absolutely bottom-line demand of the Christian is that humans are not contingent. Perhaps they could be green or have twelve fingers, but intelligent, moral beings are not a matter of chance. Beings made in the image of God had to have evolved. And that is a problem if you are not convinced that evolution is progressive, leading eventually up to humankind. Here, it really does seem that Darwinism undercuts Christianity.

I am not sure that I solved the problem in Can a Darwinian be a Christian? One kind of solution is to argue that there is indeed progress. Richard Dawkins believes that there is progress through arms races – lines of organisms compete and eventually this leads to intelligence. But, much as I enjoy using the arguments of the New Atheists to make the case for the other side, I am not convinced that really this guarantees the appearance of humans.

Another kind of solution, a theological solution in the tradition of Augustine, is to argue that God knew what would happen when He created and that is enough. In one sense, I am much happier with a theological solution to a theological problem, although this particular solution did worry me because it does seem to have a kind of determinism built-in that I find antithetical to Darwinism. It may not be directed, theistic evolution, but it seems very close.

I think now, several years later, I am more on top of the problem. The answer lies in the fact that, since humans did evolve through natural selection, they could evolve. It was just a question of enough tries. I see no reason why God should not go on creating universes until humans appear.

It is not as if God is waiting around for this to happen. He is outside time and space. And if you say that it seems like an awful waste, that is to put your value on creation and also to ignore that much of our universe seems uninhabited and by your argument is a waste already. I am not arguing scientifically for multiverses, but offering this as a theological solution.

Reactions to the Book

The reaction to the book was interesting. The science-religion community ignored it. Frankly, I think they find me pretty irritating. However, I have had a lot of folks write to me and say how helpful they have found the book. A typical reader would be someone who teaches science at a small college, grew up in a Christian home and now is either a more liberal Christian than their parents or not even a believer but who, like me, values their religious childhood, and who worries about these issues. So I feel it has been a real success.

However, other reactions were a wakeup call. Jerry Coyne, evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, wrote a scathing review in the London Review of Books, mocking me as a fool and scorning me as a dupe

Of course, it is fairly easy to do this when you are not too bothered about the content of the book you are reviewing. My efforts to distinguish what I call traditional Christianity from American Creationism come to naught. “Ruse’s attempt at a reconciliation ultimately fails – not surprisingly, given that it requires us to accept a version of Darwinism so extreme that it has practically no adherents, and a form of Christianity that would appall most theologians and churchgoers.”

Then Coyne is off on a line saying that the fossil record is inconsistent with Genesis and so on and so forth.

Condescendingly, he picks up on the very issues I wrestle with, like the problem of human existence, and then happily dismisses all solutions. It is the first, and I trust the last time, that I have been accused of being a theistic evolutionist. Mainly the tone of the review is astonishment that anyone should be as naively bold as I to try to reconcile science and religion. It just cannot be done and science has won.

Ruse's series continues here.

Discussion Question: In this post, Ruse explains that he anticipated “the problem of evil” to be the most significant problem between Christianity and biological evolution. Would you agree with his conclusion that Darwinism “doesn’t add to the problem”? And what of Ruse’s thoughts that the contingency of humans is a more important question?