My editorial policy for these excerpts is explained at the bottom of this post.

Motivated Belief (part 3)

Jesus had a comparatively short public ministry, but it had enormous local impact, drawing crowds who were anxious to hear his words and who often sought the healing ministry that he exercised. Then, on a last visit to Jerusalem, it all seemed to fall apart. The authorities, civil (Roman) and religious (Jewish) acting together, moved in to avoid trouble. Jesus was arrested and hastily executed, suffering the painful and shameful fate of crucifixion, the kind of death reserved for slaves and rebels and seen by pious Jews as being a sign of God’s rejection (“any one hung on a tree is under God’s curse,” Deuteronomy 21:23). Except for a few staunch women, his followers ran away, overcome by despair and disappointment. From the place of execution there came the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34).

Giotto di Bondone, The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas)
(ca. 1304-06), fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua

On the face of it, Jesus’s death seems a moment of pathetic failure, the final disillusionment of the followers of a rejected man whose grand pretensions had suddenly and definitively been found wanting. If that really was the end of the story of Jesus, I believe that most of us would never have heard of him. At best he would have seemed to be no better than other first-century messianic pretenders whose causes also finally failed. So the first remarkable thing about Jesus is that he is known to all of us. We need to look closer into the New Testament to find out why, against all reasonable expectation, his story continued beyond his death.

Amid the variety of its component writings, there are certain common themes that recur in the New Testament. Three of the most important themes are:

(1) All the [biblical] writers believe that the story of Jesus continued because God raised him from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. We shall have to pay further attention to this extraordinary claim, but the existence of the New Testament, and the character of its contents, are unintelligible without the recognition that this is what its writers are affirming.

(2) In wrestling with what they believe to be their experience of the risen Christ, the writers are driven, in their different ways, to speak of Jesus in a quite extraordinary manner. They know that he was a man living in Palestine in their own times, yet in the accounts they give they often seem driven to employ not only obvious human categories, but also to use language that is only appropriate to deity. The Pauline epistles are probably of the earliest Christian writings known to us, certainly antedating the gospels. Already Jesus of Nazareth is being referred to in remarkable terms. Paul begins almost all his letters with some such phrase as “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3; and so on). Not only is Jesus being bracketed with God in a manner that would, for example, have been inappropriate for a pious Jew to use in relation to Moses, the servant of God, but he is also accorded the title “Lord.” While this word (kyrios) had a widespread secular usage amounting to no more than politeness of address, its Hebrew counterpart, adonai, also had a special Jewish religious usage as an acceptable circumlocution in place of the unutterable divine name, YHWH, a particular significance which the religious context of Paul’s greeting could scarcely fail to invoke. The gospel of John portrays Jesus as claiming unity with God (John 10:30, words uttered in a situation where the hostile crowd are shown as having no difficulty in detecting what they see as the blasphemous implication), and it assigns to Jesus the use of images (the bread of life, the true vine, and so on) which carry implications of more than human status. The Writer to the Hebrews proclaims that “in these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things and through whom he also created the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2). Examples could easily be multiplied.

It is clear that when it comes to Jesus, the New Testament writers cannot rest content with the standard Jewish repertoire for speaking of people with special gifts from God—the categories of prophet, teacher, healer—but, against all their instincts as monotheistic Jews, they are driven to use divine-sounding language about him. Remember that they are referring to a near contemporary, and not to some shadowy figure of a legendary past. The New Testament very seldom out and out calls Jesus God (the confession of Thomas in John 20:28 is perhaps the clearest example), but its pages manifest a continual tension between the use of human and divine manners of speaking about him. The problem thus posed is unresolved in the New Testament itself, but succeeding Christian generations had to address it and eventually the Church was led to the distinctive and extraordinary doctrinal concept of the incarnation, the affirmation of the presence of deity in the life of this first-century Jew, who truly was the Son of God.

(3) Coupled with this recourse to divine language, and fuelling its fire, was a firm conviction among those first-generation Christians that the risen Christ had brought into their lives a new and transforming experience of saving power. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). I believe that an adequate Christology (a true understanding of the nature of Jesus) must satisfy the criterion of affording an adequate soteriology (a true understanding of the power of Christ in human lives, to which the Church has continued to give its testimony down through the centuries). The doctrine of the incarnation implies that in the Word made flesh a unique bridge was established between the created life of humanity and the uncreated life of God, and in this meeting of divine power and human nature there lies a way of understanding the fulfillment of the soteriological criterion.

​
Giotto di Bondone, Resurrection (Do not Touch Me) (ca. 1304-06), fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua

These three lines of testimony need to be presented for consideration by anyone seeking to understand the significance that Jesus of Nazareth holds for Christian belief. In the context of science the discussion of the persuasiveness of that belief cannot be conducted satisfactorily without a detailed engagement with these claims. The task is indispensable to honest enquiry and it is made all the more important today by the fact that many people seem to have so little knowledge of what the New Testament actually says.

The pivot on which the claim of a unique and transcendent significance for Jesus must turn is clearly the resurrection. If in fact he was raised from the dead to a new and unending life of glory, then it is indeed credible that he has an altogether unique status and role in salvation history. If, sadly, his life ended in failure and his body was left to molder in the grave, then he seems at best little different from many other prophetic figures who have suffered martyrdom for holding fast to the integrity of their beliefs. The quest for motivated Christian faith has to begin by focusing on the question of the resurrection. I believe that it would be a serious apologetic mistake if Christian theology thought that operating in the context of science should somehow discourage it from laying proper emphasis on the essential centrality of Christ’s resurrection, however counterintuitive that belief may seem in the light of mundane expectation.

As a preliminary one must first face the general issue of miracle. It was as clear in the first century as it is today, that it is wholly contrary to any reasonable natural expectation that a man should be resurrected within history. While there were parties in first-century Judaism which expected a general resurrection at the end of history [for example, the Pharisees], none expected the resurrection of a specific person to take place within history, even if there was some hope that a prophetic figure, such as Elijah, might have been stored up in heaven in order to be returned for a further spell of earthly life at some critical juncture in Jewish history. It is important here to recognize the distinction between resuscitation and resurrection. The former applies to someone like Lazarus, who is portrayed in John’s gospel as being called out of the tomb after an apparent death (John 11), but who was undoubtedly expected by all to die again in due course. Resuscitation is only a temporary reprieve from mortality. Resurrection, on the other hand, implies a transition from this mortal life to a new form of glorified life, lived without end in the presence of God. Resurrection is a permanent victory over mortality. The possibility of resurrection lies wholly outside the context of scientific explanation. If the resurrection of Jesus happened, it could only have been through a special exercise of divine power. In short, resurrection is, in the strict sense of the word, a miracle.

The real problem of belief in miracle is properly a theological issue, not a scientific one, since claims of unique historical occurrences lie outside science’s competence to adjudicate. All it can do is reinforce the commonsense recognition that something like a resurrection does not usually happen. The real challenge to belief in miracle lies elsewhere. It is theologically inconceivable that God should act capriciously as a kind of celestial conjurer, doing a turn today that God did not think of doing yesterday and won’t be bothered to do tomorrow. The theological problem of miracle is that of discerning divine consistency in the face of a claim of radically novel action. How that consistency is understood depends upon a proper understanding of what is involved in speaking of God in personal terms. I have already said that divine action is not to be assimilated to a kind of impersonal and unchanging process, similar to that which characterizes the law of gravity. If personal language is to mean anything when used about God, it must imply a divine freedom to respond in particular and different ways to particular and different situations, including even the rational possibility of unprecedented action in unprecedented circumstances.

Once again we encounter the unavoidable necessity of hermeneutic circularity. Of course, persons are not normally resurrected in history, but if there is something truly unique about Jesus (the Son of God), then his story could conceivably have included unique events. Equally, if he was resurrected, this was surely a sign that he indeed did have an altogether unique status. However, if he was just another prophet, then the story of his resurrection is likely to be no more than a touching legend. Both possibilities have to be considered. To believe in the resurrection rightly requires significant motivating evidence, a question to which we shall turn shortly, but its possibility should not be ruled out absolutely from the beginning, before even considering what evidence there might be for this counterintuitive belief. Moreover, it is important to note that the Christian understanding of Christ’s resurrection is that it occurred within history as the unique seed event from which a resurrected destiny for all people will come about beyond history (“for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”; 1 Corinthians 15:22). In this sense, what Christian theology sees as unique about the resurrection is its timing, rather than its occurrence. Further consideration will be given to this point in the succeeding chapter.

​Giotto di Bondone, The Last Judgment (detail, ca. 1304-06),
fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua

[The succeeding chapter, which will not be part of this series, deals with eschatology. Polkinghorne’s reference in the penultimate sentence to the unique timing of the resurrection can be fleshed out by quoting from the chapter on eschatology: “The eschatological destinies of human beings and of the whole universe lie together in the world of God’s new creation. <SNIP> In Christian thinking, the seed event from which this new creation has already begun to grow is the resurrection of Christ. His tomb was empty because the matter of his corpse had been transmuted into the ‘matter’ of the new creation, to become his risen and glorified body in which he appeared to the first witnesses.” In other words, the resurrected Jesus is “the first fruits of them that sleep,” in the glorious words of 1 Corinthians 15:20.]

Looking Ahead

In about two weeks, we will see how Polkinghorne brings his search for “motivated belief” to bear on the biblical narratives about the Resurrection.

References and Credits

Excerpts from John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (2009), copyright Yale University Press, are reproduced by permission of Yale University Press. We gratefully acknowledge their cooperation in bringing this material to our readers.

Editorial Policy

Most of the editing for these excerpts involves breaking longer paragraphs into multiple parts, altering the spelling and punctuation from British to American, removing the odd sentence or two—which I indicate by putting [SNIP] at the appropriate point(s)—and sometimes inserting annotations where warranted [also enclosed in square brackets] to provide background information. Polkinghorne uses footnotes a bit sparingly, and I usually find another way to include that information if it’s important for our readers.

"Anyone approaching the Resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead means will inevitably misunderstand those accounts and will then dismiss them as meaningless" (p. 243).

In fact, if Jesus' Resurrection were "merely" coming back to life in any way that we might comprehend, then it would be of little significance.

"Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus' Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us" (p. 243).

So what then does Resurrection mean? For Benedict it represents a new dimension of reality breaking through into human experience. It is not a violation of the old; it is the manifestation of something new.

"Jesus had not returned to a normal human life in this world like Lazarus and the others whom Jesus raised from the dead. He has entered upon a different life, a new life -- he has entered the vast breadth of God himself..." (p. 244).

Because it is something entirely new, it cannot represent a violation of natural law as understood by science.

"Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data. The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented -- a new dimension of reality that is revealed. What already exists is not called into question. Rather we are told that there is a further dimension, beyond what was previously known. Does that contradict science? Can there really only ever be what there has always been? Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?" (p. 246-7)

Thus, in this view, Resurrection (as with all true miracles) is not contrary to science, but an indicator that science does not (yet?) describe the full expanse of reality. Indeed, some may argue that science itself contains similar "indicators." The 11 (or so) dimensional universe required by some versions of string theory, the multiverse theory of the universe where ours is but one of an infinite array of universes with variable physical laws, quantum entanglements, "spooky" action at a distance, the mysterious emergence of consciousness from inorganic matter -- all push the limits of human reason and imagination, suggesting to some that reality may be far more complex than the human mind can grasp.

For a moment, let us entertain the possibility that Resurrection is as Benedict interprets it: not a violation of natural law but an indicator of something beyond our scientific understanding of the universe. This has interesting implications for understanding how believers and skeptics approach the issue. If Resurrection does not violate science, then science does not necessarily constitute an impediment to accepting the reality of Resurrection. If the difference between the skeptic and believer is not science, then is it just a matter of imagination? The believer imagines greater possibilities for the universe than the non-believer. While this is possible, it seems questionable. To my knowledge, no research has found differences in imaginative abilities between religious and non-religious people. Moreover, contrarian examples easily come to mind: Isaac Asimov was an atheist but hardly lacking in imagination when it came to science fiction. I tend to think that both believers and non-believers can imagine (with varying degrees of effort, I'm sure) the new possibilities implied by Resurrection.

Thus, if it is neither imagination nor science that prompts skepticism about Resurrection, then what is left? I suggest that it comes down to a question of authority: At what point does one allow imaginative possibilities to have authority over how one lives? To the believer, Resurrection has an authority that science fiction does not. Resurrection is not thought-provoking entertainment. It requires far more than just imagining greater possibilities for the universe. It requires a change of life, here and now. Unlike the microscopic hidden dimensions of string theory, the new dimension implied by Resurrection has "broken though" into everyday reality and demands a response -- even if that response is to actively ignore it.

Now, what convinces the believer that Resurrection merits such authority when other imaginative possibilities such as extraterrestrial life or time-travel do not? The answer here appears to be historical commitment. There's no record of people committing themselves to the point of martyrdom to other imaginative possibilities as they have to Resurrection. The earliest example of such commitment being found, of course, in the dramatic post-crucifixion turn-around of the Apostles. Such an astounding change of heart, followed by an unwavering commitment capable of altering human history demands a categorically unique explanation: Resurrection.

The believer's argument, however, remains unconvincing to the skeptic. However impressive they might be, a change of heart and steadfast commitment do not necessarily add up to a new dimension of reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fair enough. So a key question regarding the interpretation of Resurrection is this: Is the post-crucifixion history of Christianity extraordinary? Does it compel the dispassionate observer to concede that a categorically unique event could plausibly be its best explanation?

It ought to be upon questions such as those above that skeptics and believers respectfully engage one another, rather than the simplistic and often acrimonious sloganeering that has increasingly become the norm.

Tonight and tomorrow, Christians around the world stop to remember and celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem just over two thousand years ago. The familiar narrative of Joseph leading Mary to the stable to give birth to the Messiah, of the angels telling the shepherds in the fields of the great event that was happening nearby, and of the three men from the east who came to pay homage to the new King of Israel is re-told or acted out in countless churches, schools and homes. And from countless pulpits, the message goes out that those events are not just a quaint story and an excuse to give gifts, but the central mystery of our faith—that God himself became one of us in order to redeem us and the cosmos from our bondage to sin and death. That mystery—that the Creator God is also the Redeemer Christ—has been to focus of our worship since the first days of the church, and is the subject of the 7th-century Latin hymn Conditor alme siderum, presented here in a new setting from Alex Mejias and High Street Hymns.

While this recording includes only verses one and three from the original text (given in full below), it adds a refrain that catches the spirit of the whole hymn and emphasizes the longing we still feel even in our Christmas joy—the “already, but not yet” state in which we find ourselves today, living between that first Advent and the second Advent yet to be: “Come, O come to us!” For while we know that God has come to us in Jesus—that his death and resurrection have redeemed us and the universe—we are still waiting for that final consummation, depending on the Spirit to be working out our salvation even now. Until the time when, as the hymn says, “all hearts must bow,” the entire BioLogos community invites you to join us in the blessed work of declaring, celebrating, and following the Christ who is both Creator and Savior.

Creator of the Stars at Night

Alex Mejias is the founder and director of High Street Hymns, a non-profit music ministry that exists to spread the Gospel and worship the Triune God in spirit and truth through hymns, psalms and spiritual songs. Alex grew up in New Jersey and outside Washington, DC, receiving a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. For the past 15 years he has been leading worship for churches and ministries, writing and recording both new and old hymns, and touring the east coast as a singer-songwriter. Alex is also committed to the power of the creative arts to advance the Gospel and promote justice and healing in the name of Christ, serving, supporting, and collaborating with several other non-profit ministries.

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. (Revelation 6:12–14)

The non-concordist view of science and Scripture argues that Biblical texts about creation were never intended to concord with modern scientific theories. Thus, Genesis 1 is not cryptically describing the Big Bang or instant fiat, a young earth or old earth, special creation or evolutionary creation. It is not “literal” language describing the physics of the universe; it is “literary” genre describing God’s sovereignty over creation and most likely his covenantal relationship with his people.

But the argument against literalism of language of the creation of the heavens and the earth is also applicable to the language of the destruction of the heavens and the earth, or what the Bible calls, “the last days,” “the end of the age,” “the end of days,” or “the Day of the Lord.” Christians often refer to this as “the end times,” but the technical theological term is eschatology, which means “the study of end things.”

Regarding the end times, the modern Evangelical popular imagination has been deeply influenced and at times dominated by a theological construct that is best reflected in the 1970s bestselling The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and the newer bestselling fictional phenomenon Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

This view believes that the Bible foretells an as-yet future scenario on the earth of a rapture of Christians, followed by the rise of an “Anti-Christ,” a world dictator who initiates a Great Tribulation on the earth, requires a “Mark of the Beast,” and assembles global forces for a battle of Armageddon against Israel, resulting in the Second Coming of Christ who replaces the universe with a new heavens and earth to rule forever. The technical theological term for this view is futurism, the belief that prophecies about the end times are yet to be fulfilled in the future.¹

In this article, I will address the hermeneutic or interpretive approach used by this futurist perspective and apply it to the particular aspect of creation language, or in this case, decreation language -- the collapsing universe and the destruction of the heavens and the earth.

In short, the language of cosmic catastrophe often interpreted literally as referring to the end of the space-time universe is actually used by Biblical authors to figuratively express the cosmic significance of the covenantal relationship between God and humanity.

The tendency of modern literalism is to interpret descriptions of signs in the heavens and earth as being quite literal events of the heavens and earth shaking, stars falling from the sky, the moon turning blood red, and the sky rolling up like a scroll. The problem with this hermeneutic is that it assumes the priority of modernity over the ancient world. Rather than seeking to understand the origins of symbols and images used by the writers within their ancient context, this literalism often suggests the writer was seeing events that would occur in our modern day but did not understand them, so he used his ancient “primitive” language to describe it.

So for instance when the apostle John saw modern day tools of war in his revelation, such as battle helicopters, he did not know what they were so he described them in ancient terms that he did understand such as locusts with the sting of scorpions, breastplates of iron, a crown of gold and human faces, whose chopper blades made the “noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle” (Rev 9:3-9).

I was taught this modernist interpretation and lived by it for many years. When I read about Jesus explaining the “end of the age” I would assume he meant the “end of the space-time universe” because that’s the kind of language I, a post-Enlightened modern scientific mind, would use to describe such an event. When he spoke of the moon turning blood red and the sun being darkened, I assumed such events were easy miracles for God, so if you considered them figurative, you were falling down the slippery slope of neo-orthodoxy. When Jesus said stars would fall from the sky, you had better bet stars would literally fall from the sky (a primitive description of meteors²) or else you’re a liberal who doesn’t believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible.

But all that changed when I sought to understand the prophetic discourse on its own terms within its ancient cultural context instead of from my own cultural bias. I now propose that the ancient writers did understand what they were seeing, but were using symbols and images they were culturally steeped in, symbols and images with a history of usage from the Old Testament, their cultural context – not mine.

In this essay, I will argue that the decreation language of a collapsing universe with falling stars and signs in the heavens was actually symbolic discourse about world-changing events and powers related to the end of the old covenant and the coming of the new covenant as God’s “new world order.” In this interpretation, predictions of the collapsing universe were figuratively fulfilled in the historic past of the first century. The technical theological term for this view is preterism, the belief that most or all prophecies about the end times have been fulfilled in the past.³

Notes

1. The Left Behind series is a particular version of futurism called Dispensational Premillennialism. For a more in depth presentation of these varieties of eschatology see Bock, Darrell L. ed., Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999.
2. Interestingly, as soon as the interpreter thinks falling stars are meteors, he has just engaged in figurative speculation, which is not literal.
3. Some examples of orthodox scholars who hold to this view are Sproul, R.C. The Last Days According to Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998; and Gentry, Kenneth L. Jr. Navigating the Book of Revelation. Fountain Inn: SC, Goodbirth Ministries, 2009.

According to Merriam Webster, the term “intelligent design” has been used since at least 1847, in reference to “the theory that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by a designing intelligence.” That’s a decent definition, also consistent with those offered by today’s proponents of intelligent design (ID). For example, the leading ID think tank, The Discovery Institute (Seattle), has this:

Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

And in the opening sentence of a book he edited with philosopher Michael Ruse, ID theorist William Dembski said, “Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that in order to explain life it is necessary to suppose the action of an unevolved intelligence.” (Debating Design, p. 3)

On the other hand, while a recent contest on a prominent intelligent design (ID) website uncovered several other early uses of the term, it is important to note that it does not always mean exactly the same thing in each reference. The term itself has an interesting history, and while ID authors obviously did not invent the term “intelligent design,” they have given it specific content in recent years. Indeed, they have even removed content in some cases: a point I will return to later is that, though it seems the only viable candidate for such an “unevolved intelligence” is God, ID proponents sometimes seem to do cartwheels to avoid saying as much. When a term has such a complicated past, there simply is no substitute for looking at specific references in their own contexts as we move to seeing how ID plays out today as one of the 5 ways of relating science and the Bible.

Interestingly, many Protestant “modernist” scientists and theologians from William Jennings Bryan’s day (see my previous column) unhesitatingly endorsed the idea that a designing intelligence lay behind nature. At least one such person, Nobel prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, even used the very term “intelligent design” in an address he gave at a Unitarian church in 1940: “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.” (Quoting his pamphlet from 1940, The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge, p. 13. For more about this aspect of Compton’s views, click here.) However, Compton regarded design as a philosophical and theological inference from science, not an explanation within science to be invoked when other explanations fail. He also accepted the common ancestry of humans and other organisms. This is a significant difference from the ID movement today, which offers ID as a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution and (at least in many cases) seeks to undermine public confidence in common ancestry (even though ID per se is not actually opposed to it).

If any ID proponents are sympathetic to the type of religious modernism that Compton and his friends embraced, I cannot tell you who they are. In a curious, ironic twist, ID is often used by conservative Christian apologists partly to defend a cluster of traditional theological and hermeneutical positions that none of the modernists would have defended. A further irony: the intellectual descendants of the modernists—those scientists and theologians who occupy the left wing of the modern “dialogue” of science and religion—exhibit a studied avoidance of the term “design,” disconnecting them on that score from the modernists of the 1920s.

Many other contemporary writers, including some evangelical TEs, are also reluctant to use the word “design,” precisely because in their view it has been co-opted by ID proponents and they do not want readers to misunderstand their position(s). They may agree with ID proponents that certain features of the universe reflect divine design, but because they do not see design as a scientific explanation they employ other language. (Likewise, the YECs have co-opted the word “creationism” to mean just one specific understanding of God’s creative activity, leading most advocates of other views either to provide their own definitions of the word or else to avoid using it altogether. Politics dogs this conversation at every turn.)

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Intelligent Design

With that bit of historical context for the term “Intelligent Design,” let’s now look at the first of the Core Tenets of this perspective in its current state, and as it is most often used by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement.

(1) The Bible is NOT to be mentioned (at least for now); ditto for “God” and “theology” as far as possible.

This is a deliberate strategy, adopted for political reasons to keep arguments at the level of philosophy and science. Here, “political” refers to the American political system, with its constitutional disestablishment of religion, not to partisan politics. Since the 1980s, federal courts have consistently ruled that “creationism” (which was specifically of the YEC variety in the relevant cases) is sectarian religion, not science, and therefore it cannot be taught in public school science classes. Anxious to avoid a similar fate, proponents of ID always want to ensure that they are not perceived as advocates of “creationism.” The less they mention God and the Bible, the reasoning goes, the less likely they are to fall afoul of those decisions.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pertaining to the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press.
Source: http://www.rochester.edu/college/psc/images/Courses/Spring2008/FirstAmendment.png

Phillip Johnson, the former law professor who effectively began the ID movement some twenty years ago, has put it bluntly: “To put things on a more rational basis, the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion.” He quickly adds, “This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact.” (“The Wedge: Breaking the Modernist Monopoly on Science,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/August 1999, p. 22.)

If God and the Bible are really to be left out for the time being, then why am I discussing ID in a series on “Science and the Bible”? It’s a fair question. I simply don’t see any way meaningfully to avoid talking about ID apart from the culture wars in which it is embedded (I’ll say more about this in a subsequent column), and the Bible is never far from the surface when the battle being fought involves origins. Conservative Christians sense that ID really is about God—Dembski’s “unevolved intelligence”. As Dembski himself has said, “no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life”, and there aren’t a lot of candidates for that job. Many Christians also identify strongly with the ways in which ID seeks to confront the secular establishment, in an explicitly-stated effort to combat what Johnson calls “the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions.” (“The Wedge,” p. 23.) They see it as a way of getting traditional theistic perspectives and Christian values back into the academy, once “design” has become an acceptable academic talking point—and it isn’t very far from there to conversations about “science and the Bible.” If this were not so, then why would so much ID literature be published by Christian presses? Indeed, when I tell church audiences with a straight face that ID purports not to be about the Bible at all, I’m usually met with considerable skepticism.

When I’m back in about two weeks, we’ll look at further Core Tenets of ID—the ones that have even less to do with the Bible, explicitly, and more to do with the way we approach the study of the natural world.

Introduction

One of the reasons that some of us are hesitant to accept evolutionary creation is that it seems to make God responsible for the suffering and death of innumerable creatures over millions of years—before humans ever existed or sinned against their creator. Since we believe in and worship a God who is loving, benevolent, and all-powerful, it sounds quite implausible that our God would have created a world like that; therefore, any scientific evidence for evolution must be incorrect.

Other people look at the scientific evidence for evolution and find a compelling case that it has taken place during our earth's history. On this basis they may conclude that if evolution is true, then the belief in an all-powerful, perfectly good God must be false!

The trouble with both of these views is that they tend to invoke a completely abstract, philosophical god, not the living God of the Bible—the God who became a human being, experienced unimaginable suffering, and died in a grotesque and humiliating public display. The death of Jesus completely defied the expectations (and common sense) of his followers, as well as the expectations of any “rational” understanding of the way the Creator of the universe should act in the world. On the cross, in the person of Jesus, God took upon himself far more suffering than any creature has ever experienced.

If God himself is willing to die, particularly in such a gruesome way, then perhaps we should at least consider the possibility of God allowing the death of other creatures, too. But would this really be compatible with what we know of God through Scripture? In this essay, we will explore this quandary through a “theology of the cross”, a concept articulated by pastor George Murphy in his book Cosmos in the Light of the Cross.¹

Theology of the cross

Before we jump into the theological problems associated with evolution, let’s take a look at how we understand Christian theology itself. For the reformer Martin Luther, any theology (or science) that tries to reach knowledge of God apart from the cross is bad theology.² Instead, Luther pointed to a theologia crucis, in which the true God is seen first and foremost “through suffering and the cross”. To make his point even clearer, Luther insisted that “the CROSS alone is our theology”.³ It is the lens through which we view everything.

Of course Martin Luther, having lived in the 16th century, was not aware of the vast history of life on our planet (or any other aspect of modern science, for that matter), but George Murphy draws from Luther’s teachings the foundation that all human knowledge begins with the Word made flesh and crucified.⁴ With the cross of Christ as the ultimate framework through which we view reality, we are bound to view the processes of nature quite differently. As Murphy explains it,

A theology of the cross is an explication of belief in a God who becomes a participant in the history of the universe and thereby shares in the suffering, loss, and death that are part of worldly experience.⁵

God does not sit idly by and watch unaffected as his creatures suffer, but neither does he swoop in and make everything completely effortless and easy. Instead he chose another way, the crucifixion of Jesus—certainly not the approach that we would have preferred! The apostle Peter went so far as to try to talk Jesus out of it, but he was met with a stern rebuke (Matthew 16:21-23).

Why is evolution so disconcerting to Christians?

The problem of suffering throughout all of human history is troubling enough for us to reconcile with a loving, personal God. But in addition to that, the discovery of vast numbers of fossils reveals that death has taken place on a far greater scale than we had ever imagined. Both the wide variety of extinct creatures and their sheer numbers is quite staggering, and it raises questions about our Creator:

The picture of a God who is immune from suffering and death but who forces organisms through millions of generations and extinction is disturbing to those who believe in a God of love.⁷

The mass extinction of life on earth was already well established by the early 19th century—decades before Darwin’s research—and extinction can be empirically verified independent of any theory of evolution.⁸ The fact that the earth’s crust is a veritable graveyard of long-lost creatures is deeply troubling, and as late as the 1790’s, distinguished intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson denied the very possibility of extinction.⁹

But in addition to the reality of species extinction, the theory of evolution by natural selection proposes that new species also arise in an environment containing widespread pain and death. Both the creatures that are now living and those that are gone are tainted by an “acrid smell of death”.¹⁰ It makes us wonder, if our Creator is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mk. 12:27), where is God’s presence in the evolutionary picture?

In all honesty, creation through evolution is not what we would expect from God, but Scripture is full of examples in which God acts in unexpected ways. After all, God’s choosing to undergo an agonizing death on a cross is not what we would expect from the all-powerful Creator of the universe, either. In both cases, new life comes about through pain, suffering, and death. As George Murphy puts it,

A priori ideas about God have to be overcome, and God's character has to be learned from God's self-revelation.¹¹

God’s fullest self-expression is in Jesus Christ himself, one who is intimately familiar with and personally endured creaturely pain and death. The theology of the cross reveals that God's self-revelation takes place in situations of suffering, loss, and apparent hopelessness, much like situations that occur through natural selection.¹²

The crucifixion is disconcerting too

Not only is creation through evolution an unexpected and unsettling process, but so is the crucifixion of Jesus! Killing someone by hanging them on a cross is an unbearably painful, prolonged, humiliating form of death. It was such a horrific type of public execution that it wasn't until after the Roman Empire stopped the practice of crucifixion—and people no longer witnessed it personally—did the cross become a visual object of devotion.¹³ Our culture is sufficiently removed from crucifixion that we are desensitized to its original significance, but to connect it to our current context, imagine the reaction you would get by wearing jewelry designed to look like an electric chair.¹⁴

Once we are more attuned to the brutality of crucifixion, it seems all the more striking that the cross is the sign of God’s work, what George Murphy calls “the trademark of God”.¹⁵ The suffering and death of Jesus is featured prominently in the Gospels, but the crucifixion-resurrection pattern is strongly resonant within the Old Testament, too. Israel suffered and toiled as slaves in Egypt for centuries before they were rescued in the Exodus, bringing life to a people who were spiritually dead. Centuries later, the nation of Israel would experience death again when the Babylonians destroyed the Davidic monarchy, burned their Temple, killed their people, and sent many into exile.¹⁶ Neither Israel (God’s chosen people) nor Jesus (God’s own son) were spared from death and suffering; rather, suffering seems to have been the way in which God re-forms and renews humanity to fully bear His own image.

Redemption extends to all of creation

Fortunately, God’s story does not end with death. God gives new life after his creatures have been subjected to terrible circumstances. Redemption was promised to Israel itself—Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones describes how God would renew His chosen people (Ezek 37:1-14). Later, the astonishing resurrection of Jesus made salvation possible not only for Jews, but for all people in Christ (Gal 3:26-29). Ultimately, the New Testament makes it clear that God’s renewal will encompass the entire Creation:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. (Ephesians 1:8-10)

Christians are accustomed to thinking of the death of Christ in regard to humans, but our culture rarely acknowledges God plan for the redemption of His entire creation. This is partly attributable to the fact that discussions of creation and origins are often separated from the topic of salvation.¹⁷ In doing so we tend to marginalize Jesus as we argue about Genesis. Rather than fall into this trap, if we view nature through a theology of the cross, we will see Christ as both the alpha and the omega point in discussions of life’s history and life’s future. With this perspective, we are more apt to sense our solidarity with the rest of creation as we wait in eager anticipation of a glorious future:

The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21)

Conclusion

As part of the Church’s conversation about the problem of natural evil, this essay is meant to be a brief introduction to a “theology of the cross”. One can explore this concept in greater detail in Murphy’s book The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. While there is a lot more to be said, let me conclude with the following observation: though evolution may not be compatible with some interpretations of Christianity, evolutionary creation is certainly compatible with the crucified Christ and the theology of the cross. In the person of Jesus, God suffers with the world and ultimately redeems it. As George Murphy puts in, “The world's pains are God's stigmata.”¹⁸

Explore this Topic Further

• Miller, Keith. “And God saw that it was good”: Death and Pain in the Created Order. BioLogos series
• Murphy, George L. The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003.
• Murphy, George L. “Cross, Evolution, and Theodicy: Telling It Like It Is”. In The Evolution of Evil. Edited by G. Bennett, M.J. Hewlett, T. Peters, and R.J. Russell. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008.
• Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2008.

Notes

1. Murphy, George L. The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003.
2. Murphy, p34
3. “CRUX Sola Est Nostra Theologia,” in D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Boehlau, 1892), 5:172. The captitalization is in the original. Cited in Murphy, p26.
4. Murphy, p108
5. Murphy, p4
6. Murphy, p43
7. Murphy, p3
8. Some Christians ascribe animal death to some combination of Adam’s fall and Noah’s flood, but this does not resolve the problem that the animals are still suffering and dying through no fault of their own. See Keith Miller’s BioLogos series Death and Pain in the Created Order for the limitations inherent in a fall-based theodicy.
9. Rudwick, Martin. The meaning of fossils: Episodes in the history of paleontology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
10. See Jeff Schloss’ BioLogos essay Evolution, Creation, and the Sting of Death
11. Murphy, p63
12. Murphy, p122
13. Murphy, p27
14. This example is drawn from an evangelical outreach event held by a Christian student group in Innsbruck, Austria. On campus one day, they started conversations with their classmates by asking the question, “Would you wear an electric chair on your neck?”
15. Murphy, George L. The Trademark of God: A Christian Course in Creation, Evolution, and Salvation. Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1986.
16. Murphy, Cosmos in the Light of the Cross, p 31-32.
17. Murphy, p35
18. Murphy, p87

[T]he purpose of Jesus’ “art” was to give verbal, visual, and dramatic forms to those complicated and confounding relationships and symmetries and harmonies between Himself (and the Father and Spirit) and the world, ourselves included in the latter. Such creative expressions did and do not make everything clear, but rather resist simple clarity, forcing their hearers to come at the whole complicated, opaque truth from a position of intellectual and spiritual humility.

Speaking in parables is indeed similar to an artist’s craft. Neither are systematic, logical arguments aimed at intellectual persuasion. Rather, they create impressions, whole new worlds of meaning intended to turn old worlds on their heads. Further, they do not always clarify, but actually can by design obscure a deeper reality. To apprehend that deeper reality, one must—like a patron facing a timeless painting—continue to seek, ponder, and meditate on what is being said.

Parables are radical pieces of communication meant to disorient the hearers and then reorient them to an entirely new way of thinking. The reason Jesus does so much story telling is because stories—not debate or other “proofs”—are best suited for such a whole scale reorientation. Jesus’ preaching, after all, was about the kingdom of heaven (or of God). This kingdom was not about where one goes after death, but a here-and-now transformation of how people thought about God and their relationship to him.

Jesus “explains” this new kingdom in several ways, one of which is the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), where Jesus lays out the types of behaviors that should now characterize the people of God. These new behaviors contrast again and again with the old and are fully at odds with what the religious leaders of the time were teaching the people. Jesus’ kingdom is counter-cultural.

But Jesus more often “shows” the people what this kingdom looks like by telling a good story, which regularly begins, “The kingdom of heaven is like….” Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to paint a verbal picture, which is precisely what Jesus does in the parables.

Jesus’ stories are not like Aesop’s Fables (as interesting as they are), where there is a moral to the story. The parables are not about playing nice with each other. They actually plant you in a different world where things are running according to a wholly different set of rules of the kingdom of heaven.

We can see this by looking at one of Jesus’ favorite topics in the parables: how Jews related to Gentiles. Jewish identity was an extremely important and touchy issue in Jesus’ day. Even though the Jews had returned to their land after the exile (539 BC), they had been guests in their own land—first of the Persians, then Greeks, and now the Romans. How Jews could maintain their ethnic and religious identity in such a pressure cooker of pagan Greek and Roman ideas, not to mention the embarrassment of pagan rulers telling them what to do, was a sore point.

So, one can understand why Jewish attitudes towards tax collectors, for example, are a repeated concern in the Gospels. Tax collectors were fellow Jews who were traitors to their own people by collecting taxes for the Romans. They were even spoken of in the same breath as prostitutes (e.g., Matthew 21:31-32).

No “good Jew” committed to maintaining his or her identity amid a pagan world would lower themselves to work alongside the Romans. Yet, what does Jesus do? He associates with these (and other) “sinners” on a regular basis, and even calls a tax collector (Matthew) to be among his select group of followers. By his actions Jesus demonstrates that his kingdom operates by different, counter-intuitive, counter-cultural rules.

These types of concrete actions were supported again and again by Jesus’ parables. Such a radical change in how Jews viewed God, the world, and their place in it—where sinners and other outsiders were welcome—required a communication strategy that was up for the task.

Stories are that communication strategy. Parables were Jesus’ canvas for “painting” a new vision for what life in his kingdom should look like. And in Jesus’ kingdom, there was no longer any place for maintaining those fundamental ethnic and religious distinctions by which the Jews had been operating.

We can go to virtually any parable to make this point, but the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan works as well as any (Luke 10:30-37). We recall that what drove Jesus to tell this story was the question asked by the “expert in the law” (v. 25): “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ answer was this parable, and it carries a double punch.

First, the Jewish leaders step around the beaten man on the road—certainly a non-Jew—feeling no obligation to come to his aid. The point is that the leaders of Israel, of all people, should know enough of God’s character to stop and help him. They shouldn’t ask whether he is “one of us,” an insider. All one needs to know is that this human being needs help. In Jesus’ kingdom, carefully drawn lines of ethnic and religious separation are a thing of the past.

But second, on a deeper level, Jesus’ point is far more threatening. By calling upon a Samaritan as the “good guy” in this story—with all of the backdrop of cultural hostility—Jesus is making a more pressing point than “be good to everyone” (which is where the Sunday School lesson typically ends). The hated Samaritan sees the man lying there, and without asking questions about who he is—whether Jew, Samaritan, Greek, Roman, or anything else for that matter—helps him. The Samaritan, of all people, acts like a neighbor toward the man who needed help, the very thing the Jewish leaders failed to do.

By telling Jewish leaders that they have something to learn about their own God from, of all people, Samaritans, is not a suggestion to be more open-minded and tolerant. It is nothing less than a rewriting of the Jewish narrative or religious and ethnic identity. Jesus uses a story to paint a vivid mental and emotional picture for his hearers. No other medium would do.

It is sometimes thought that Jesus told stories because he wanted to persuade the masses, the common people who are not used to debating fine points of theology like the scribes and priests. This is partially true, but it is also true that the radical message of the kingdom of heaven required a means of communication that was best suited for it. Like any work of art, stories “create” new ways of seeing the world—and it is, after all, a new world that Jesus means to create.

Let me put this another way: Jesus himself communicated the deep mysteries of a new way of being through the use of such things as vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors, and other devices common to artistic expression. In fact, the incarnation, God in human flesh, is not a debate or argument about the nature of God that appeals primarily to the intellect. It is a vivid—and true—demonstration, a portrait, of a radically new and mysterious way of thinking about God, the world, and our place in it.

If this is how God chooses to communicate at the incarnation—the very climax and epicenter of his story—we should not be surprised to see God painting vivid portraits elsewhere in Scripture. This is especially true of Genesis and creation. Something so fundamental to God’s story may need to be told in a way that transcends the limitations of purely intellectual engagement. Genesis may be written more to show us—by grabbing us with its images than laying out a timeline of cause and effect events—that God is the central figure on the biblical drama.

Originally posted February 1, 2011.

A Christology for Science

The theologian Robert Barron has nicely clarified much of what lies behind recent conflicts over human origins that feature supposedly biblical truths contending against supposedly scientific conclusions.

In his words, “recent debates concerning evolutionist and ‘creationist’ accounts of the origins of nature are marked through and through by modern assumptions about a distant, competitive, and occasionally intervening God, whether the existence of such a God is affirmed or denied.”¹ Barron’s response to these modern debates is a sophisticated exposition of classical Christology aimed at his theological peers. My effort is much simpler and is aimed at academics in general, but it comes from the same christological perspective.

Christ as Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer

Classical Christian orthodoxy as expressed in the creeds that summarize the Scriptures begins at the beginning: nature owes its existence to and is sustained by Jesus Christ. From this starting point several important ramifications follow naturally.

One is the implication that the best way of finding out about nature is to look at nature. This implication comes directly from the christological principle of contingency. As described in the Gospels, individuals who wanted to learn the truth about Jesus had to “come and see.” Likewise, to find out what might be true in nature, it is necessary to “come and see.”

The process of “coming and seeing” does not lead to infallible truth about the physical world since there is no special inspiration from the Holy Spirit for the Book of Nature as there is for the Book of Scripture. But “coming and seeing” is still the method that belief in Christ as Savior privileges for learning about all other objects, including nature. This privileging means that scientific results coming from thoughtful, organized, and carefully checked investigations of natural phenomena must, for Christ-centered reasons, be taken seriously.

From this perspective, the successes of modern science in recent centuries testify implicitly to the existence of a creating and redeeming God. To once again quote Robert Barron, scientific activity by its very nature “implies . . . an unavoidable correspondence between the activity of the mind and the structure of being: intelligence will find its fulfillment in this universal and inescapable intelligibility.” But how can this implication be justified? According to Barron,

The universality of objective intelligibility (assumed by any honest scientist) can be explained only through recourse to a transcendent subjective intelligence that has thought the world into being, so that every act of knowing a worldly object or event is, literally, a recognition, a thinking again of what has already been thought by a primordial divine knower.²

In lay language, the “transcendent subjective intelligence” and the “primordial divine knower” guarantee the possibility that a researcher’s mind can grasp something real about the world beyond the mind. The Scriptures—in John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1 — provide a name for that “intelligence” and that “knower.” In these terms, the existence of nature and the possibility of understanding nature presuppose Jesus Christ.

A second implication arising from the centrality of Christ in creation concerns the interpretation of Scripture. Classic biblical texts about the purpose of the Bible reinforce the foundational principle that the believers’ confidence in Scripture rests on its message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Thus, in John 20, the Gospel story has been written down so “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). In 2 Timothy 3, the inspired or God-breathed “holy scriptures” have as their main purpose instruction “for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (3:15). And in 2 Peter 1, “the word of the prophets made more certain” as these prophets were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (1:19, 21) deals preeminently with “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:16).

As these passages suggest, salvation in Christ anchors the believer’s confidence that all of Scripture is trustworthy.³ But because of that supreme fact, the effort to understand how Scripture is trustworthy for questions like the ordering of nature should never stray far from consideration of Christ and his work. Yet as we have seen, “Christ and his work” includes, as an object, the material world of creation, and as a method, “come and see.” In other words, following the Christ revealed in Scripture as Redeemer means following the Christ who made it possible for humans to understand the physical world and offered a means (“come and see”) for gaining that understanding.

Final and ultimate disharmony between what “come and see” demonstrates about Christ and what “come and see” reveals about the world of nature is impossible. This Christ is the same one through whom God has worked “to reconcile to himself all things . . . making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:20) and in whom “all things were created” and in whom “all things hold together” (1:16-17).

Yet it is indisputable that on some science-theology questions, trust in Christ (and therefore trust in Scripture) has seemed to conflict with trusting in what Christ-authorized procedure (“come and see”) reveals about a Christ-created and Christ-sustained world. The parade of difficult questions arising from the effort to bring together standard interpretations of Scripture and standard interpretations of the natural world is a long one. Trying to answer these questions has been a consistent feature of the modern scientific age.

• In the nineteenth century, many earnest believers were wondering, if “coming and seeing” in geology and astronomy led to the conclusion that material existence has a very long history, should the “days” of Genesis 1 be understood as long periods of time or should a new interpretation of Genesis 1:1 be adopted that posits a “gap” between “in the beginning” and “God created”?

• More recent advances in both historical understanding (the ancient Near East) and empirical science (genetics, biology, astronomy) have prompted questions about the creation accounts of early Genesis. Well-trained scientists with strong Christian convictions have followed the Christ-rooted procedure of “coming and seeing” in their study of physical evidence for the origin of the universe and have concluded that much of standard evolutionary theory seems well grounded.⁴ Similarly, well-trained biblical scholars with strong Christian convictions have followed the Christ-rooted procedure of “coming and seeing” in their study of ancient Near Eastern cultures and have concluded that the early chapters of Genesis seem to be directly concerned about attacking idol-worship that substituted the sun or the moon for God.⁵ Given the combination of these two streams of testimony, should it be thought that early Genesis is not concerned with modern scientific questions but is very much concerned about encouraging worship of the one true God who is the originator and sustainer of all things?

• Even more recently, the rough consensus on evolutionary change assembled from many scientific disciplines makes for even more complex questions: for example, if human evolution seems indicated by a wide range of responsible scientific procedures (“come and see”), how might responsible biblical interpretation understand the New Testament stress on Christ (very definitely in historical time and historical space) as overcoming the sinfulness inherited from Adam and Eve, whom Scripture, at least on a surface level, also represents as individuals in historical time and historical space?

All such questions caused understandable consternation when they were first raised, since they challenged specific interpretations of Scripture that had been tightly interwoven with basic interpretations of the entire Bible. Even after long and hard thought, such questions continue to pose definite challenges.

Answering such questions responsibly requires sophistication in scientific knowledge and sophistication in biblical interpretation — exercised humbly, teachably, and nondefensively. Unfortunately, these traits and capacities have not always predominated when such questions are addressed. But the difficult questions will almost certainly only continue to multiply because of two ongoing realities: the Holy Spirit continues to bestow new life in Christ through the message of the cross found in Scripture, and responsible investigations lead plausibly to further evolutionary conclusions from the relevant scientific disciplines.

This excerpt was drawn from chapter 3 of Mark Noll's book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. If you would like to read the whole chapter, click here. First posted August 30, 2011.

Notes

1. Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), 221. For convenience, I return several times in the following paragraphs to this book by Robert Barron. But there are other parallel efforts, for example from the physicist and Anglican theologian John C. Polkinghorne, in books like Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), and Science and the Trinity; The Christian Encounter with Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
2. Barron, Priority of Christ, 154.
3. See above on providence.
4. Barron, Priority of Christ, 13.
5. A Summa of the Summa, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 174 (from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 22, 4).

Asa Gray

If Thomas Huxley earned the title of "Darwin's bulldog," then Asa Gray should be remembered as "Darwin's dove." Whereas Huxley enjoyed a good fight in his defense of Darwin's theory, Gray sought to mediate and bring sides together around a common understanding of "good science." As Darwin's strongest and most vocal scientific ally in the United States, Gray recognized the scientific importance of Darwin's efforts for the growing professionalism of biological researchers.

But as an orthodox Christian, a Presbyterian firmly devoted to the faith expressed in the Nicene Creed, Gray saw in Darwin's theory both evidence for his philosophical commitment to natural theology and support for his opposition to the idealism advocated by Louis Agassiz and the Naturphilosophen in both Europe and America. Indeed, Agassiz's advocacy of Platonic forms as a basis of biological understanding (e.g., "A species is a thought of the creator")¹ would be a major source of American opposition to Darwin's theory.

Professor of botany at Harvard during most of the middle half of the nineteenth century, Gray was one of the few members of the scientific community to whom Darwin revealed his theory before the publication of On the Origin of Species, and, from what I can tell, the only American. Gray and Darwin met briefly in January 1839 during one of Gray's visits to England. Later, during the 1850s, Darwin wrote Gray on several occasions requesting information--a practice that Darwin frequently employed. In 1854, Darwin's friend and confidant, Joseph Hooker, showed Darwin Gray's review of Hooker's Flora of New Zealand, in which Gray had argued strongly against Louis Agassiz's idealism and had raised questions from his own work on the stability of species. Gray was not yet ready to deny their permanence, but hybrids and other observations were beginning to trouble him.

The next year Gray wrote a lucid and penetrating positive evaluation of Alphonse De Candolle's two-volume Géographie botanique raisonnée, a pioneering work dealing with plant geography and distribution from a statistical perspective. Hooker had sneeringly dismissed the work. In A. Hunter Dupree's authoritative biography of Gray, he describes Gray's puzzlement at Hooker's response in these terms:

Although in the long view Gray's evaluation of the epoch-making nature of De Candolle's book was more justified than Hooker's sneers, [Gray was confused by his response, for] Hooker seemed to be talking with a more comprehensive theory definitely in mind, some reason for taking his position, which he did not divulge and which his friend [Gray] did not possess.²

Darwin, however, saw in both Gray's review of Hooker's book and in his comments on De Candolle's tome that Gray was troubled by some of the same empirical data that had been bothering him. In April 1855, Darwin wrote Gray to urge that Gray update his Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States first published in 1848, and especially to address the issue of the range of Alpine plants in the United States. Specifically, he said: "Now I would say it is your duty to generalise as far as you safely can from your as yet completed work."³

Behind this request was Darwin's desire to test his impression that Gray could make a good ally. Gray passed the test, and finally, in July 1857, Darwin let Gray in on his theory of the transmutation of species. Gray was never an uncritical supporter, and there are many evidences in the correspondence between these two scientists that Gray was willing to challenge Darwin and disagree with some of his conclusions. Nevertheless, Gray saw the importance of Darwin's work and the ways in which it provided answers to the troublesome issues that he had confronted in his own botanical efforts.

Gray responds to Darwin's theory

After considerable interchange--one might even say debate--among Gray, Darwin, and Hooker, Gray wrote to Hooker in October 1859 (one month before the publication of On the Origin of Species) saying that he had absolutely no problem with cognate species arising by variation. He did, however, raise a concern that would be the source of much future discussion. He wondered about Darwin's "carry[ing] out this view to its ultimate and legitimate results,--how [do] you connect the philosophy of religion with the philosophy of your science." He added: "I should feel uneasy if I could not connect them into a consistent whole--i.e., fundamental principles of science should not be in conflict."⁴

When Origins was published, Gray wrote a clear, positive, yet critical review in The American Journal of Science. Aware of mounting religious opposition, he ended his review by arguing that whereas one could use Darwin's theory in support of an atheistic view of Nature, one could use any scientific theory in that way. He wrote: "The theory of gravitation and ... the nebular hypothesis assume a universal and ultimate physical cause, from which the effects in nature must necessarily have resulted."⁵ He did not see the physicists and astronomers who adopted Newton's theories as atheists or pantheists, though Leibniz earlier had raised such reservations. And a similar situation existed with the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin, Gray continued: "merely takes up a particular, proximate cause, or set of such causes, from which, it is argued, the present diversity of species has or may have contingently resulted. The author does not say necessarily resulted."⁶

This far Gray could go with Darwin. But there was a point at which he parted company, and that was the fortuitous randomness of the process that Darwin's theory seemed to imply.

In part 2, Dr. Miles describes Darwin's struggle with the problem of natural evil and design in nature.

Notes

1. Cited in A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 151. 2. Ibid., 236.
3. Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903), 252.
4. Dupree, Asa Gray, 266.
5. Asa Gray, "The Origin of Species" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 44.
6. Ibid.

I ask the question, “Why is the universe so special?” Now scientists don’t like things to be special; we like things to be general, and our natural anticipation would have been that the universe is just a common or garden specimen of what a universe might be like.

But we’ve come to understand a lot about the history of the universe. We know that our universe started 13.7 billion years ago, and it started extremely simple, just an almost uniformly expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could possibly think about. But a world that started so simple has of course become rich and complex. With you and me, in fact, the most remarkable and complex consequences are its history, at least of which we are aware. The human brain is far and away the most complicated physical system we have ever encountered anywhere in our exploration of the universe.

That fact itself might suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history rather than just one thing after another. But we’ve also come to understand many of the processes by which this rich fruitfulness has come to birth. As we’ve come to understand these, we’ve come to see that though these processes are of course evolving processes, they took long periods of time – the universe was 10 billion years old before any form of life appeared in it, at least as far as we know anyway – and life of our complexity only appeared yesterday.

Nevertheless, the universe is pregnant with life, pregnant with the possibility of life, essentially from the beginning onwards. By which I mean the given laws of nature had to take a very specific, very finely tuned form, if the universe was to have so fruitful a history.

That’s a very remarkable discovery, and let me give you some examples of why we believe that. If you’re going to have a fruitful universe, one of the first things you have to get right is that you have to have the right stars in the universe. The stars are going to have a very important role to play. First of all, you must have some stars that are going to be very long lived, live for billions of years, steadily burning, steadily producing energy which will enable the development of life on one of the encircling planets. We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way very well, and it depends on a delicate balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. The seats on which you are sitting are held together by electromagnetism and in fact you are held together by electromagnetism.

If you alter that balance a little bit in one direction the stars will begin to burn intensely, furiously, just pouring out energy and they will only live a few million years rather than a few billion years. If you move it a little bit in the other direction they will burn so slowly they will be brown stars and they will not produce enough energy to fuel the development of life. So you have to have a very delicate finely tuned balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetic forces in a fruitful universe.

Remember, science takes the laws of nature, takes the given strengths of gravity, the given strength of electromagnetism, uses that to explain processes in the world, how things happen, but it doesn’t explain where those laws of nature come from. They are just brute facts as far as science is concerned.

And the stars have another absolutely indispensible role to play. The stars are the place where the heavier elements essential for life are made in the interior nuclear furnaces. There are many elements that are necessary for life, of which carbon is perhaps the most essential. Carbon is the basis of the long chain molecules, which are the biochemical basis of life. The early universe only makes the simplest elements; it makes hydrogen and helium and it makes no carbon at all. Carbon only begins to be made when the universe, which started uniform, begins to condense and become lumpy and grainy with stars and galaxies. As the stars condense they heat up, nuclear processes begin again in their interiors. And it’s those nuclear processes in the stars that make carbon and the heavier elements. Every atom of carbon in your body was once inside a star. We are people of stardust made in the ashes of dead stars.

And that’s a very beautiful process that takes place in that sort of way. And one of the great triumphs of astrophysics and the second half of the 20th century was to unravel that process. One of the people who did some of the most important work on that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. And they were trying to figure out how to make carbon. They got helium, and if you can make three helium nuclei stick together that will produce carbon, but when you have something as small as a nucleus it is impossible to get three to stick together at one time, they’re just too small.

Ok, so let’s do it step by step. Stick two together gives you berylium. Helium 4 gives you beryllium-8, hope it stays around for a bit, another helium comes along, attaches itself, and bingo, you’ve got carbon-12. That’s the obvious thing to think about but it doesn’t work in the obvious way, and the reason it doesn’t work in the obvious way is that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable. It doesn’t oblige you by staying around long enough to catch that third helium, at least in an ordinary, straightforward way.

But Fred realized that it would be just possible for this to happen if there was a very large enhancement effect, in the trade we call it resonance, occurring in carbon at just the right energy, it has to be the right energy, which would enable that attachment process to catch that third helium much much more quickly that you might have thought, in fact so quickly that some of them would get caught before the beryllium-8 disappeared. It was a very good idea, and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself and he went off to just check in the nuclear data tables of this particular resonance’s energy levels, and it wasn’t in the tables, but he knew it must be there, he’s carbon based life like you and me.

So he rang up some friends in the States, a father and son team who were good experimentalists and he said, “Look, you missed something. There’s a resonance and energy level in carbon that you haven’t spotted, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. I know exactly where this energy has got to be. You go look for it.” And they said, “No, no, we don’t want to do that, we have more interesting things to do.” But Fred was very determined and he bullied them into looking for it and they found it.

Now that’s a wonderful achievement, to predict an energy level in carbon on the basis of how it might have been made in the stars is a fantastic scientific achievement. But it’s more than that. Fred had a lifetime conviction of atheism, realized of course that if the laws of physics had been just a little bit different that resonance wouldn’t have been there, and the possibility of carbon-based life is too significant for it just to be a happy accident in his view, so he says in a Yorkshire accent that is beyond my power to imitate, he said that the universe is a put-up job. Fred didn’t like the word God, and so he said some Intelligent, capital “I” Intelligence, must have monkied with the laws of nature to make carbon production possible. What that could possibly be I don’t know, but the more sensible thing to say is that creation is ordained, that the laws of nature would be such, as to enable the fruitfulness of carbon-based life.

We’ll come back to evaluating that possibility in a minute, but before we do, let me give you two other examples of how specific, how special, our universe has to be for us to be able to be here today to think about. We live in a universe that is immensely big, beyond our powers to imagine really. There are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy in the Milky Way, of which our sun is just a common or garden specimen, and there are about a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable universe, of which our Milky Way is a pretty common or garden specimen. So we live in a world that is unimaginably vast, and sometimes we might feel upset by that and think, “What could be the significance of us who are simply inhabitants of a speck of cosmic dust, as you might say, in this vast, vast universe?”

Nevertheless, if all those stars were not there, we would not be here to be upset at the thought of them. Because there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts, and a universe that is significantly smaller than our universe would not have been able to last the 14 billion years, which is the necessary time to produce beings of our complexity. So that’s another condition of the world that has to be right for human beings, or something like human beings, to be a possibility.

One final example, which is the finest tuning of all: quantum theory suggests that there should be an energy attached to space itself. In quantum theory the vacuum, so called empty space, is not just a void. There are things called vacuum fluctuations which occur in a continual sort of seething mass of things coming into being and going out of being all the time. So while there is nothing there that doesn’t mean there is nothing happening. That may sound strange and paradoxical but believe me that’s what quantum theory implies. And of course these happenings, these fluctuations, generate a certain amount of energy, we call it “zero point energy”, and that energy is spread out over the whole of space. So we expect there to be energy associated with space.

And just recently the astronomers have discovered something called dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe, which is just such an energy associated with space. Well that’s very good, you might say. However, when we estimate, just from thinking about quantum theory, how much energy there should be in space it turns out to be a fantastically large amount, and when we see the amount of energy there actually is per volume in space, it turns out to be very, very small in relation to that expected size. In fact, it turns out to be smaller by a factor of 10^-120. That means by a factor of 1 over 1 followed by 120 zeros. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to see that’s a fantastically small number. So some fantastic cancellation has taken place to turn that big number into the tiny number that we actually observe, and if it hadn’t taken place we wouldn’t be here to observe it because significantly higher energy would simply have blown the whole show apart too fast for anything interesting to happen. That’s the finest tuning that we know in the universe: one part in 10¹²⁰.

So we live in a world that is very remarkably finely tuned, and we have to consider that. And all scientists would agree about what I have been telling you; this is non-contentious. Where the contention comes in is what we might make of that, what is the further significance of it.

In the conclusion to Dr. Polkinghorne’s lecture, he looks at two explanations for the "fine-tuning" principle -- the multiverse theory and the existence of a divine intelligence -- and explains why natural theology alone is not sufficient to make the case for a God who interacts and cares for his creation. To make the case for theism, he argues, we need revelation, God's self-disclosure. This is manifest in various ways, including that which we experience personally, including ethics and aesthetics.

Design arguments have been around forever and expressed in various ways. Most of them fall into what we call natural theology, which is the process of inferring something about the existence and nature of God by the inspection of nature. The story of creation in Genesis launches the discussion in the Judeo-Christian tradition when it speaks of God ordering nature and driving back chaos. On the fourth day “God created the sun, moon, and the stars to give light to the earth and to govern and separate the day and the night. These would also serve as signs to mark seasons, days, and years.” All this suggests design and purpose. Job speaks of God making “water drops evaporate” so the clouds can “shower abundantly on mankind.” (Job 36:27-28 HCSB). The psalmist expresses awe at the grandeur of the night sky but remarkably does not comment on the grandeur of his own existence:

When I observe Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, . . . what is man that You remember him? (Psalm 8:3-4 HCSB)

In the New Testament, Paul speaks of the created order testifying clearly to the reality of God, arguing that, “the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20 KJV). Biblical scholars have interpreted this to mean that an open-minded seeker can infer the existence of God by studying the creation. As theologians reflected on the nature of the creation these arguments were repeated and refined. Augustine in the fourth century, Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Luther and Calvin at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century—all were understandably convinced that the world had a grand design that was readily discernable. After all, nobody had any other explanation for why birds were adapted to fly, fish to swim and constellations to mark the seasons.

By the time we get to Isaac Newton in the latter part of the seventeenth century, we have the first carefully constructed scientific arguments. Newton, as we learned in high school, explained how gravity from the sun keeps the planets in their orbits. This explanation replaced previous medieval explanations that included the possibility that the planets moved because angels pushed on them. (It also replaced Galileo’s explanation that they moved because of a “circular inertia,” which turned out to be as much a fantasy as the pushing angels.) But Newton’s theory didn’t explain why the planets all go around the sun in the same direction and in almost the same plane. In fact Newton could not imagine any natural process that could produce such elegant design, so he argued that God must be the explanation.

About two centuries later the most famous design argument was developed by William Paley whose Natural Theology Darwin read voraciously as a young scientist. “Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground,” asked Paley, “and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. . . . [W]hen we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. . . . [T]he inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.” Paley goes on to compare the watch to an eye, arguing that if a watch implies a watchmaker, then an eye implies an eye-maker. The eye-maker, of course, can only be God.

Newton’s argument about the planets and Paley’s about the watch have the same logical form: We find something in nature that appears too ingeniously arranged to have been produced by known natural processes, so we infer that a Designer from outside the natural order—God— must be the source of the design. Their arguments differ, however, on the question of purpose. It was not clear to Newton or anyone of his day exactly why the planets needed to be going about in the orderly way they were observed. If the order was indeed provided by God, no explanation for it could be discerned other than the creation of order for the sake of order. In contrast, the designs that Paley highlighted were clearly purposeful. Our eye is remarkably designed for a purpose other than to elicit awe at its complexity. We see with our eyes. We don’t do anything with Neptune’s nice orbit, other than admire it.

Red Flags

Arguments that the universe is designed are complicated. We certainly live in a remarkable universe with many features that inspire awe. Many of those features connect in astonishing ways to the habitability of the universe. The psalmist’s wonder at the heavens has only grown stronger as we have learned more about those heavens. The universe certainly does not become ever more boring and bland as we come to understand it better.

But we also live in a world with earthquakes, plagues and tsunamis. Our sun will burn out at some point, incinerating the earth in the process. The prospects of securing our future by colonizing other planets seem remote. The long-term prognosis of the universe, by the cold logical lights of science, is not good. Its temperature will continuously drop as it expands for billions of years. Eventually there won’t be enough heat left for any form of life, and finally there won’t even be enough heat for atoms and molecules to interact. This sterile icy blackness is frightening to contemplate. No matter what we do as a species, we and our cultural achievements are destined to perish.

No simple overriding explanation that makes sense of everything comes into view as we learn more about the universe. And experience with past arguments raises red caution flags. For example, Newton’s design argument about the planets was an argument from ignorance that now bears the label “god of the gaps.” There was a gap in Newton’s explanation for the planets. He could explain why their orbits were elliptical and what kept them in their orbits. But he could not explain the uniformity of their orbits, so he invoked God as the explanation to plug this gap—hence the label for such arguments—god of the gaps.

A century after Newton, French physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace dispelled the mystery of the structure of the solar system. He showed that a better understanding of gravity and how solar systems originated could explain the things that Newton attributed to the direct action of God. Laplace’s work did not refute the existence of God, of course. But it did dismantle Newton’s argument that the planetary orbits must have been set up by God, thus eliminating an argument that some had been using to argue for God’s existence.

In a similar way, Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for the design that Paley marveled at in the eye. Scholars of Paley’s generation knew nothing of natural selection, mutations or genetics, so they could not imagine how nature might craft something so remarkable as an eye. Paley’s argument, like Newton’s, turns out to be another god of the gaps explanation that disappears with further scientific insights into the way the world works.

So this is the first red flag to note—design arguments are all-too-often based on gaps in our knowledge and will disappear when those gaps are filled.

The second red flag concerns the apparent purpose of any design. “Design” can point in many directions or no direction at all. The science museum in Boston has a grand contraption that does nothing except move balls around to no end. The only possible purpose is to impress a visitor with the juxtaposition of complex design and lack of purpose. There is likewise no significance to the patterns of the stars that we call constellations. The “design” of the Big Dipper is simply interesting. The fine-tuning of the universe for life, on the other hand, encourages us to wonder if life may be important in some way. But it does not specify which life forms are relevant and why. And we must note that some features of our world exhibiting a high level of design—like the AIDS virus or the poison of the rattlesnake—seem to have the purpose to destroy human life. If rattlesnakes could reflect on their existence, they could marvel at the carbon resonance that makes that existence possible.

A third red flag we must note is bad design. If marvelous design in the universe motivates reflection on the possibility that God created the world what do we do about the counterarguments? Consider asteroids. A gigantic asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and so disrupted the ecosystems and the atmosphere of the earth that the dinosaurs went extinct. Absolutely nothing prevents the same thing from happening again. We are protected today largely by the vastness of space and the structure of our solar system with large outer planets that “vacuum up” a lot of stuff that could hit the earth. These various protections make collisions of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs unlikely. But they offer no guarantees. If the Goldilocks features of our universe are intended to make it habitable, then why does the universe also have anti-Goldilocks features?

Many such issues complicate the process of figuring out why the universe is the way it is. And as we have learned somewhat reluctantly in the last few centuries, the great explanatory power of science disappears entirely when questions of purpose enter the conversation. Science is quite extraordinary at telling us how the world is but quite unable to tell us why the world is like that. Science illuminates the remarkable features of our universe that make life possible, but it goes silent when we ask whether any particular life form is the reason why the universe is the way it is. That deeply religious question has to be explored somewhere else.

These challenges caution us against naively selecting—cherry-picking we call it—a few Goldilocks features of the universe, assuming the friendly design work is for our benefit, and jumping to the conclusion that everything points simply and unambiguously in the direction of God as Creator.

Since this post, and those that will follow it, depend on an accurate representation of the argument for irreducible complexity (IC), I will take some time to clarify exactly how Michael Behe, the biochemist and Intelligent Design (ID) proponent who has most extensively developed the IC argument, uses the term. For Behe, the argument for IC is a critique of gradual evolutionary processes, of the kind that Darwin saw as necessary for his theory to hold. When Behe introduces and defines IC in his book Darwin’s Black Box, he has a key quote from Darwin on gradualism explicitly in view:

Darwin knew that his theory of gradual evolution by natural selection carried a heavy burden: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

It is safe to say the most of the scientific skepticism about Darwinism in the past century has centered on this requirement… critics of Darwin have suspected that his criterion of failure had been met. But how can we be confident? What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications”?

Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39)

The definition of an IC system is thus straightforward: it is a matched group of components, where all the components are necessary for the function of the system. The necessity of each component can be demonstrated by attempting to remove it – if the system no longer works if even one component is removed, it is by definition IC. Since an IC system requires all the components to be present for its function, it is not possible for the system, in its current state, to have been produced directly from a non-functional precursor. If one grants this premise, it leaves two options: that the IC system was derived indirectly, from a system that is not IC, or that the system was assembled by fiat and thus represents the actions of a designer. Behe’s criterion for distinguishing between these choices is based on evaluating the probabilities of these competing options:

Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can not definitively rule out the possibility of an indirect, circuitous route. As the complexity of an interacting system increases, though, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously. And as the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 40)

As we will examine in an upcoming post, Behe attempts to determine the precise limit of what evolutionary processes can (and cannot) achieve in a second book, The Edge of Evolution. For our present purposes, however, it is enough to note that the strength of the argument from IC depends on the perceived implausibility of the opposing explanation – that of an indirect evolutionary route that produces an IC system from a non-IC precursor system.

Building IC, one step at a time?

The presence of IC systems in biology as Behe has defined them is not contentious: there are many biological systems that cease to function when parts are removed. Indeed, the success of classical genetics in “dissecting” which genes are needed for certain functions largely rests on the ability to see some effect on function when a gene is removed from a system by mutation. What scientists dispute, however, is Behe’s claim that identifying IC systems is a hallmark of design. The evolutionary model for building IC is quite simple, and Behe has set it out as an option: an indirect route where non-essential parts are added to a system, and then over time the system comes to depend on those parts. We can diagram this model as follows:

The key to the model is that new parts can be added to a system, and that these parts are not essential when they are added. The resulting system is thus not IC, since it has parts that are not essential to its function, even if the new parts are advantageous in some way. If the new component is taken away at this stage, the system merely reverts to the precursor system. The second part of the model is that these intermediate, non-IC systems then may become IC if small changes make the new parts essential.

The addition of new, non-essential parts can be accomplished in several ways, such as a change in an existing protein that allows it to bind to a “precursor system”. More extreme would be the generation of a new protein that then adds to a precursor system as a non-essential component. Brand new genes, by definition, cannot be essential when they arise, since they arise in an organism that, up to that point, had no need of them. Looking to see if new genes then later become essential would be very good experimental support for the evolutionary model for how IC systems arise.

In practice, it takes a lot of scientific effort to tease out changes to an existing protein that allow it to become part of an intermediate system and then progress to an IC system, though we have examined one such example in a previous post. Looking for brand new genes, however, is much easier – and some recent work in several fruit fly species (Drosophila) has done just that.

The Young and the Restless

So, how to go about finding genes that are new? We have already discussed, in the context of duplicating an entire genome, how duplication of genes may lead to the two copies picking up new functions over time. While duplication may happen rarely at a whole-genome scale, small-scale duplication of small numbers of genes happens quite frequently as an error during cell division. At the time of the duplication, the two copies are the same, and therefore functionally equivalent. Over time, however, the two copies may become different and acquire distinct functions.

One way to look for genes that have arisen due to a recent duplication event is to compare the genomes of closely related species and look for genes that are present in one species but not another, or in a subset of related species. Duplicated genes will show up in a nested hierarchy, much like how pseudogenes appear in the same nested pattern, as we have discussed previously here.

The complete genome sequences for a number of fruit fly species are available, so researchers used this method of comparison to look for new genes that mostly arose “recently” (over the last 35 million years) within flies. Since the speciation times for the various fly species are known to a good approximation, the time of the various duplication events can be estimated as well.

Putting the argument for IC to the test

Using this method, researchers identified 195 recent, “young” genes that arose through duplication events. (Note: this finding, in and of itself, is problematic for the ID argument that significant amounts of new information cannot arise through evolutionary mechanisms). More problematic for the argument from IC, however, is that just less than one third of these new genes are now essential for development in the species that carry them. This fraction is approximately the same for “old” genes – about one third are essential for development.

The implications are easily grasped: many new genes have arisen through duplication, and a sizeable fraction are now part of IC systems. When they arose, they could not have been essential, but now they are emphatically so. As such, they must have been added to previous systems, and become IC over time. Moreover, this effect is not a rare, one-off event, but rather has been repeated time and again in recent evolutionary history.

In the next post in this series, we’ll delve into some of the details about how these new genes arose, and what sort of functions they have.

For further reading:

Behe, M.J. Darwin’s Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Free Press, New York, 1996.

Behe, M.J. The Edge of Evolution: the Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Free Press, New York, 2007.

Chen, S., Zhang, Y, and Long, M (2010). New genes in Drosophila quickly become essential. Science 330; 1682-1685.

An example of the way poetry helps re-make our interpretive framework is Richard Wilbur’s poem, Still, Citizen Sparrow. Directly addressing our “natural” revulsion for death and those contaminated with it, the poem contrasts the small “darting” sparrow with the vulture—an unwelcome visitor in the sparrow’s space. Surely, the vulture must seem an awkward and ungainly abomination in the fruitful orderliness the smaller bird inhabits, for those “orchard aisles” hint at both a garden and a church. Yet the poem also presents a two-fold defense of this most un-clean of birds, beginning with the difference between how it seems on the ground and how it is in its own element, at the “tip of the sky.” “[N]o more beautiful bird is in heaven's height “, Wilbur tells us, “No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight.” But more than just his aeronautic skills are at issue. It is the vulture’s “rotten office”—the very thing that makes it so repulsive to our sensibilities—that Wilbur names as its saving grace.

The “naked-headed one. . . Devours death, mocks mutability, / Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.” This description of the vulture could be a purely naturalistic assessment of the importance of biological recycling, but a turn at the poem’s fourth stanza takes its imagery in an explicitly scriptural direction. From here on, it connects the vulture with Noah, and the sparrows (and implicitly us) as those “who would have died / Gladly with all [they] knew” rather than put up with the tedium and apparent foolishness of Noah’s incessant sawing and hammering. At last, Wilbur implores the sparrows to consider how “high and lonely” was Noah’s time on the waters as “He rocked his only world, and everyone's.”

The vulture here is more than just “the hero” of the poem, as Wilbur puts it, but exactly what he stands for is not immediately clear. In terms of the great narrative of the Bible, we are used to thinking of ourselves and all humanity as “Adam’s sons,” and even as the “sons of Abraham”; in Christ, both of those images are completed and fulfilled, and all of us redeemed. But Still, Citizen Sparrow ends not with a claim of kinship with Adam or Abraham, but with this: “all men are Noah's sons.” Might Noah also be a type of Christ? How does the all-too-natural vulture connect with it, deepening our understanding the role and experience of Jesus as the Messiah?

Following Wilbur’s account of the nobility of the vulture, we can make the connection between it and Jesus’ role of overcoming death. But what unites them more subtly (and perhaps even more poignantly in this season of Lent) is shame and rejection, even exile. These terms are not at all unrelated to death, for touching the dead was one of the things that made an Israelite ceremonially unclean, and vultures’ ordinary habits might account for their similarly-rejected status in the Jewish bestiary. Elsewhere in the Bible, the characteristic baldness of the vulture provides imagery of shame, despair and humiliation, as in Micah 1:16: Make yourselves bald and cut off your hair, for the children of your delight; make yourselves as bald as the vulture, for they shall go from you into exile.

Surely the vulture is an unlikely symbol for Christ, especially when wrapped up with the character of Noah. But the key insight of the poem and the image actually lies in the relationship between the vulture and the sparrow, the latter of which serves as our stand-in. We are too often like that small bird in Wilbur’s account, wanting a more noble and glorious emblem than this of how the Kingdom bears on our world, wishing ever still to banish the unclean from our presence and keep our own lives neat and tidy. The cause of Christ is not neat or tidy, though, and brings ridicule and rejection from our peers more often than it brings honor. As we draw close to Jerusalem with Jesus, may we be willing to accept the “rotten office” ourselves, and to take his (and the vulture’s) perspective on rejection—in his story, and in our own.

“Still, Citizen Sparrow”

by Richard Wilbur

Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call
Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air
Over the rotten office, let him bear
The carrion ballast up, and at the tall

Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you'll see
That no more beautiful bird is in heaven's height,
No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;
He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,

The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you
Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he
Devours death, mocks mutability,
Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.

Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget
How for so many bedlam hours his saw
Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,
And the slam of his hammer all the day beset

The people's ears. Forget that he could bear
To see the towns like coral under the keel,
And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel
How high and weary it was, on the waters where

He rocked his only world, and everyone's.
Forgive the hero, you who would have died
Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide
To Ararat; all men are Noah's sons.

From Richard Wilbur: New and Collected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988: p. 318. ©Richard Wilbur.

Richard Wilbur is a poet, translator, and playwright, and was appointed as the second Poet Laureate of the United States in 1987. Please read the poem aloud, then click here to buy your own copy of Wilbur’s latest work, Anterooms: New Poems and Translations.

Josh wrote:

Hi Aron,

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. I am still skeptical. Please consider the following:

Suppose:

1. The evangelical Christian God exists, is omnipotent, omniscient, loves people and wants them to believe in him so that they can join him in heaven.
2. There are sincere truth-seeking people who have not seen evidence that convinces them that this God exists, but if they just saw Jesus walk on water, feed thousands with a few fish and loaves, rise from the dead, have vivid and non-contradictory dreams about heaven, etc, they would believe. It does not have to be one single awesome event. It can be many different signs to different people. If God employed a multitude of miracles and awesome ways to reach people, people will not idolize one single manifestation. They would understand that these diverse awesome signs are just different ways that God is using to show his presence and not God himself.
3. God has no other agenda more important than the agenda of loving people and having people believe in him that would prevent him from showing evidence like the ones above.

Then, I believe God would show himself more clearly to these people, but he isn't doing so, so one of the above statements must be false.

The first step in communicating yourself is to signal your presence. 'Creation' may or may not convincingly point to the existence of a Creator, but I don't see how it points to the Christian Creator and not some unknown Creator that is not the Christian God. To many people, the Bible is just a religious book, and not special compared to other religious books of other religions. Just because it is claimed to be true and to have had its accuracy preserved doesn't mean that claim is true. A non-believer who requires more substantial evidence in order to be convinced should not be required to just accept the Bible, because he has no prior reason to believe in it.

In essence, God is letting these people go to Hell because they fail to believe as a result of his failure to provide convincing evidence. In this situation, humility doesn't really matter.

Aron wrote:

Dear Josh,

In my last email, I was discussing only of this life, and what reasons God might have for partially concealing himself for the sake of our spiritual development here. The issue you raise in this email regards the final judgement and Hell. Any discussion of this must necessarily be more tentative than discussions of life on earth, because the final judgement hasn't happened yet, so we don't know right now exactly what it will be like. If the life of Jesus reveals what God is like, then God is very merciful (even though he is also very severe towards hypocrisy and unforgiveness). If Christianity is true, then Jesus will be the one doing the judging. If he was merciful when he was on earth, then he will also be merciful when he comes again.

Your objection to Christianity is this: How could a loving God possibly arrange things so that a sincere truth-seeking nonchristian, (an atheist, polytheist etc.) goes to Hell through no fault of his own?

In order to check to see if this is a problem, we should first check to see whether there are any sincere truth-seeking non-Christians who go to Hell. One could imagine two different kinds: 1) people who have never been exposed to Christianity, and therefore have no opportunity to know it is true, and 2) people who have been exposed to Christianity but claim there is not enough evidence to believe it.

With respect to the people in the category (1), how do you know that the Christian God would send them to Hell just for not being Christians? I think the Bible teaches quite explicitly that God does NOT do this. In Acts 17, Paul is trying to convince the Athenians not to worship idols. He says, "In the past God winked at this ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent." In other words, Paul explicitly says that God did not hold the idol worship of the pagans against them before they had an opportunity to hear the gospel and repent. Furthermore, it says in the book of Revelation that people are redeemed from every "nation, tribe, people, and language". Since many groups went extinct before having an opportunity to hear the gospel, it is clear that at least some people are saved without having explicitly heard the gospel in their lifetimes. Finally, Peter seems to suggest that there is some opportunity for people to believe the gospel even after they have died, when he says:

"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built....the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit." (1 Peter 3:18-20 and 4:5-6).

This text goes against the standard evangelical view that there is no chance to be saved after death. On the other hand, evangelicals also say you're supposed to go with the Bible rather than what any particular church says, so I think I'll go with the Bible. :-)

Now let's turn to category (2), the case of a person who has been exposed to Christianity but doesn't believe it because they claim not to have enough evidence. I think there are several different possible things that might be going on here:

First of all, just because they claim to be seeking the truth doesn't mean they really are:

(A) They might actually have enough evidence to believe in God, but dishonestly refuse to admit it to themselves, because they don't want it to be true. In this case, they are not actually sincere, and have rejected God not because of inadequacy of the evidence, but because of stubborn rebellion. In this case, there is no reason to think that they would accept God even if they did have more evidence. So it is not God's fault that they do not believe. It should be pointed out that many of the people who saw Christ multiply the loaves, heal people, raise the dead etc. nevertheless refused to believe. It is naive to think that if everyone saw miracles, everyone would believe. Rather the people who don't want to believe become more firm in their rejection of God.

(B) Or, although they don't have enough evidence to believe, they choose not to investigate to see whether it is true or not. In this case, it is their own fault that they don't have enough evidence. If people claim to base their decisions on evidence and reason, it is hypocritical if they reject Christianity without carefully considering whether there is sufficient evidence for Christ's Resurrection and other miracles to show that Christianity is true. In particular, it is utterly irrational to insist on seeing a miracle personally in order to believe if there is lots of evidence that other people have seen miracles. People don't refuse to believe in scientific results unless they personally witness the experiments, so long as multiple reliable people say they have done the experiments, that is enough. Why should religion be different?

I never assume that anybody is intellectually dishonest until I have some specific reason to think they are dishonest. But I've talked to enough atheists to know that most of them do fall into categories (A) or (B), at least to some extent. However, I'm sure that there do exist cases in which atheists are sincere. In this case:

(C) It might be that although right now they do not have enough evidence to believe, later God will give them enough evidence to believe and they will become Christians. This might happen either before or after death, for all we know.

(D) Or, although they will die without explicitly believing in Jesus, it may be that through caring for the needy, Jesus will regard them as having accepted him without knowing it. (See Matt 25:31-36)

(E) Or, although they do not have enough evidence to believe, they live wicked lives without love. Since God is love, this means that what little they do know about God, they hate (even though they do not know it is God that they are hating). If people hate God, there is no reason to think they will stop hating God if God reveals himself more clearly. Why should God reveal himself to someone who would not benefit from it?

Given all of the possibilities A-E, it is not at all obvious that there ARE any sincere, truth-seeking atheists who are going to Hell. I think that most of them aren't really sincere or truth-seeking, and also that many of them aren't going to go to Hell.

Jesus says "Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or the age to come." In other words, when people reject Jesus without knowing his divinity, God forgives them and does not hold it against them. But when someone by the influence of the Spirit receives the insight necessary to understand that God is working through Jesus, and then rejects him, this is a sin that cannot be forgiven. (God forgives everyone if they repent, but the point is that people who persist in this attitude won't repent.)

It should also be made explicit that no one deserves to go to heaven; God saves people by his mercy. But God will not overrule people who insist at every opportunity that they want nothing to do with his mercy. If people would hate God if they knew him, God is being merciful by not revealing himself to them yet. It gives them a chance to grow and develop, so that maybe later they would be prepared to accept him.

The Noisy Life of Jesus

Dave as a backpacking buddy is always an out-front kind-of-guy. Scrambling up, over, and around the large boulders at the base of Mount Darwin, he was out front. Dave once led me on a road-trip study of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Indians of the Southwest. Dave, at the time, was student president of our Phi Alpha Theta history honor society. Cliff dwellings came up in class, and Dave organized a road trip to see as many Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi ruins as can be done in an October four-day weekend.

Elbows in the breeze, my boys in the way back, a car-full of students following, we drove east from San Diego to Casa Grande and Montezuma’s Castle near Phoenix. Approaching Mesa Verde we hit snow. Our last night, we camped at Canyon de Chelly, east of Flagstaff. At every site, we were frustrated by the silence of the ruins. We could imagine life in these impressive buildings and speculate on why they were built and abandoned. However, we learned no specific names, nothing of political innovations, next to nothing about major events. Unrelenting mystery engulfed every site.

The cliff dwellings are, in many ways, as impressive as the ruins of Athens and Corinth, but we know so much more about genius of the latter’s citizens. The Greeks tell us about themselves, their leaders, the heroes, their gods, their acts. We listen and learn. In the Southwest we knew we were in the presence of genius, but there we could only listen to a frustrating silence.

The life of Jesus is noisy. A cacophony of information reaches through two thousand years to communicate with us. In the Bible alone we have four organized biographical sketches, Luke’s history of the first decades after Jesus, and a bunch of letters. Intersecting Jesus and the New Testament is an amazing amount of Roman literature dealing with Syria and Palestine, which were important and unruly parts of the empire. A Jewish/Greek historian, Josephus, wrote books about Israel that contribute to our knowledge of Jesus’ time. From the Bible and Josephus, historians have much more information about Jesus and the social and political issues of Jerusalem than any person or place in Europe at the same time. On top of all of the noise of good information in the Bible and Josephus, a large library of books, called the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” were discovered in the middle of the twentieth century. We have much more information about Jesus to fight about than we have for almost any other person you read about in ancient history. Our sources are strong and diverse. We have multiple testimonies from highly credible sources, sources willing to live and die by the truth of their testimony.

Ironically, we have so much information that is essentially consistent and reliable, that we historians nitpick fights about all sorts of little things. Historians are frustrated when they don’t have information, but they become hypercritical when they have lots of information. We harmonize, then criticize, then revise, then harmonize again. We chase our tails. Many are so overwhelmed by so much information that they turn their back on the information. They declare that we can’t expect to ever know the real “historical” Jesus.

There is some truth in what they say. The discipline of history is a blunt instrument—in the university pocketknife, we are the awkward can-opener tool. Historians don’t have the knife-blade precision of controlled, repeatable experiments or the screwdriver leverage of geometrical demonstrations. By high standards of scientific precision or by high standards of philosophy, we don’t “know” historical people—be they Jesus or Caesar Augustus—really. However, by the practical standards of history, we know about Jesus as much, probably more, than we know about most ancient people, even Caesar Augustus. Those who proclaim that we can’t know the “historical” Jesus are usually folks who don’t want to listen to the noise of so many good sources. Instead of listening to hear about Jesus, they want to create a Jesus. They want to create a more modern Jesus, a rational Jesus.

Giving up on the historical—traditional—Jesus is the first step to giving up on a Christianity strong enough to withstand any overblown Darwinian claims. Darwinism’s greatest threat to Christianity depends on the bait-and-switch of substituting a rationalized Jesus for the biblical Jesus. When we get to the top of Mount Darwin, we will be able to see Mount Fiske to the south. John Fiske can remind us of the danger in substituting a rational Jesus for the real one reported in history.

The Jesus People Wish For

John Fiske was a modern-minded young man from the start. He was born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1842 with the name Edmund Fisk Green. In college he changed his name to John Fisk, and then when he became an author he added an “e” to the end. Before leaving home for college, his concerned grandmother asked after his religious belief:

“In her sore perplexity, grandma asked whether I believed in the Bible, meaning whether I believed everything in it; of course I said no. I couldn’t lie even to save her feelings. She felt bad about it. She asked me if I didn’t believe Christ was God, and of course, again I had to say no. How can a man have two natures without having two medulla oblongatas? A double ego, a double center of innervation is something to which I cannot yet subscribe.”

Fiske was a smart kid wanting to be on the intellectual cutting edge. In his junior year at Harvard, he was caught reading Auguste Compte in chapel. Much like young Solomons, Fiske wanted to be a writer. When he got famous enough, he become a traveling intellectual, publishing his lectures and reviews as they accumulated.

Like many nineteenth-century historians, Fiske wrote history largely to prove that modern people are smarter than ancient people. Such historians don’t love history for a larger sense of community and experience; they find it self-justifying and gratifyingly isolating. History, for them, is the story of progress. The historian becomes magisterial and dispenses praise and blame, honor and pity at will. Listen to Fiske’s magisterial tone when talking about the past as childlike:

“No religious creed that man has ever devised can be made to harmonize in all its features with modern knowledge. All such creeds were constructed with reference to theories of the universe which are now utterly and hopelessly discarded. How, then, it is asked, amid the general wreck of old beliefs, can we hope that the religious attitude in which from time immemorial we have been wont to contemplate the universe can any longer be maintained? Is not the belief in God perhaps a dream of the childhood of our race, like the belief in elves and bogarts which once were no less universal? and is not modern science fast destroying the one as it has already destroyed the other?”

God, elves, and the bogeyman versus modern science. The reader is shamed into joining the writer’s triumphal modernity. Biblical accounts of Jesus, of course, must be rationalized so as to fit our adult/modern minds. Many biblical reports of events and statements have to be jettisoned so that the “real” Jesus can be found.

In a review article entitled “The Jesus of History” (1870), Fiske declared that we have “but few facts resting upon trustworthy evidence” for Jesus. The words of Jesus are “preserved by hearsay tradition through the generation immediately succeeding his death,” and that generation cannot be trusted to distinguish the “authentic utterances of the great teacher from the later interpolations suggested by the dogmatic necessities of the narrators.” The early church was duped into a history of Jesus by its own “uncritical spirit,” its own lack of a rational historical method that could have preserved a genuine history. Fiske then offered a quick survey of an appropriate “method of inquiry which, in the hands of the so-called Tubingen School, has led to such striking and valuable conclusions concerning the age and character of all the New Testament literature.” Fiske particularly praises David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835–36) and praises early nineteenth-century German biblical scholarship. This new German scholarship supported the French tradition evident in the book that Fiske was reviewing: an anonymous work published in 1869 derived from the internationally popular French Life of Jesus written by J. D. Renan in 1863.

Renan’s book was reprinted and translated many times. In it, Renan declared his desire to get at a genuine history of Jesus. He criticized his German predecessors for their overemphasis on philosophy and wrote in a simplified critical spirit that discarded impossibilities and discounted the given narratives while offering conjectures about what really happened and what really was said. Of course, there was no actual historical resurrection. Renan’s Jesus was the Son of God because he taught that true worship is not tied to earthly places and rituals. Given the popularity of his book, we can assume that Renan struck a deep chord in lots of people who wanted a vaguely rational Jesus who was anti-clerical and might even be a liberal Protestant. Renan’s Jesus was a guy who would fit well in a faculty meeting. It was the disciples who embarrass us with pseudo-historical stories of the transfiguration, walking on water, and the resurrection.

Fiske supported books that supported the search for the rational Jesus. The Bible obfuscates more than illuminates. To find the truth, the scholar must go behind what is reported in the Bible to find the bits and pieces of the “true” Jesus that poke from underneath. This “true” Jesus unearthed by modern scholarship is the Jesus of the bait and switch. Once a rational Jesus is established, then a rational guy like Fiske can knock him down. The abstraction of Jesus can’t win against the stronger abstractions of natural history. My GPS is bigger than your GPS.

This is the central problem with the common claim of scientists. Stephen Gould, in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999), insisted that science is about facts, experimental results, and natural reality, while Christianity is about values, ethics, and things taught in literature classes. Christianity can’t breathe in the realm of abstractions. If Christianity is about values, then I would rather be Confucian. Christianity has to be about facts, facts about a teacher who not only messed with the laws of nature, but rose from the dead, confirming his own claims, reported to us in ancient history.

Indeed, despite our technological advancement, our yearly calendars remain tied to the movements of celestial bodies, whether to the course of the moon around the earth or to the course of the earth around the sun. And putting the point above in a slightly more positive way, such naturalistic calendars serve to assure us of the dependability of the background rhythms of the physical world, against a foreground that often seems disconcertingly unpredictable and chaotic. But looking only to the material, such calendars can only give shape to the tension between our competing experiences of earthly time as something that is relentlessly marching forward, but also as something that is ever the same and ultimately futile, devoid now of the sense of wonder and mystery that the sun, moon and stars evoked in our forebears.

Yet attention to the natural rhythms and processes of the material world does not necessitate a belief that the sun and moon (or oscillating crystals) are, in fact, the only measures by which we can mark time, nor does it mean the material world really has been disenchanted by our inspection of it at scales both large and small. Unlike each imaginary “Baby New Year,” the babe born in Bethlehem does not cede His place each year, much less only a week after Christmas, but lays claim to all of time and the world as His own, forever, insisting that mystery and paradox remain at the heart of what is true about the cosmos: this includes that the material world is good and speaks of Him who made it, and that humanity occupies a peculiar place at the intersection of the material and the spiritual. Rather than demystify or “explain” who we are in strictly material terms, the past year’s worth of essays, papers, paintings and poems on this site demonstrates that looking deep into the fabric of the universe and our own human bodies via science, yet through the lens of Christ, heightens our awareness of the mystery of being human. Our accounting of human identity, of what it means to be made in the image of God, need not avoid attention to the sometimes-ordinary aspects of the material “how,” so long as we resolutely keep our eyes fixed on the “why” and “who,” as well.

Continuing this link between images of babies, childbirth and beginnings, and the problem of seeing the world in disenchanted terms, Suzanne Rhodes’s poem “Appointment” makes explicit the tension between the “ordinary” scientific and medical aspects of human pregnancy and birth and the intrinsically extraordinary fact that what is being knit together is a human person—a being capable of knowing itself and its Creator, and of being known and cherished, itself. Rhodes models a faithful tension between the material and the spiritual by first establishing a running point/counterpoint between the medical information she hears from her doctors (“facts”) and her own sense of the wisdom and meaning of the life taking shape within her (“mystery”). Despite our extensive clinical knowledge of what is happening at each stage of an average pregnancy, and even our ability (illustrated by a first snapshot of my own third son, above) to peer inside “so dark a place,” Rhodes insists that what is happening has cosmic significance, that the process moves to “music steep as stars.”

Yet notice, too, that the poet is not removing the earthy truth from the human experience—not seeking to distance the miraculous from the ordinary context in which it comes to be. Rather, it is the very physicality, the specificity, the sacrificial quality of what bringing about a new life entails that makes that life a treasured “pearl” (as we’ve discussed elsewhere, an emblem of the coming Kingdom). Technical knowledge need not, cannot, replace wonder, nor erase the import of what we can now recognize as an echo of the incarnation in each birth. Like Mary’s answer to the angel at the Annunciation of Christ, Rhodes’ last lines are an acquiescence to and affirmation of the outworking of God’s plans through the most ordinary of means, a recognition that He speaks when we are rendered mute. And finally (and perhaps most apropos a discussion of calendars and beginnings and new years), throughout Rhodes’ poem is the implication that what we can see and measure and claim as the start of something new, God has already been working on in advance of our knowledge, much less participation.

If we see only mindless futility in the natural world and its cycles, or even more in its relentless march forward, we have little choice but to despair that all our beginnings will amount to nothing. But if we understand our task as joining into what has already begun and trust that the Lord intends renewal for us and creation rather than merely novelty (or stasis, for that matter), then we can look back over the past and forward to the future with renewed hope. Further, we can commit to continuing our exploration of the world with confidence that our concerns over “how” will always be allayed by our knowledge of the “who,” that what is “new” to us is no surprise to the Creator of heaven and earth, and that even things that seem like the “quake of birth” will, in the end, leave us speaking poems of praise and thanksgiving for what the Lord has done and will yet do.

“Appointment”

by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

Tomorrow they will tell me what I know.
After tools and taps they will talk in facts
of mystery, of the flame in so dark
a place you want to look and see God
shaping the hands and face.

They will call it by other names
but I will be hearing
blood and bones sliding in place
to music steep as stars.

I'm dreaming
while the doctor feels clay
and schedules birth on a chart unreal.
As the earthen womb sings,
making its pearl,
I allow everything:

quake of birth that will leave
the poem of dust in my mouth.

This poem first appeared in Sow's Ear Poetry Review.

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes received an M.A. in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has served on several boards and committees of poetry organizations and is a co-founder of the Appalachian Center for Poets and Writers. Her latest book, A Welcome Shore, is a sequel to her earlier collection of prose meditations, Sketches of Home. She has also published two volumes of poetry, What a Light Thing, This Stone and Weather of the House, in addition to a poetry textbook, The Roar on the Other Side. Her work has been featured in journals from Georgia to Alaska, and been nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize. Besides her literary activities, she works full-time as the director of public affairs for a charitable organization, Mercy Medical Airlift. Suzanne and her husband, Wayne, a professional photographer, have five grown children. More on Suzanne and her work may be found here, and she may be contacted here.

Part of the “answer” to the mystery of the incarnation lies in realizing that those three are not really the right questions to be asking, for they focus merely on means rather than meaning. Rather, we should recognize that the miracles of Jesus’ life—beginning with His conception and birth through Mary—are not only or most miraculous in their physical, material aspects, but as demonstrations of His identity and calling, and ultimately of our own as those who bear His image. In contrast to the manger scene familiar to most Western Christian eyes, the image pictured above is an Orthodox icon of Mary as the Theotokos, the birth-giver of God, and it offers to us an alternate way of picturing the central mystery of Christmas that Orthodox priest, curator and art historian David Goa has described as “the Church’s great image of the human vocation and call to us to claim that vocation—who we are and how we are to then live all in one simple image of our common human experience.” For, without setting aside or attempting to explain the material aspects of the virgin birth, the continuing miracle of the incarnation is that it is as much a present reality in the lives of Christians today as it was for Mary or for those in the early Church.

In a sermon dedicating another Theotokos icon, Goa warned of the danger of living in a time when Christmas imagery has become too-familiar, "that we make a fetish of virginity and the birth of a Palestinian baby; his mother and would be father; that we fill the emptiness with the glamour offered from all quarters; that we turn this feast into a family occasion: freeze frame our familial affection.” Against those temptations, this icon does not “naturalize” Christ as a perfect human baby born in a manger, but reminds us that even within Mary’s body—and though setting aside his power for a time as a fully human infant—Christ remained the Lord of all; thus, He is shown seated on the throne of the heavens and with a scroll in His hand, emblems of both arenas of His revelation of Himself. Yet far from minimizing Mary’s role, this iconography of the fullness of God emphasizes her as a model of the way every Christian can and does make a place and a way for the Lord, as well.

In speaking of the icon, Goa reminds us that, “the Incarnation is a revelation of who we are. It is a retelling of Genesis chapter 3 and that is why, in this season of retelling this story, we enter a dangerous time.” It is dangerous not just because we might miss the meaning of it, but because with every re-telling of our commissioning as image-bearers, sent to cultivate and create in God’s name, we are tempted to exert our own desires, to exercise dominion for our own sake, in our own names. Goa continues, “The mystery of the Incarnation of God in Christ is our mystery, a revelation of our created nature and a call to its fullness, . . . [thus] the Icon of the Virgin and Child is . . . the Icon of the Human Vocation. It reveals to us our capacity as persons, as women, men and children.” That vocation certainly includes seeking to understand the created world and its ways via careful and faithful study, just as it includes seeking the Lord through the scriptures and traditions of the Church; but it is most fully expressed when we use both of those resources to ease the pain and injustice we find (and have even caused, ourselves) in the world around us.

Finally, Goa notes that, “When Orthodox Christians around the world enter the church, they bring a candle to this icon and, bowing in a prayer of gratitude to God who clothed them in flesh, ask that they, too, like the Theotokos, may be open to be a birth giver of divine love in a fractured and suffering world.” Motivated by confidence that the Lord who created the cosmos is the same Lord who was born of Mary in Bethlehem, may all of us who struggle to understand the way God continues to reveal Himself in creation and in the scriptures remember that the most vital and present revelation of His love occurs by the Spirit within us, for the benefit of others. May we recognize that the miracle of Christmas was not that God chose to break the rules of biology, but that He makes a way for all of us “who were far off” to join in His reconciling, redemptive work by likewise bringing—being—the Body of Christ unto the world. May we, then, join with Mary Theotokos in her song of praise and thanksgiving that we have been called to share in the mystery of the incarnation of our God and Savior.

Dr. David J. Goa is the Director of the Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion & Public Life at the University of Alberta. All quotes were taken from Goa’s “Our Common Calling: The Icon of the Human Vocation,” given at Bethel Lutheran Church in December 2007. More on the iconography of the Theotokos and this image may be found here.

In last Sunday’s consideration of the “root” image for the coming Christ, I noted that the text of Isaiah 1:11 helps us understand Jesus to be not only the source of creation and salvation (the literal “root” of both), but also the means of their flourishing (as the growing “branch” or “shoot”) and their culmination (their “fruit”). The traditional American carol linked above goes even farther afield than the prophets for its image of Christ, turning to Song of Songs 2:3 for inspiration and a more specific tree image: it uses the familiar apple as a emblem of the very tree of life, emphasizing that the promise we have in Jesus goes beyond the merely material to encompass our complete shelter, nourishment, and passionate joy.

The text of the song (included below) was collected in New England or the Appalachians in the late 18th century, and was then set to an American Revolutionary War-era marching tune by Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838) of Newbury, Vt. According to early music scholar, performer and popularizer Thomas B. Malone, “Jeremiah Ingalls had a particularly successful run as a tavern keeper and church musician in Newbury between the years of 1709 and 1810, during which he published a book of fasola music called The Christian Harmony. This book contained not only the familiar fuging-tunes and anthems . . . but something rather new, folk-melodies with sacred texts, as well as call-and-response spirituals, and camp-meeting revival choruses.”

But though the lyrics’ narrative of individual spiritual weariness relieved by communion with Jesus is itself praise, and though the central drawn-from-cultivated-nature image of the apple tree reminds us of the inextricable linkage between the material world and its creator, it is the way the music is sung in this particular recording that has the most to tell us about how we might find our way forward though the overlapping contemporary cultures of science and Christian faith. This abridged version of the entire carol was recorded by Malone at the Weathersfield Meeting House in Vermont in June, 2005 during a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Ingalls’ book—an event that brought together new and seasoned practitioners of the traditional American form of congregational music known as “shape note” or “fa-so-la” singing.

Also called “Sacred Harp” music (for the instrument that God has provided to every individual and, hence, to every gathering of worshippers), shape note singing requires participants to have only limited technical knowledge in order to join voices and hearts in praise and celebration of the works of the Lord in creation and in human lives. The resulting music is much more about the act of making music together in community—perhaps especially in community with those you may have just met—as it is about making music to be listened to. There are other available versions of this tune (for instance, here you can listen to a snippet of a considerably more precise and “professional” version of the song from the album Carols from the Old and New World, sung by Theatre of Voices as directed by Paul Hillier), and the song text has been set to new music several other times this century (including the most well-known version by Englishwoman Elizabeth Poston and another by Stanford Scriven), but this version preserves the original song’s feel of a common struggle to find our way in the world as well as the specific words of the text. And though even the setting published by Ingalls can be sung by highly-trained musicians, a simple repertoire of harmonic rules, a specific notational style, and a basic commitment to the underlying goodness and truth of the music itself is sufficient to link groups of amateur singers across centuries as well as across miles; it is doubtful that the versions recorded in more formal settings are “better” or more true to the heart of the music and its message than are un-recorded, “come as you are” shape-note versions sung in the myriad church congregations where they are still (or are newly) being sung.

That tension between getting every note right, on one hand, and, on the other hand, understanding music as a means of expressing and deepening both human and divine relationships in sometimes motley company, is suggestive for thinking about the tension that exists between technical and popular understanding of science, among other fields where there is a divide between amateurs and professionals. Especially in a culture so enamored of specialization and compartmentalization as is ours, experts in whatever field perennially run the risk of missing the forest for the trees (apple or otherwise), of forgetting that knowledge and expertise are fulfilled when integrated into the context of the greater human community—made part of that wider conversation on meaning.

This does not mean, of course, that the depth and subtlety of knowledge gained by years of study, research and practice by professionals (scientists included) should or can be discarded by non-experts, either. Instead, it is a reminder that—especially for believers instructed by Paul to think of ourselves as co-equal and interdependent parts of Christ’s Body—the authority of knowledge must be both given and received in humility for the good of the whole church and, through the church and by its example, for the good of all. Those who understand, study, and contribute to music or any other great tradition of knowledge have a gift to offer non-experts, even if they hear the results of their gifts rendered as a “joyful noise,” rather than a “studio-quality” recording. For both sides of the amateur/expert divide, keeping one version in mind while listening to (or singing) the other gives the richest, most fruitful sense of the music (or science) as both worship and art, precisely because such an attitude and demeanor of self-giving emulates the life lived and given by Jesus, himself.

“Jesus Christ, The Apple Tree”

traditional, collected by Joshua Smith/arranged by Jeremiah Ingalls
(verses omitted in this recording given in italics)

The tree of life my soul hath seen
Laden with fruit and always green;
The trees of nature fruitless be,
Compar’d with Christ the appletree.

This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the appletree.

For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought;
I miss’d of all, but now I see
‘Tis found in Christ the appletree.
[refrain]

I’ll sit and eat the fruit divine,
It cheers my heart like spir’tual wine
And now this fruit is sweet to me,
That grows on Christ the appletree.

This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the appletree.

This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying soul alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the appletree.

This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the appletree.

This copyrighted recording was made available by Thomas B. Malone via a Creative Commons license on his website. The site is devoted to Ingalls' music and life, features similar recordings of many of his and others’ shape note arrangements and provides information on joining an annual singing event in Vermont, about which Malone says: “No experience is necessary, and books are provided.” Malone’s own page on the Apple Tree Carol is here, and the direct link to this mp3 is here.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures and features physicist Ard Louis.

In today's video, Oxford physicist Ard Louis discusses the famous debate between renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould believed (and wrote in his book Wonderful Life) that if the "tape" of evolution were rerun, the chance that anything like human intelligence would emerge is essentially zero. In other words, humanity is here through random accident. Gould pointed to the work of Morris and fellow scientists in their research of the Burgess Shale as evidence for this view.

However, Morris himself disagrees, pointing to what is called evolutionary convergence. As Morris notes, there are numerous examples of identical features evolving multiple times throughout the history of life independently. Morris believes that if the tape of life were replayed, we would see something like humans emerge. A Christian might say, it looks like we were planned.

Some Christians might find Simon Conway Morris' viewpoint, with its implicit teleology, more attractive. Others, perhaps motivated by a high view of providence, may find Gould's emphasis on contingency equally congenial to their faith. What do you think?

The texts from which the “root” image for Jesus derives are both from Isaiah 11, and the root image actually encompasses the full flourishing of the plant, from its origins in the ground, through renewal of a seemingly-dead stump, and towards the fruitfulness of the restored vine. The most direct line naming Jesus as the root is in verse 10: “In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.” It is this promise of the Messiah’s advent being for the rule and benefit of the gentiles that Paul picks up in chapter 15 of his letter to the Romans, as well. In both cases, though, the conflation of the “branch,” or “rod,” or “shoot,” mentioned earlier in Isaiah 11:1, with the “root” from which it springs suggests the way Jesus, though coming at a specific time in history, was at history’s beginnings and will be at its end: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
 and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
”

But thinking about roots more specifically and “naturally” is worthwhile, too, as being attuned to functions as well as forms helps us reflect on the several ways in which Christ enables us to be connected to Him and each other. Spend time walking along a river, for instance, looking carefully at the trees that grow along its banks and you will discover that their roots have two principal functions: to take in nourishment from the water and to anchor the tree securely in place; on one hand, to seek out something that is supremely mysterious, mobile, and literally fluid, and, on the other hand, to take hold of something solid, secure and immovable. Indeed, they are complementary roles, for a tree fully exposed to the power of moving water is as likely to be washed away as to flourish—it must have a stronghold to stand in the presence of the flood. Likewise, to “take root” in the Scriptures and in the Lord Himself is thus to be always reaching out, yearning for more of His Spirit, even as we stay firmly planted in the strength and security of His steadfast embrace.

For Guite, the fact that the Radix image refers to the ‘tree of Jesse, the family tree which leads to David, and ultimately to Christ as the ‘son of David,” is important, but, he says, “the title radix, goes deeper, as a good root should. It goes deep down into the ground of our being, the good soil of creation.” In other words, it gets at both the truth of Jesus’ identity as the source of our life and salvation (He is the root, the stem, the fruit), but also as the author of the world to which we (and the Scriptures, themselves) turn to find ways of talking about and imagining our own connection, our own grafting-in to that vine. It subtly suggests that recognizing ourselves as contiguous with the world—though set apart from it by God’s grace and fellowship—begins our process of being re-connected to the King and His kingdom. Conversely, when we turn our backs on the knowledge He speaks forth through His creation, or shrink back from our call to know and cultivate the world as it is, we cut ourselves off from our roots, from each other, and even from the Lord. That we so often satisfy ourselves with the latter is one more reason to lament in this season of waiting, as we call to the coming Messiah, “Come, O Radix, come!”

“O Radix”

by Malcom Guite

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,

Rose from a root invisible to all.

We knew the virtues once of every weed,

But, severed from the roots of ritual,

We surf the surface of a wide-screen world

And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood

Whose heart we once inhabited in love,

Now we have need of you, forgotten Root

The stock and stem of every living thing

Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,

For now is winter, now is withering

Unless we let you root us deep within,

Under the ground of being, graft us in.

Born in Nigeria and raised in Africa and Canada, Malcolm Guite is a poet and singer-songwriter living in Cambridge, UK, where he also works as a priest and academic, lecturing on the links between literature and theology. His poetry has appeared frequently in journals, and he has published two collections: Saying the Names (2002) and The Magic Apple Tree (2004). He is also the author of What Do Christians Believe? and Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination. His essay on literature and incarnation is included in Beholding the Glory: Imagination Through the Arts. As a musician, Guite moves easily from rock ’n’ roll to traditional jazz to folk, including hybrids of all three. His CD, The Green Man, is out on Cambridge Riffs and iTunes. Guite’s own mediation on and reading of the poem, along with a recording of the accompanying antiphon, may be found here.