That may seem strange. Many people wouldn’t start with the Bible when talking about a scientific theory. But I’m a theologian, and I take the Bible with utmost seriousness. Talking about the Bible is a natural place for me to begin, both because the Bible was principally important in my youth, and because it remains so for me today.

I don’t mean to snub science. Science is important too. I read a lot in the sciences, and I think the evidence supporting the theory of evolution is strong. I try to take this and other evidence with great seriousness.

But the real story – for me – starts with the Bible.

Centrality of Scripture

Fortunately, my parents were committed Christians. Our family was one of those “attend-church-three-times-a-week-and-more” families. My parents were significant leaders in our local congregation, and I began following their footsteps early in life.

I doubt I missed more than a handful of Sunday school classes before I was twenty years old. And I always attended Vacation Bible School – even winning Bible memorizing competitions on occasion. (John 11:35 was my friend!) I participated on youth Bible quizzing team for a while too.

While growing up, I don’t recall anyone telling me that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But my passion for Scripture and my Evangelical community inclined me toward that position. Scripture was central in my life.

Besides, I wanted a failsafe foundation for my beliefs. And how could I convince my Mormon friends to become Christians if the Bible was not true in every sense, including literally true about what it said about the natural world? Witnessing to God’s truth seemed to require that I believe the Bible was without error on all matters, including matters related to science.

An Inerrant Bible?

My view of the Bible began to change when I went to college. It wasn’t that a liberal Bible professor brainwashed me away from the positions of my youth. Instead, I started reading the Bible carefully and the work of biblical scholars. I began to think it important to love God with my mind in a more consistent way.

And then I took a class in koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. In this course, I discovered several things. First, we have differing English translations of the New Testament, because the biblical text allows for a number of valid translation options. (When I later took Hebrew class, I found the diversity of valid translations even greater!) Second, we do not have access to the original biblical manuscripts/autographs. Our Bibles come from later manuscripts, the earliest of which are not complete. And, third, the oldest texts we have differ in many ways – although most differences are minor.

I also discovered discrepancies in the Bible. For instance, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers immediately (21:18-20). But in Mark’s version of the same story, the fig tree does not wither immediately and the disciples find it withered the next morning (11:12-14; 20-21). Mark says that Jesus heals one demon-possessed man at Gerasenes (5:1-20), while Matthew says there were two demon-possessed men involved in that same miracle (8:28-34). Jesus tells the disciples to take a staff on their journey as recorded in Mark 6:8, but Matthew says Jesus told the disciples not to take a staff (10:9-10). Jesus says Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly. Then, making an analogy with his own death, he says the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Mt 12:40). But Jesus was not dead three days and three nights!

I mention only a few of the many internal discrepancies. Once I discovered a few, I noticed more. This, of course, made me question whether I should say the Bible is inerrant in all ways.

What’s the Bible For?

I’m persistent. I don’t settle for easy answers, ignore problems, or appeal to mystery at the drop of a hat. I want to give a plausible account of the hope within me.

My quest for better ways to think about the Bible prompted me to read theologians and Bible scholars from the past and present. What I found surprised me! I had assumed believing the Bible is inerrant in all ways was the traditional position of Christians throughout the ages. I assumed it was the position of my own Christian tradition. I was wrong.

Few if any great theologians argued the Bible was absolutely inerrant. Augustine did not affirm inerrancy in this way. Thomas Aquinas didn’t. Neither did Martin Luther or John Wesley – a least in a consistent way. And I discovered through reading and conversations that those considered the leading biblical scholars and theologians today also reject absolute biblical inerrancy.

I did find a few teachers who said the Bible was inerrant. But when I read their explanations of the Bible’s discrepancies and their views about the differences between the oldest manuscripts, I found they stretched the word “inerrant” beyond recognition. Their meaning of “inerrant” was nothing like the usual meaning. And it was certainly not what most Evangelicals meant when they called the Bible the inerrant Word of God.

Perhaps even more important was my discovery that great theologians and biblical scholars of yesteryear believed the Bible’s basic purpose was to reveal God’s desire for our salvation. Many giants of the Christian faith could agree with John Wesley who said, “The Scriptures are a complete rule of faith and practice; and they are clear in all necessary points.”

The necessary points of Scripture refer to instruction for our salvation. They indicate that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, Scripture is inspired and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The purpose of the Bible is our salvation!

I also discovered Christian leaders over the centuries did not feel required to search the Bible for truths about science. In fact, they sometimes used allegorical interpretations that seem silly to me now. The vast majority of Evangelical scholars with whom I talked also didn’t think the Bible has to be inerrant about scientific matters.

After my studies, I came to believe that the Bible tells us how to find abundant life. But it does not provide the science for how life became abundant.

Tomorrow, Tom will discuss what his evolving view of the Bible has to do with evolution.

Despite this usage, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability, and that it often implies a lack of conscious intentionality. But what do mathematicians and scientists mean when they say something is random? Can a random process lead to an ordered, even predictable outcome? Is there evidence that God makes use of random processes to fulfill his creative purposes?

These are big questions, and we won’t address them all today. But I think randomness is an important topic to cover for two reasons: 1) it is integral to many processes in biology (and math, physics, chemistry, etc.), and 2) it is commonly misunderstood to be incompatible with Christianity.

As I said above, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability. If you pick a card “at random” from a shuffled deck, you have a small probability of drawing an ace (4 out of 52, or a 7.7% chance). If you flip a coin, you have an equal probability of getting heads or tails.

Randomness also seems to imply a lack of intentionality or purposefulness. After all, you might hope for an ace when you draw a card, but you can’t choose one on purpose. You might call heads when you flip a coin, but you can’t know beforehand what the outcome will be. Thus the outcome is indeterminate, but is it purposeless? Not necessarily. Indeterminacy simply means the result cannot be predicted from the outset.

It should be noted that indeterminacy does not imply that God does not have foreknowledge of future events. Christians ought not to be uncomfortable with the idea of God interacting with his creation through chance. We often describe a seemingly-random (i.e. unplanned by us) sequence of events as being “providential,” or planned by God.

In biology, it is very hard or impossible to calculate precise probabilities for most processes, so when we say a process is random, we typically mean it is extremely unpredictable. Eventually we will discuss randomness within biological evolution, but first we must consider some simpler processes, like the self-assembly of a virus.

Viruses are remarkably efficient entities. Coiled tightly within a protein-based shell is a small amount of DNA needed for self-replication. The shell, called a capsid, is made of many repeating protein subunits and is therefore highly symmetrical (see figure). Important biomedical insights have certainly been gleaned from structural studies of viruses, but viruses also teach us about the emergence of order from non-order.

The virus life cycle has four main steps: 1) enter a host cell, 2) hijack the cell’s replication and translation machinery to make many copies of itself, 3) assemble into many virus particles, and 4) exit the cell to invade another host.

When I first learned about this process, I found it very hard to believe it just “happens.” The idea that a bunch of molecules bumping into each other inside a crowded cell could spontaneously assembly into a fully-functional virus seemed a bit far-fetched. Many viral capsids have over 100 protein subunits that must interact with each other in just the right way, or it won’t work. Surely there must be something driving this process, right?

There is! Random motion. I had to see it to believe it. I distinctly remember sitting in class during my first year of graduate school when the professor demonstrated self-assembly of a virus using a 3D model as shown in the following video. In less than 30 seconds, you can watch a jumbled heap of proteins become a beautifully ordered structure.

As the narrator explains, sub-assemblies form and break apart en route to the most stable structure, the full capsid. As the sub-assemblies begin to form, further associations with free subunits become more favorable and as a result occur rapidly, while the final steps may take considerably longer. While the subunits in the model are rigid, in reality the proteins take on multiple conformations, allowing the capsid to “breathe.”

Amazing as it is, the system we just considered—one virus capsid in a jar—is pretty simple. One wonders how self-assembly can happen in a crowded cell, where there are countless other molecules diffusing around, potentially getting in the way. We can’t directly see how it happens in a cell, but we can reconstitute the process in a test tube using different combinations of constituent molecules.

Consider two viruses, where each protein subunit in one virus is the mirror image of the corresponding subunit in the other. Putting the two viruses together by hand would be pretty tricky, because the constituent parts look so similar. But random motion can do the job in short order:

From this model, we can see clearly, in real-time, how distinct complex structures can arise from their parts randomly interacting with one another. Many large viruses also use special scaffolding proteins to assist in the assembly process, and some even use their own genomes as a scaffold. In addition, two closely-related viruses that happen to infect the same cell can exchange parts to create a new virus. This is one way viruses can evolve quickly to evade the host’s immune system.

Here we have seen how viruses demonstrate a principle inherent in God’s world—that order can emerge out of chaos from random processes. In my next post, we will look at some other biological processes that make use of—rather, depend on—randomness. This will set the stage for us to see that such processes can not only assemble a structure within seconds or minutes, but also generate complex, information-bearing molecules over billions of years. Even though the freedom inherent in nature sometimes produces unintelligently-designed structures (like viruses, which can kill us), we see that God has made, and continues to oversee by his providence, a good creation that, at least in part, is capable of creating itself.

Next weekend, we’ll continue this series about randomness and God’s divine will. Up next: how God created the body to heal itself, and how can random mutations can be both harmful and benign.

Understanding John Polkinghorne: Theology of Nature

John Polkinghorne’s interest in natural theology is important, but what really sets him apart from most others is that he combines it with an equally strong interest in theology of nature, which is not the same thing. Where natural theology involves, “metaquestions about the pattern and structure of the physical world,” theology of nature involves, “metaquestions about how its historical process is to be understood.” Rather than “looking to the physical world for hints of God’s existence,” we look “to God’s existence as an aid for understanding why things have developed in the physical world in the manner that they have.” (Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 13)

On this front, Polkinghorne advances a strongly Christocentric theology of creation, stressing Jürgen Moltmann’s notion of The Crucified God . In the context of Polkinghorne’s theology of nature, the point is that the Creator is the crucified and resurrected second person of the Trinity. Since I devoted a column to this before, I won’t say more here, except to alert readers to the singular importance this particular idea has for him—especially when facing the problem of suffering. “The insight of the Crucified God lies at the very heart of my own Christian belief, indeed of the possibility of such belief in the face of the way the world is.” (Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 44)

Situating John Polkinghorne: The Resurrection of Jesus

Many Christians today see science as posing dangerous threats to their faith, challenging their understanding of the Bible and undermining core tenets such as the bodily Resurrection of Jesus, the historical basis on which the Christian faith stands or falls. “Evolution” is often identified as the problem, but the real danger is unbridled naturalism. A commitment to naturalistic methods, known as “methodological naturalism,” (MN) has been an integral part of science and medicine since the ancient Greeks. Those methods have been highly successful at producing a coherent, often very convincing picture of nature and the history of nature.

Advocates of Intelligent Design and some other Christians reject MN, but many Christians who work in the sciences and related fields (such as engineering, medicine, or the history and philosophy science) support MN as a properly grounded and properly limited way of understanding reality. In their view, a robust Christian faith is consistent with a commitment to MN, provided that the limits of scientific inquiry are not simply equated with the limits of rationally grounded belief. Polkinghorne fits squarely in this category.

To understand more clearly where Polkinghorne lies on the larger landscape of science and religion, let’s consider his approach to the Resurrection. Many contemporary thinkers, including some theologians and clergy, believe that “science” has somehow made it impossible to believe in the Resurrection, the deity of Jesus, and even belief in the transcendent God of the Bible.

A prime example is John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopalian bishop whose books have sold more than one million copies. Spong sees the bodily Resurrection as a figment of the disciples’ imaginations, a vestige of a theism that now we must throw away like a threadbare suit of clothes. For Spong, Christians today need to go "beyond theism" throwing out the baby of divine transcendence—the fundamental truth of monotheism—along with the bath water of the credulity and mythology of the pre-modern authors of the Bible and the ecumenical creeds. Spong’s message is that “Christianity must change or die,” and all in the name of “science.”

As Spong likes to say, his work is very controversial, and not just among rank-and-file Christians. Scholars have also railed against him. “I have been attacked in books from the religious right by such people as Alistair MacGrath [whose surname is actually spelled McGrath], N.T. Wright, and Luke Timothy Johnson,” he complains (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. xvi).

I understand (with much sadness) that we live in a highly polarized age. Nevertheless, it’s difficult for me to grant much credibility to an author who identifies McGrath, Wright, and Johnson as representatives of the “religious right.” Indeed, if anyone here is distorting the news it is Spong, not they. As the (late) great Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown once observed, “I do not think that a single NT [New Testament] author would recognize Spong’s Jesus as the figure being proclaimed or written about.” (Birth of the Messiah, note 321 on p. 704)

Matthias Grünewald, The Resurrection (a wing of the
Isenheim Altarpiece, ca. 1515), Unterlinden Museum,
Colmar, France

Polkinghorne certainly understands science far more than Spong does, and his conclusions about the implications of science for Christian beliefs are markedly different. With respect to the Resurrection, he is basically on the same page with his friend Wright, whose profound book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, he cites with appreciation. Belief in the Resurrection is well supported by the evidence, and the Resurrection, itself, is “the pivot on which the claim of a unique and transcendent significance for Jesus must turn.” Considering authors like Spong (although he does not explicitly name him), he adds, “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.” (Theology in the Context of Science, pp. 135-6)

Amen.

Looking Ahead

This is the Easter season, and I’ll return in a couple of weeks to begin examining Polkinghorne’s approach to the Resurrection more fully, using excerpts from the chapter on “Motivated Belief” from his recent book, Theology in the Context of Science.

References

Raymond E. Brown, Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. (1992).

John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998).

John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (2009). My review for First Things online is here.

John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998).

If we want to talk about God, creation, and science, where should we start? It’s easy to begin with conflict. We can claim that the rise of modern science is the root of cultural decline. We can dive right into some of the contentious questions about how the Bible and science relate to each other. We can adopt a posture of defensiveness about what Christians believe and the ways in which some people think science threatens our beliefs.

But this is not a good place to start. The place to start is the place where all good Christian theology must start: with God.

“In the beginning, God….” These are the first words of the Bible. “I believe in God….” These are the first words of the Apostle’s Creed. If we want to develop wisdom and understanding about the relation between God and creation, then we need to start with the source of everything: God.

But how do we know anything about God? And how can we say anything about God? As we go about our daily lives, we can’t converse with God in exactly the same way that we might talk with our families, friends or neighbors. We can’t touch or smell God like a patch of green grass or taste Him like an apple. We can’t see him like an image on our TV screens. In theological terms, there is a sense in which God is “hidden” to our human senses. Many great Christian thinkers, such as Martin Luther, spent a good part of their lives reflecting on the “hiddenness” of God.

It may surprise you to hear God described as “hidden.” Those of us who have been in the Church for a while often are much more familiar with talk of how God has revealed Himself to us. We seem to gravitate towards detailed and systematic explanations of what we think we can know about God. God has, of course, revealed Himself to us – or else there would be very little point in trying to speak about Him. In scripture, in the proclamation of the Church, in the created world, and most importantly, in Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known. So why start with how God is “hidden?”

The very fact that God cannot be directly perceived by our ordinary human senses tells us something important about God and creation. God is “hidden” because He is “other.” God is not a patch of grass, and a patch of grass is not God. God is not an apple, and an apple is not God. God is not a television image or painting or statute, and a television image, painting or statute is not God. God is not a human being, and human beings are not God. God is not matter, the stuff of the created world, and matter is not God.

In theological terms, God is transcendent. “God” and “creation” are not the same thing. This is a basic idea that distinguishes Christian understandings of God from many other philosophies and religions. In fact, this emphasis on God’s transcendence is one important difference between the Hebrew and Christian theologies of creation and the prevailing ideas in the ancient near eastern world of the Biblical writers. It also distinguishes Christian thinking about God and creation from some of the important ideas that are common today.

In many ancient near eastern creation myths, the material creation was derived from the body of a god. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, for example, the female god Tiamat is killed by another god, Marduk, and the two halves of Tiamat’s corpse become the earth and the skies. In Egyptian mythology, many of the gods were related to material entities. Ra, for example, was the god of the Sun, Nut was god of the sky, and Geb was god of the earth. These stories reflect an ontology in which there is no sharp distinction between the gods and the material world. The Biblical literature, in contrast, separates the nature and being of the creator-God from the nature and being of His creation.

In contemporary popular Western culture, two of the most common ideas about God and creation really are very old notions dressed up in new clothes.

One is a thought you might hearon TV talk shows, in self-help books, or in popular music or movies: that “everything is one” or that “God is in everything and everyone.” This usually sounds like “pantheism” — the notion that God and the world around us really are essentially the same thing. In American popular culture, this often boils down to God becoming the same thing as our own individual selves. How often have you heard a line like this in a song or TV show or movie: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are?”

The truth of God’s transcendence means that the real basis for a meaningful and good life lies outside of our selves. We are part of creation, and therefore we are not God. We must look outside ourselves to find the source of life. Before we become too critical here, we need to preview for a moment another important theme in Christian theology: that God is also immanent. It is true that creation is an interconnected system and that God is always present throughout all of creation. It is also true that in our created humanity we are made for an intimate connection with God. It is right to look into ourselves as we seek God. As Augustine described in his Confessions, an honest search of the self should reveal a nature that is not self-sufficient, that is not meant to be alone, that longs for relationship with a beauty and harmony and love that the individual self cannot sustain. Augustine called this a “God-shaped void” at the heart of every person.

Yet we also need to be clear that, while the search may begin within our selves, it must not stop there. God is “other,” so we must continue beyond ourselves, in fact beyond everything we think we see, in order to find Him. And the paradox here is that we can only find the true meaning and purpose of our own selves by going beyond ourselves and finding the God who is other than us and who made us.

The other idea often expressed in our popular culture is that “matter is all there is.” Unfortunately, for some people this idea has become the standard for supposedly “scientific” thinking about the world. But this is not a “scientific” idea at all – it is a metaphysical statement (“metaphysical” just means “beyond the physical”) with roots going back to the ancient Greek Stoics. For many educated people in Western culture, if something cannot be verified with the human senses, it is not “real,” or at least it is not worthy of consideration as a matter of “fact” or “reason.”

There are many reasons why this way of thinking about what counts as truth or knowledge has become so influential. Our modern intellectual, political and social systems were shaped by the period from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries known as the “Enlightenment.” Even modern Christianity has been tinged in significant ways by Enlightenment thought.

The Enlightenment, of course, was not all bad. It gave us some great gifts, including the contemporary scientific method and the political frameworks, such as the U.S. Constitution, that support the freedoms we now take for granted.

But like many exciting moments in history, the Enlightenment produced some unbalanced perspectives. The ways in which human beings can know things in addition to observation of the tangible world around us were lost. The sorts of intuitions and experiences that human beings throughout history had understood to reach beyond reason were discredited. The thought that a transcendent God might have broken into history to reveal anything about Himself was mostly set aside.

Christian theology has always asserted that because God is transcendent, human observation and human reason are neither the starting point nor the ending point for true knowledge, wisdom and understanding. If matter is not all there is, then our search for truth cannot be limited to the material world alone. In fact, the beginning of knowledge and wisdom is the realization that God is beyond and other than the created world. Again, a word of balance is in order. Human observation and reason do matter, precisely because God created us as part of a world that is in important ways orderly and knowable. The great Christian thinker Anselm said that knowledge is the act of “faith seeking understanding.” “Understanding” – the sometimes difficult process of bringing all our resources, including reason, to bear on the search for truth – depends on and follows “faith.”

God’s transcendence means that the physical world does not represent the limits of what is true and real. Indeed, the physical world is not the beginning or end of what is true and real. The “beginning and end,” the “alpha and omega,” is the God who is beyond all our thoughts and imaginings.

Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

Keeping History Safe

In the cold morning air with the sun not yet over the ridge, the place to begin preparation for summiting Mount Darwin is to ponder the reasonableness of miracles. Many Totalizers would like to ban miracles from university consideration and inquiry. Trouble is: human history is awash with credible people reporting miracles.

Modern academic tradition tends to try and maintain order. For historians it behooves us professionally to avoid accounts of alleged spiritual events. We find comfort in a little logical gymnastics that keeps history safe for us to wander in, a deceptively formulaic avoidance method that helps us avoid what people are telling us about extraordinary events in the past.

David Hume popularly articulated this logical gymnastics in an essay titled “Of Miracles” that was eventually printed in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding (1748). “I flatter myself,” Hume triumphantly proclaimed, “that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.”

His everlasting check on superstition begins with a circular argument that because miracles can’t happen, a reasonable person should not even listen to reports of them. Hume taught that though the normal job of a historian was to listen to the testimony that comes down to us from the past, there is a point at which you can close your ears. Hume knew that historical testimony can get wild, so he came up with a way to domesticate the wildness, a way to make history a zoo rather than allow it to be a jungle. His “Of Miracles” has been tremendously influential in the discipline of human history over the last two hundred and fifty years, not because his ideas are strong, but because his ideas are useful. Get rid of “superstitious delusions,” and the discipline of history can be turned from a safari into a form of home economics. Hume’s domestication of history is seductively simple. Instead of following the Aristotelian tradition of linking the credibility of hard-to-believe testimony to the credibility of the testifier, Hume recommended disregarding the testifier and focusing only on the testimony. This effectively removed the persuasive power from hard-to-believe testimony. Miracles need the credibility of an eyewitness in order to have persuasive power. Hume cut the power source from the unwanted testimony.

Essentially, Hume adopted the modeling technique that Darwin later used and is best seen in Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Hume recommended gathering testimony from the past and every region to create a general model of what humans generally experience. Using this mass of information, one should generalize standards of common experience. Now if anyone reports a miracle, the alleged event can’t be true because it does not conform to the generalized standards of common experience. (Of course, Hume had already refused to allow that any reports of miracles could be used even to generalize common experience.) It’s tricky. Its logic is circular. But it works to weed out awkward, quirky information. It is as if a domineering GPS unit created a sphere to serve as an abstraction for the earth, then insisted that the earth can’t have wobbling poles and flattening in the upper latitudes because the sphere in the GPS shows it can’t be true. Given a useful and trustworthy GPS, don’t listen to a scientist who might tell you something different than what the GPS tells you.

The circularity of this argument has been noted ever since Hume first proposed it, but Hume was a good writer and said what a lot of people wanted to hear. Miracles are impossible so miracle reports can’t be true. Don’t even listen to reports of them.

Balancing Likelihoods

Also embedded in Hume’s essay is the awkward “rule of logic,” most often called “Balancing Likelihoods.” By combining math and logic in an odd way, Hume’s “Of Miracles “ offered another way for historians to avoid thinking about miracles. Balancing Likelihoods has many names but is probably best stated by David Hackett Fischer, in his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, as “the rule of probability:”

“[A]ll inferences from empirical evidence are probabilistic. It is not, therefore, sufficient to demonstrate merely that A was possibly the case. A historian must determine, as best he can, the probability of A in relation to the probability of alternatives. In the same fashion he cannot disprove A by demonstrating that not-A was possible, but only by demonstrating that not-A was more probable than A. This is the rule of probability.”

This seems to be practical but is impossible. Balancing Likelihoods, in the way described by Fischer, cannot be used by historians in any normal practice. It is a talisman to keep history mentally safe from the wildness that is reported to exist. Logicians, especially mathematicians, have long criticized intellectual constructions like this. The “probability” that Fischer writes about is seemingly mathematical, but the math is simply implied to give a sense of strength to human feelings.

Before Hume wrote “Of Miracles” probabilistic logic had been advancing rapidly and there was a great hope that mathematical analogies would strengthen human thinking—even Christian apologetics. “Pascal’s Wager,” the most famous mathematical apologetic from the seventeenth century, equated eternal salvation with mathematical infinity and then applied it to a gambling formula. Antoine Arnauld, in The Port-Royal Logic (1662), and John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Discourse on Miracles (1706), carried probabilistic math and logic into the handling of reported miracles. A half-century later, however, Hume reacted against Arnauld and Locke’s teachings that mathematical analogies could help in the discussion of the credibility of miracles. Hume insisted that to handle a reported miracle, a historian had to create two separate ratios, pro and con, for believability. The ratios were then to be weighed against each other. This is Fischer’s “rule of probability” quoted above. In the language of Hume’s era, this was proclaimed as the “calculus of good sense.”

Lorraine Daston, in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), offers an excellent study of Hume and the many eighteenth-century mathematicians who wanted to help bring rigorous quantitative thinking to what today would be called the humanities. Daston writes that by the 1840s, mathematicians realized that “the ‘calculus of good sense’ had become antithetical to good sense,” and that today most of what these early probabilists were trying to do is considered “patently absurd.”

In 1901, one of America’s preeminent philosopher-mathematician-logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote three essays attacking the way historians had adopted Hume’s bad logic: “A Preliminary Chapter, Toward an Examination of Hume’s Argument Against Miracles, in its Logic and in its History,” “Hume’s Arguments Against Miracles, and the Idea of Natural Law,” and “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies.” Peirce showed that historians are in error when they talk of judging testimony by balancing probabilities because “in a scientific sense, there are no ‘probabilities’ to be judged.”

Probability, Peirce wrote, “is the ratio of the frequency of occurrence of a specific event to a generic event.” A testimony “is neither a specific event, nor a generic event, but an individual event.” Peirce further pointed out that what people were justifying by claiming Balancing Likelihoods was really simply relating “what they prefer to do” to what they don’t prefer. “Likelihood is merely a reflection of our preconceived ideas.”

Historians like me who teach in universities about the reasonable credibility of Jesus’ resurrection need to be students of Peirce not Hume on the subject of assessing the credibility of reports that come down to us from ancient history. Dealing wisely with reports of events verging on the incredible is just part of the normal job of being grounded in the social study of our complex human past.

“Come to history as a doubter,” Richard Marius advises in a historical methods manual. “Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities. Historians don’t trust their sources. . . . Nothing is quite so destructive to a historian’s reputation as to present conclusions that prove gullibility.”

But Marius is wrong. In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt. In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting. Historians have to be close listeners, discerning listeners, wise listeners, who sometimes have to make harmonies and stretch for belief.

There are several different kinds of arguments that people bring along these lines; I want to talk about just one. So first… the Heidelberg catechism, one of the forms of unity of the church I go to (the Christian Reformed Church), says

Providence is the almighty and ever-present power of God, by which he upholds as with his hand heaven and Earth and all creatures and so rules them, that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty. All things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but from his fatherly hand.

And part of the way it comes to us—not by chance, but from his fatherly hand—part of the way God has designed our world, is that there is a great deal of regularity and dependability in our world. Of course, if it were not for this regularity and dependability, we couldn’t do the things that we actually do. I mean, for example, if I just wanted to walk off the stage—if, for example, all the sudden those stairs over there suddenly turned into a ladder going up—well, that would make it really difficult.

If you are trying to build a house, for example, you have this hammer, but all the sudden the hammer turns in to a goose or a pigeon. Again, that would make things really difficult…or if the nail turned into a worm…or if you get in the car and turn the key and the car turns into a camel, things would be really hard, much harder than they are. This regularity and dependability in our world is an essential condition of our being able to live in the world in which we actually do.

If the world were irregular enough, we would not even be able to live in it, but there are also, according to classical Christianity here (the Heidelberg catechism, for example) there are also special divine actions; sometimes God does things specially. There are miracles in Scripture: the parting of the Red Sea, for example, Jesus walking on water, Jesus changing water into wine. There are miraculous healings: Jesus rising from the dead, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and so on. And according to classical Christians, many of them, perhaps most of them, are special divine actions. God, for example, responds to prayers. He works in the hearts and minds of his children to effect sanctification. There is, what Calvin called, the internal testimony or witness of the Holy Spirit, and there is what Thomas Aquinas called the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. So, these things are all special actions on the part of God. God constantly causes events in the world. Ok, so far fair enough—what is the problem?

Many theologians seem to think there is a science-religion problem here. I don’t think any of the theologians of Biola think this, (I don’t know, but I doubt it) but many theologians do. For example, Rudolf Bultmann says, “The historical method,” which of course he thinks that is the method we should use, “includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. This continuum, furthermore, cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.”

That’s what he says. Alright, there is this continuum that cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural (that would be God) or transcendent powers. So, it is a little bit like the laws of the Medes and Persians. You probably remember Daniel. Daniel was a favorite of King Darius, and well, the other courtiers became jealous of Daniel (they didn’t like it that the king liked him so well). So, they came to the king and said, “Oh king, live forever, we think it would be a great idea if you passed an edict to the effect that you alone can be worshipped. Everybody has to worship you and nothing else.” Well the king thought that over for a minute, and that sounded pretty good to him so he said, “I guess that it is a pretty good idea.” So he made this edict; he made this declaration: “Only King Darius is to be worshipped—no one else, nothing else.”

These courtiers knew that Daniel worshipped God, and they thought probably Daniel would keep right on worshipping God despite this edict. So they were watching Daniel, and he was, in fact, worshipping God. So they came to the king. Now the penalty for worshipping something else was to be thrown into the lion’s den and they said, “Well, king live forever, looks like Daniel has been violating this edict. You have got to throw him in the lion’s den.”

Well, the king didn’t want to do this because he really liked Daniel. He thought this was a miserable way to proceed, and he didn’t want to do it, but then they said to him, “O king live forever, and remember a law of the Medes and Persians cannot be abrogated, even by the king himself.” So once it’s put in place, not even the king himself can change it or abrogate it or go against it.

That is sort of the suggestion that you get here from Bultmann. Bultmann thinks, “Maybe God created the world and set it up in a certain way, but once he did that, not even he can interfere in it”—he uses that word interference—“not even he can do anything in it. He just has to keep hands off.” It is like the law of the Medes and the Persians.

Another theologian who agrees is John Macquarrie, who says,

The way of understanding miracle (and that would be one kind of special divine action) that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to supernatural intervention belongs to the mythological outlook, and cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought. The traditional conception of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world, can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world, and if on some occasion, we are unable to give a complete account of some happening, the scientific conviction is that further research will bring to light further factors in the situation that will turn out to be just as imminent and this worldly as the factors already known.

Ok again, no room there for special action. And the third thinker here, Langdon Gilkey (still another theologian), says something similar, but I will pass. I will not read that one in the interest of saving a little bit of time, but these three theologians, plus many others want to assert that there is something wrong with the idea of God acting in the world, acting in the world in a way that goes beyond creation and sustaining, or creation and holding things in existence. So they think, “Ok, God created the world; God sustains it in existence”…that is ok with them, but anything beyond that, God performing any miracles, raising Jesus from the dead, or for that matter working in somebody’s heart and mind in a special way, that, they say, is a real problem. The question is, what is the problem?

Well, the next little bit here…according to the Christian and theistic idea, God is a person; he has knowledge, loves, and hates. He has aims and ends. He acts on the basis of his knowledge to achieve his ends. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good. Thirdly (noted above by the Heidelberg catechism), God has created the world. Fourth is God conserves and sustains and maintains in being this world he created, but fifth, at least sometimes, God acts in a way going beyond creation and conservation in miracles, but also in his providential guiding of history, his working in the hearts of people, his internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, and so on, and it is with that fifth category that these people have a problem. It is God’s special action in the world—action beyond conservation and creation—and miracles would be an example.

So we might think of these theologians as endorsing what we could call hands off theology. God has got to keep his hands off. God could create the world. God conserves the world, sustains it in being, but he can’t do anything else—that is as far as he could go. It is hands off theology, and Bultmann, even in this context, even talks about interfering. I mean if God did something in the world that would be interfering, which, when you think about it, is a sort of strange thing to say—I mean if God created the world, he is the omnipotent, omniscient, holy, good creator of the world—when you accuse someone of interfering, you are saying they are doing something they should not be doing, right?

So Bultmann thinks if God did something in the world that would be interfering, and he should be ashamed of himself. Ok, now why is this a problem? Their suggestion is that somehow it is contrary to science. It is contrary to science the suggestion that God acts specially in the world. I didn’t read that bit, but Gilkey says, "The causal nexus in space and time which the enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the western mind is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars. Since they participate in the modern world of science, both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else.”

From a presentation sponsored by Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, and delivered February 12, 2012 at EV Free Church, Fullerton, CA. Used by permission.

Suppose a man falls among thieves, or wild beasts; is shipwrecked at sea by a sudden gale; is killed by a falling house or tree. Suppose another man wandering through the desert finds help in his straits; having been tossed by the waves, reaches harbor; miraculously escapes death by a finger’s breadth. Carnal reason ascribes all such happenings, whether prosperous or adverse, to fortune. But anyone who has been taught by Christ’s lips that all the hairs if his head are numbered [Matt. 10:30] will look further afield for a cause, and will consider that all events are governed by God’s secret plan.

In this passage, Calvin presents belief in “fortune” as evidence of carnal reasoning, and statements like this one have contributed to a widely-held notion that modern scientific understandings of the role that randomness plays in nature is inconsistent with belief in divine providence. In other words, if “randomness” equals blind and capricious “fortune,” then how can God be said to be working all things to his ends?

But Calvin could not have known of the very different understanding of randomness held by today’s scholars. Physical scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians have not yet agreed on a single unambiguous definition of the term “randomness,” but among these scientists, the term consistently refers to a family of related concepts focusing on unpredictability of the outcomes of single events and the absence of pattern in sequences of outcomes. I like this statement by John Polkinghorne, “Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.” In Polkinghorne’s view, chance is an agent of creativity and can be perceived as being purposeful.

In fact, there are abundant examples of phenomena in nature in which randomness plays a role one could understand as being purposeful. For example, osmosis is a marvelous mechanism that enables all 10 trillion cells in our bodies to be nourished – it depends on the random motion of molecules. The human immune system is able to defend the body against attacks from millions of different microorganisms using a relatively small number of building blocks and random combinations of these to fashion defenses specific to each adversary. We never take a breath and find it to be all nitrogen or carbon dioxide – random motion of molecules keeps oxygen close to uniformly distributed throughout the atmosphere.

In 2007, a British statistician, David Bartholomew published God, Chance, and Purpose in which he argues that God “can have it both ways”—that he can use low level randomness to accomplish divine purposes while simultaneously maintaining order at a higher level. Of course, we cannot prove that God ordained these random processes to achieve divine purposes in the world. But to a person of faith, such an interpretation in both consistent with the observations we make in science and with the Scriptural notion of God’s providential care for the world.

Considerations like these led the John Templeton Foundation to provide a generous grant of $1.69 million to support a new research initiative on the theme of Randomness and Divine providence. Beginning this past summer, the program has the purpose of providing support for solid theoretical exploration of the kinds of ideas and possibilities expressed above—involving theology, philosophy, natural science, mathematics, and statistics. The grant will support individual scholars and teams of scholars who are willing to devote a significant amount of time between March of 2013 and June of 2015 to such work, and the project’s request for proposals suggests the following as questions researchers might pursue:

• How might God work providentially through indeterminate processes? Can recent advances in understanding the nature of randomness offered by algorithmic information theory, physics, biology, and other sciences provide insight into this question?
• Can we bring clarity to the concept of "randomness"? Philosophers and scientists have tried on occasion to give precise definitions of when a process is random, but more work needs to be done on the question. How do (or should) conceptions of randomness vary across academic disciplines?
• What are some possible implications of randomness for hiding or unfolding divine creativity and purpose in the world? Could God use randomness to (1) generate creativity, (2) hide divine actions, or (3) unfold information? Why might God do so?
• How might we identify and come to understand a significant collection of nondeterministic processes in which agents could intentionally employ randomness to bring about purposeful results?
• How might we mathematically and physically model random processes in ways that help us understand how divine providence could be exercised in a "chance-governed" world?
• How do "laws and orders" in nature interplay with "chance and randomness" in bringing about results that can be interpreted as aspects of divine providence?
• Might randomness be evidence of limitations in human knowledge but nothing more? Or might it be evidence of ontological indeterminism? Might this be tested?
• What implications does randomness have for aspects of God’s relationship with the physical world such as God’s relationship to time and God’s role in causation? How might randomness be reconciled with God’s foreknowledge?
• How might an understanding of providence based on an extended Molinism and/or open theology incorporate randomness? For example, could an extended Molinism provide a plausible account of the relationship between quantum mechanics and divine providence?
• What are some theodical implications of randomness, particularly for the issue of natural evil?
• How have the theological traditions of Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin addressed chance and fortune? In what ways might they incorporate ontological randomness?
• How do or could religions other than the Judeo/Christian tradition understand and incorporate randomness?
• How is the concept of randomness understood by advocates of secularism, naturalism, and new atheism? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these usages?
• How might an understanding of randomness in the world alter our conceptions of divinity, especially our understanding of divine providence?

Despite the range of issues mentioned above, research is by no means restricted only to these topics. In fact, the structure of the program is designed to foster collaboration and build community between scholars, with the end of expanding the range and integration of their work: two conferences will be held to bring scholars together with each other and then with members of the public—one at Calvin College in 2013 and the other at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2015. To get more information and to learn how to submit a proposal, see the project website; then join us in exploring the truth that all creation glorifies God—even randomness!

For more, be sure to read Randall Pruim's recent series Randomness and God’s Governance, Kathryn Applegate's post That's Random: A Look at Viral Self-Assembly, and our FAQ How Do Randomness and Chance Align with Belief in God's Sovereignty and Purpose?.

Author's Note

I am so thankful that I grew up in a Christian environment, which both kindled and nurtured my relationship with Jesus Christ. The Biblical instruction I received from my parents, pastors, and teachers has been invaluable as I walk out my love for the Lord from day to day. However, there was one specific topic growing up which was not fully addressed, namely evolutionary theory.

Coming from a conservative Christian background, evolution was given little or no thought because of its seeming contradiction to the creation story in Genesis. To me, evolution meant a monkey became a human, and as far as I knew, I had never seen that happen! So, of course, it appeared too improbable to hold any truth. When it was discussed, an inadequate picture of its ideas was often painted, which caused immediate suspicion and rejection of the theory. I don’t think this was intentional, but most Christians have never learned an unbiased, in-depth theory of evolution that is completely detached from societal agendas and philosophical conclusions. Therefore, their explanations of the theory are often misinformed.

My senior year of high school, I took AP Biology, and finally learned the scientific reasoning supporting this theory. I was surprised by how logical and obvious the mechanisms of change (such as mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, and so on) were that gave rise to new species. My subsequent response was, “No wonder people believe evolution occurred.” At that point, I was convinced that microevolution (evolution within a species) existed, but I was still questioning macroevolution.

Now, being at Point Loma Nazarene University as an undergrad in the Biology-Chemistry major and a year-round, student intern at BioLogos, my understanding of evolution has expanded enormously. I have enjoyed critically thinking through the evidence for evolution and reading articles that tackle difficult issues at the interface of science and Christian faith. Ultimately, I know that God has created all things, but the processes he used surpass my small understanding.

My personal wrestling with evolution and quest for truth has led to times of prayer and studying God’s Word, which has deepened my love for him in ways I cannot express. The first chapters of Genesis, in particular, have come alive. My whole life, the creation story was a straightforward list of facts about the creation of the world; I never searched further. I didn’t even perceive the truths Genesis declared over my very identity and God’s character. The more I study his Word and handiwork, I glimpse the awesomeness and majesty of the Creator, who loves me much more than I know. There is still so much to learn, but I am confident that he will lead me into all truth as I seek him out.

I desire to give others the opportunity to see evolution accurately and to distinguish it from the traditional, philosophical, and personal conclusions that too often cloud the scientific theory. I believe these conclusions alienate Christians from evolution more than the scientific theory itself. Ultimately, I do not mean to convince someone about evolution, but simply to give them the freedom to understand it.

Therefore, my goal for this podcast is two-fold:

• First, to offer a new perspective on randomness within natural processes that removes its negative connotations (especially as it relates to evolution).
• Second, to expose why evolution is powerless to support conclusions beyond the physical realm.

This will hopefully encourage others to study evolutionary theory and draw their own conclusions about its meaning in the framework of their faith.

(Written by the BioLogos editorial team)

In a recent lecture in Washington, D.C., Intelligent Design advocate Stephen Meyer noted that scientists and theologians are generally uncomfortable with the idea of "supernatural intervention" in natural processes such as evolution. He then posed the question, “What's so bad about supernatural intervention?” Meyer’s comment touches on a point of particular tension among Christians engaged in understanding how our science and our theology interact: the nature of divine action.

Much of the confusion in this area, however, stems from the inexact meaning of intervention, which—like evolution or Darwinism—implies different things to different people. All Christians affirm that God works powerfully in the world, doing extraordinary acts of creation and salvation. In common conversation, then, intervention tends to mean simply “acts that are recognizably or obviously God’s,” whether as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea or as subtle as an individual believer hearing a clear call to repentance or to mission from the Lord. Even in this most casual sense, intervention tends to mean special occasions of God’s providential care, rather than his ordinary sustaining work.

But to Christian scientists and philosophers trying to understand God’s action in creation—especially how he might go about his sustaining role—intervention has another connotation: namely, that recognizing something as “divine action” requires it to be in violation of the natural laws which God himself established. Put another way, many Christian thinkers associate the word intervention with the idea that to act in the world God “must” act from outside the world. That view is a central tenet of deism, not Christianity. One response to Meyer’s comment, then, is to ask whether intervention is the only (or even a helpful) way of thinking about God’s work in biological creation. Is there another way of talking about “divine action” that does not restrict God's work to only extraordinary events? Can we conceive of divine action in a way God is never absent, distant, or in any way removed from the creation he sustains at every moment?

Finding such an alternative vocabulary to talk about the different ways God acts in his creation is the purpose of this short series introducing the work of theologian and physicist Robert John Russell. Russell’s book Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega explores the history of Christian thinking about divine action and proposes one model for how we might understand it in light of Scripture, the traditions of the church, and contemporary scientific explorations of the material world.

To be clear, Russell argues that God does unmistakably act in the world. He singles out the bodily resurrection of Jesus not only as a prime example, but as a truly unique event distinct even from Christ’s other miraculous acts during his ministry on earth. That is, the resurrection was an in-breaking of God’s new reality into the present one, something “beyond miraculous.” This series, though, offers his perspective on the more basic issue of how God might be at work in what we have called the “ordinary processes” of his world.

We begin our three-part series below with Professor Russell’s description of how views of divine action have changed throughout history (excerpted from Chapter 4 of Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega).

Historical background to the problem of divine action

The notion of God’s acting in the world is central to the biblical witness. From the call of Abraham and the Exodus from Egypt to the birth, ministry, death and raising of Jesus and the founding of the church at Pentecost, God is represented as making new things happen. Through these “mighty acts,” God creates and saves. Rather than seeing divine acts as occasional events in what are otherwise entirely natural and historical processes, both the Hebrews and the early Christians conceived of God as the creator of the world and of divine action as the continuing basis of all that happens in nature and in history.

The view that God works in and through all the processes of the world continued throughout Patristic and Medieval times. For example, God was understood as the first or primary cause of all events—where all natural causes are instrumental or secondary causes through which God works. The conviction that God acts universally in all events, and that we act together with God in specific events, was maintained by the Reformers and the ensuing Protestant orthodoxy. John Calvin (1509-1564) argued that God is in absolute control over the world and at the same time maintained that people are responsible for evil deeds. Questions about human freedom and the reality of evil were seen more as problems requiring serious theological attention than as reasons for abandoning belief in God’s universal agency.

Moreover, faith in God the creator was articulated through two distinct but interwoven doctrines: creation and providence. The doctrine of creation asserts that the ultimate source and absolute ground of the universe is God. Without God, the universe would not exist, nor would it exist as “universe.” Creation theology, in turn, has often included three related but distinct claims: 1) the universe had a beginning; 2) the universe depends absolutely and at every moment on God for its sheer existence; and 3) the universe is the locus of God’s continuing activity as Creator. The first two have traditionally been grouped in terms of creatio ex nihilo(creation from nothing), and the third in terms of creatio continua (continuing creation).

The doctrine of providence presupposes a doctrine of creation, but adds significantly to it. While creation stresses that God is the cause of all existence, providence stresses that God is the cause of the meaning and purpose of all that is. God not only creates but guides and directs the universe towards the fulfilling of God’s purposes. These purposes are mostly hidden to us, though they may be partially seen after the fact in the course of natural and historical events. The way God achieves them is hidden, too. Only in the eschatological future will God’s action throughout the history of the universe be fully revealed and our faith in it confirmed. General providence refers to God’s universal action in guiding all events; special providence refers to God’s particular acts in specific moments, whether found in personal life or in history.

Divine intervention arises in the Enlightenment

The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and Enlightenment philosophy in the eighteenth, however, led many to reject the traditional views of divine action. Although Isaac Newton (1643-1727) argued for the essential role of God in relation to the metaphysical underpinnings of his mechanical system, and in this way defended the sovereignty of God in relation to nature, Newtonian mechanics depicted a causally closed universe with little, if any, room for God’s special action in specific events—and then only by intervention: that is, by acting as from outside that closed system. A century later, Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827, pictured left) combined the determinism of Newton’s equations with epistemological reductionism (the properties and behavior of the whole are reducible to those of the parts) and metaphysical reductionism (the whole is simply composed of its parts), to portray all of nature as a causally closed, impersonal mechanism. This in turn led to the concept of interventionism: if God were really to act in specific events in nature, God would apparently have to break the remorseless lock-step of natural cause and effect by intervening in the sequence and violating the laws of nature in the process.

The eighteenth century also saw the rise and fall of deism, in which the scope of divine agency was limited to an initial act of creation. According to deism, the universe was like a clock which, once built and set in place, proceeded to run on its own. David Hume (1711-1776) challenged the deistic (and theistic) arguments for God as first cause and as designer. In response, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, pictured right) constructed a new metaphysical system which emphasized the mind’s role in organizing sense-data through universal categories of intuition and forms of sensibility. According to Kant, the sphere of religion lies not in our knowing (the activity of pure reason) but in our sense of moral obligation (the activity of practical reason). It is our ethical system, not our knowledge of nature, that requires us to postulate God, freedom and the immortality of the soul. The consequence of Kant’s thought for the West was the philosophical separation of the domains of science and religion into “two worlds”—a move which was to have an immeasurable effect on Christian theology up to the present.

Theology splits into conservative and liberal interpretations of divine action

As a consequence of the philosophical division of science and religion, theology in the nineteenth century was faced with a fundamental challenge not only to its contents and structure, but even to its method. The variety of responses to this challenge tend to fall into two groups: “liberals” largely accepted and worked within the terms of the discussion that modernity dictated while “conservatives” upheld traditional formulations and tended to reject “modernity.” The earliest and most influential figure among liberals was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who responded to Kant by locating religion as neither a knowing nor a doing. Instead religion is grounded in personal piety—the feeling of absolute dependence.

Schleiermacher held that theological assertions emerge from the immediacy of the religious self-consciousness. He understood God’s relation to the world in terms of “universal divine immanence” [the idea that God is present to the entire cosmos at all times], and he blurred the distinction between creation and providence by collapsing the later into the former. In a famous move he defined miracle as “. . . simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant.” Schleiermacher’s arguments became characteristic of liberal Protestant theology throughout the nineteenth century and continued into much of twentieth century theological work.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of Darwinian evolution, which combined random variation and natural selection to explain biological complexity. To some in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the fundamental role of chance in nature seemed to undercut any notion of divine action in the world; to others, such as the Anglo-Catholic liberal movement in Britain and America, Darwinian evolution could be accommodated and even integrated into theology without interventionism, since God works immanently in and through the very processes of nature. In contrast, religious conservatives tended either to reject evolution as a whole or give it a limited acceptance with the proviso that the objective acts of special providence constitute divine interventions in nature.

The rise of neo-orthodoxy in the twentieth century

Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century was largely shaped by Karl Barth. In his rejection of nineteenth-century liberal theology, Barth returned theology to its biblical roots and focused it on the God who is “wholly other.” Recognizing that a religion founded exclusively on subjective experience is vulnerable to the critiques of Feuerbach and Freud, Barth and his followers held fast to the objective action of God in creating and redeeming the world. “The Gospel is . . . not an event, nor an experience, nor an emotion—however delicate! ... It is a communication which presumes faith in the living God, and which creates that which it presumes.” The ‘God who acts’ became a hallmark of the ensuing “biblical theology” movement which arose in the 1940s and 1950s. To many this movement seemed to offer a tertium quid between liberal and conservative theologies.

But do Barthian neo-orthodoxy and the biblical theology movement actually produce a credible account of divine action? On the one hand neo-orthodoxy attempts to distance itself from liberal theology by retaining biblical language about God acting through wondrous events and by viewing revelation as including an objective act. Yet on the other hand, it, like liberalism, accepts the modern premise that nature is a closed causal system, as depicted by classical physics. The result is that neo-orthodoxy seems to assert a contradiction: God does act objectively in nature (as conservatives believe) and God does so without intervening, violating, suspending or obstructing the ordinary processes of nature understood as a closed causal system (as liberals believe).

A third way between liberal and conservative theologies

Any purported “third option” will require an intelligible concept of objectively special providence which does not entail divine intervention. Such a concept could serve as a genuine tertium quid to conservative and liberal notions of special providence, combining strengths borrowed from each. Specifically, we will seek to speak about special divine acts in which God acts objectively in an unusual and particularly meaningful way in, with, and through events which serve to mediate God’s action. We will seek to do so without entertaining—in fact by refusing—the additional claim that God must intervene in, or at least suspend, the laws of nature. Those laws are themselves the result of and description of God’s continuous creation, after all. I call this type of divine action Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA).

In part 2 of this series, Tom Burnett will explore in more depth what Russell takes to be wrong with the Enlightenment concept of “supernatural intervention.” Part 3 will explain and clarify Russell’s theory of NIODA.

From Chapter 4, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act? New Approaches to Divine Action In Light Of Contemporary Science,” in Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega by Robert John Russell, copyright © 2008 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers. All rights reserved. No further reproduction allowed without the written permission of the publisher.

Many of the games I enjoyed playing involve a combination of strategy and randomness: card games of various sorts, backgammon, and board games like Monopoly and Parcheesi. Some games that rely exclusively on chance (like War and Candy Land) or too heavily on chance (like Sorry) quickly became uninteresting to me. In fact, for Sorry, War, and several other games, I introduced additional rules to change the balance of strategy and luck—for example, by allowing each player to hold a hand of cards rather than merely flip a card and follow its bidding.

When my children were young, I played many games with them, especially those involving some amount of chance. I always play to win, so games of pure strategy like chess gave me too great an advantage—at least when they were still young. I still remember the first time I played the German game Mitternachtspartie with my children and some of their cousins. The game uses a die on which the number 5 has been replaced with the image of Hugo the ghost. Each player rolls the die and moves one of his figures the specified number of squares, unless Hugo is rolled, in which case Hugo moves instead.

I quickly worked out the expected distance Hugo would move for each of my turns and the expected number of squares I would get to move my own figures each turn. Using that information, I could strategically place my figures in the opening portion of the game. I fully expected to win this first game, since my young children were going to have to learn from experience what I already knew by the mathematics of probability. I lost—badly. As it turned out, the die had two Hugos on it. So compared to my expectations, Hugo moved twice as often, and my figures moved slightly less far. That combination turned the carefully calculated positioning of my figures into a disaster.

From Fun and Games to Science

I still enjoy playing games, including games that involve chance. But these days I encounter randomness even more often in my profession. I was trained as a mathematician and now work at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Like many scientists, I use randomness on a daily basis as part of our toolkit for modeling and investigating all sorts of phenomena. Models known as stochastic models, which explicitly incorporate random components, often via simulation in computer software, are used to model everything from diffusion to genetics to quantum mechanics. Insurance companies and financial institutions use stochastic models to manage risk. If we include all the applications of statistics, then almost no area of science is untouched by the use of randomness.

Most of the time, scientists and game players alike don’t devote much thought to just what makes randomness tick. But they both know that the better they understand the probabilities, the more successful they are. Nevertheless, if you ask many of them what it means for something to be random, they may struggle to put it into words. I won’t try to give a precise definition either, but it is important that we have some idea what we are talking about, so let’s consider one of the prototypical examples of randomness: the tossing of a fair coin.

If I flip a coin, the result could be heads or tails. Until I flip the coin, I don’t know which it will be. In this sense, the coin toss is unpredictable. If the coin is fair, each result is equally likely, so while I cannot say in advance whether a particular result will be heads or tails, I can say something about a large number of flips: approximately half should be heads and the other half tails.

A little mathematics even allows me to determine a range around 50% in which the percentage will almost surely lie. For example, if I flip a fair coin 1,000 times, the percentage of heads will most likely be between 45% and 55% (where “most likely” means a 99% chance). If the percentage of heads lies outside this range—especially if it is quite far outside this range—I am going to be suspicious that the coin flipping process is not fair. That’s one of the key ideas in statistics: not only can we calculate the frequency with which an event occurs, but we can compare data to a stochastic model to see if they are compatible or incompatible.

There are several interesting things we can learn by considering a coin toss. First, probability calculations rely on assumptions. If the assumptions are incorrect, then the probability calculations will also be incorrect. For example, if the coin is biased (such as one that is heads 60% of the time), but we assume it is fair, then the probability calculations given above will be wrong. Of course, if the assumptions are not too far from correct, the results may still be sufficiently accurate for scientific conclusions. If we have an appropriate way to collect data, then we can test our assumptions by comparing data to projections made based on the assumptions.

Second, “random” does not imply “equally likely.” A fair coin should have equal probabilities of heads or tails, but a biased coin is no less random. It’s just different. It is not as simple to handle arithmetically as a situation in which all outcomes are equally likely, but it is not otherwise special. It is a common mistake to assume random events are equally likely when they are not (or when that assumption is not justified).

Third, randomness is about the process. It is a fun experiment to flip a penny 100 times, then spin a penny 100 times and record the side that is showing when it finally tips over, then to stand the penny on end (this takes a steady hand and a little practice) and record which side is showing after pounding the table. These are three different processes, and they do not yield the same results.

Fourth, random processes produce patterns. I sometimes ask my students to mentally flip a coin and record the results as a sequence of letters (e.g., “HTTHHTHT”). Then I have them actually flip a coin and record the results. If the sequences are long enough, I can almost always tell them which is which. The sequences imagined by the students tend to have too few runs of consecutive heads or tails. The sequences based on real coin flips usually include several heads in a row. People not familiar with randomness are often surprised at the patterns that result and assume that the process must not have been random when they perceive a pattern. Our eyes and minds are drawn to similarities and patterns—even those that are produced purely randomly. This can lead us to draw false conclusions from coincidences of all sorts.

Consider the image in Figure 1. It was constructed using a computer to randomly throw 300 darts at a square board. Every position on the board was equally likely to be hit by a dart. This does not, however, mean that the dots are evenly spaced. There are 100 smaller squares. The average is three dots per square. But your eye is likely drawn to some clusters and voids. My eye also catches a graceful downward swoop in the lower part of the upper left quarter. All of this is exactly what we should expect from this random process. If we repeated this experiment, we should expect similar results. Several of the smaller squares would be empty and some others would have two or three times the average number of dots, but these clusters and voids would appear in different places.

Finally, randomness can be used to produce patterns intentionally. Consider the two pictures in Figure 2. You may think the two pictures are identical, but they are not. However, they were each constructed using the same random process:

1. Start at the lower left corner of the big triangle.
2. Randomly choose one of the three corners of the big triangle.
3. Move half way to that corner, placing a dot at the new location.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, 50,000 times.

The first few steps of this process for each image are illustrated in Figure 3. Although the final images look very similar, the route taken to get there is very different. In fact, the only point the two images have in common is the starting point. As the creator of the program that generated these images, I knew full well that the result would resemble a fractal image known to mathematicians as Sierpinski’s Triangle, even though I did not know or exercise any control over how the individual points would be selected.

Despite our familiarity with children’s games and the importance of stochastic models throughout the sciences, many Christians have a reaction to randomness that falls somewhere between uneasy and antagonistic. And yet, those same Christians may well watch the evening news to learn about public opinion polls forecasting upcoming elections, take prescription drugs approved by the FDA based on statistics found in clinical trials, obtain electrical power from a nuclear power plant that uses random fission reactions, and insure their cars with companies that rely on stochastic models to set the rates. The foundation of each of these activities is a thorough understanding of randomness that begins with the simple description above.

So where does the uneasiness come from? Likely it comes from the feeling that taking randomness seriously means not taking God seriously. Or put more strongly, it comes from a fear that believing in randomness means not believing in God. Next week we’ll address that problem by asking the question, “Could God use randomness to achieve his purposes?”

In the 1950s, Cage began using various methods of “casting lots” to determine how elements of his music would be chosen and arranged—principally the Chinese system of I Ching. His controversial program was to distance himself from his own creative process, and he explored many additional strategies to transform the role of “creator” into one of “observer.” Most famous of these was his musical composition, “4.33,” which consisted of a pianist sitting at the instrument doing nothing at all for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, while musician and audience listened to the ambient sounds of the concert hall. Yet contrary to that main thrust of Cage’s work, a description of the activities during the week-long residency at the Mountain Lake Workshop where the New River Watercolor Series were made suggests that choice, constraint, and intention were integral and inescapable tools in putting randomness to work for creative ends.

Here’s art historian and theorist Howard Risatti’s description of Cage’s plan of action for the New River Watercolors, from the website of artist Ray Kass, who runs the Mountain Lake program and was Cage’s collaborator for his work there:

Following upon [a previous (1983) Mountain Lake workshop] “painting experiment,” stones collected from the New River were sorted into three groups according to size, which were separately numbered; numerous and varied brushes were divided into two separately numbered groups; likewise, feathers to paint with, colors and washes, and papers were also divided and numbered. In this way, chance procedures using pages of random numbers that were now generated by a computer program could be used to determine the specific materials utilized for each painting (e.g., which painting instruments, what type of paper and which colors, how many washes, which stones to paint around, where to locate the stones on the paper).

While this list enumerates all the specific variables that Cage and his team submitted to chance, there was an incredible level of personal engagement with the materials: Cage didn’t just show us drawings of where the I Ching said the rocks ought to be, he (or his assistants) placed them on the paper and used them as guides to paint around. Large custom brushes were constructed to lay on washes of color, and even the paints were hand mixed, combined, and diluted according to his desires.

Cage’s use of chance, then, was not a “hands off” process, but neither was it a matter of total control: Cage selected processes to create a space of play between himself and the materials he used: the feather between himself and the paper, for instance, introduced variability of resistance and spring, its ability to hold paint, the width of the line. All of these things were elements of material ‘freedom,’ areas in which Cage asked the stuff he used to make the paintings to take part in the process—to contribute its own identity to the intentional, purposeful, and determined work of creating “based on chance.” This should not be surprising, as all art, all creation that we can observe, happens as a dialectic between materials and the creator, and such engagement and interaction in no way lessons the purpose of making, the end in sight.

Kass’ book The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors, gives a much more complete account of the tools, processes, and interpersonal reactions between Cage, Kass, and the team of student assistants who helped at almost every stage of the creation of the works. The book goes to great length to honor Cage’s ideal of being present in but not controlling the outcomes (not least by nearly always putting words like “choice” in quotation marks), but the description of his process makes the centrality of Cage’s personal aesthetic and artistic motives inescapable, even more than his physical engagement. What comes through perhaps even more than the way Cage intended to allow chance to ‘guide the creative process’ is that way Cage, himself, not only set the parameters of the chance he allowed into the system, not only engaged directly with the materials during the process, but also exercised judgment over the results, both in process and at the end:

“Cage decided he didn’t want the images of the stones to overlap or go off the sides of the paper. To guarantee this restriction, he created conditions and rules to limit their possible placements.” (p. 51)

“For this single painting [Series IV, #1, pictured above] Cage chose to confine the images of the rocks to a lower area of the paper that represented the proportion of the “golden rectangle. . .” (p. 57)

“While “choice” established much of the work’s nature, “chance” highlighted the intrinsic nature of the materials to reveal a refreshing presence.” (p. 59)

“[H]e initially decided to remove [the first painting of Series III] from the group, and then, liking it more, changed his mind and returned it to the group that would be signed.” (p. 56)

This last note is particularly interesting in that it highlights the fact that Cage was claiming these paintings, naming himself as their author, and was attentive to which ones he approved of enough to call his own. There is no way around the fact that Cage was subjectively as well as objectively the maker of these works: the author of the procedures by which they came to be, but well as the judge (and sometimes redeemer) of the results. For Cage, randomness was a tool, no different than the brushes or rocks or paints is that its specific parameters were chosen at the outset, and always used within the context of his over-arching vision. Perhaps we may likewise think of God’s use of chance—constrained by and tuned to the material conditions he established at the birth of the cosmos—as a way to both engage with and allow freedom for the creation itself.

With any work of art it is reasonable to ask, “Is it beautiful?” or more tellingly, “Would I hang this on my wall?” Seeing Cage’s watercolors for first time without any knowledge of the process or the relative fame of Cage himself, some might be intrigued by the structure of the work (the proportions of the golden rectangle, the overlapping stone shapes, the colors of the paint) while others would be completely uninterested, perhaps even after hearing about how they were made and seeing them in the context of the rest of the New River Watercolor series. But if you had been there in the shop as an assistant, or even observer, if you had been party to the relationships that developed even over the few days Cage spent at the Mountain Lake Workshop, your sense of the beauty of these paintings (and perhaps even scraps of paper Cage used to try out brushes or washes), would take on a different meaning, in much the way we treasure the crayon drawings of our children not because they are spectacular art, but because they are tokens of our relationship.

I make that observation to emphasize one other aspect of Cage’s creative process: that Cage was the instigator first and foremost of relationships of creation. His process created not only paintings but the fellowship that developed as the work was being done. That social, interpersonal dimension is what gives the objects a depth of meaning beyond their material composition, and suggests the particular roles humanity has been given by God. One role is to join into the creative process as lesser, but not unimportant co-creators with him; the other is to observe, recognize and celebrate his activity in the world. Where some will see randomness as evidence of an absent God, our knowledge of this most personal and participatory aspect of creation points us to the God who is with us.

With God’s creation as with human art, we may (or may not) marvel at any one particular “work,” or even think the specifics of how it was made are interesting or attractive; but knowledge of and fellowship with the artist transforms our appreciation of the process as well as its results. When we know the maker, we come to recognize and treasure even the most “random” bits of his handiwork, and name them as his, nonetheless.

For Further Reading:

Ray Kass. The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors, 2011.

Website for John Cage Centennial Festival, Washington, DC. September 2012.



]]> Sun, 13 May 12 12:53:04 -0700 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/southern-baptist-voices-a-biologos-response-to-william-dembski-part-i?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/southern-baptist-voices-a-biologos-response-to-william-dembski-part-i?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication We think that God created all living organisms, including humans, through the evolutionary process. But acceptance of creation through evolution does not mean that we reject the notion of a miracle-working God. On the contrary...

This ongoing series grew out of a conversation that Kenneth Keathley, the Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and I had last year. We agreed that he would solicit a set of essays from scholars at Southern Baptist Seminaries who would specifically identify their concerns about what they perceive to be the BioLogos view of creation. In response to this request, Dr. William Dembski of Southwestern Baptist Seminary submitted the essay “Is Darwinism Theologically Neutral?” Although I do not consider my view Darwinian, I am sure that my view and that of others associated with BioLogos is perceived that way by some, so this gives me an opportunity not only to respond to his analysis, but to clarify my position on creation and how I think it is distinct from what Dembski calls “Darwinism."

God’s Activity in Creation

I will begin by summarizing my view of the nature of God’s activity in creation. I think that God created all living organisms, including humans, through the evolutionary process. Acceptance of creation through evolution does not mean that I reject the notion of a miracle-working God. On the contrary, I believe in the miracles of Scripture, and I believe that we’ve experienced God’s supernatural activity in our own lives. I stand in awe of a personal God whose activity is not constrained by natural laws, but also includes supernatural acts.

But what are the natural laws? Are not the the laws of nature simply a description of God’s ongoing and non-ceasing activity in the universe? The Law of Gravity, for example, is not something that God set up in the beginning, thereafter recusing himself from further involvement and exiting from the scene. Instead, the Law of Gravity works as it does because of the ongoing activity of God’s Spirit in the universe. So consistent is that activity that it can be described mathematically through scientific analysis. If God ceased to be active, however, then not only would the matter of this universe no longer function in a way which enables a mathematical description of gravity, matter itself would cease to exist. Paul, referring to Christ, writes “All things are created by him and through him.” Continuing, he goes on to state that “He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). So he created in the beginning and, indeed, “…without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:3) But it doesn’t end there: his ongoing activity is necessary for the universe to function. As the writer to the Hebrews declares “He sustains all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:4) The laws of nature, then, are simply a description of the ongoing activity of God which—because it is so consistent, dependable, and pervasive—points to the trustworthiness of God. Put another way, the activity of God is not restricted to that which we call the supernatural; it is all God’s activity. It is just that some aspects of God’s activity are so consistently repeatable that we can develop laws which describe the regularity of the divine activity which “holds” and “sustains” the universe. This latter type of activity is no less magnificent just because God does it continuously. Indeed, the Psalmist marveled at God’s natural activity and worshipfully reflected upon it.

On the other hand, the God we know through Scripture and personal experience also works in ways that are not mathematically predictable. We call this aspect of God’s action supernatural, and we seem to think of this facet of God’s work—this law-defying activity—as being more God-like. Indeed calling it super-natural suggests we think of it as God’s “turbo-charged” activity. But are not miracles simply a reflection of God choosing to work in a unique, non-customary manner to accomplish God’s purposes in God’s time? (See here for more detail.) When God works in this way, Scripture generally presents such activity in the context and purpose of God’s desire to enter into or renew a relationship with an individual or with a community of people. For example, God’s miraculous involvement in the lives of the elderly couple, Abraham and Sarah, led to the birth of their son, Isaac, and marks the beginning of God’s very special relationship with their descendents. God’s interaction with Moses through the burning bush initiated a new phase of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people as they moved out of slavery and back into the Promised Land. And of course, the supreme examples of miraculous activity are the incarnation, the empty tomb, and the resurrected Body. We worship a personal God whose desire for an ongoing loving relationship with humankind is first laid out in the early chapters of Genesis, but does not end there. In all divine activity—supernatural and natural—God is just being who God is: Creator, Sustainer, and loving Father. There are not two sets of activities, even though we label them “super” and “ordinary.” All are “super,” because all describe the activity of our supernatural God. Some are regular, predictable and ongoing, while other activities of God are not, for reasons often based in the fact that God is lovingly responsive and relational.

The Genesis narrative gives us no details about the mechanism by which God brought the universe and life into existence. God gave the charge: “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky..., “ “Let the waters bring forth…,” “Let the land bring forth…,” “Let the birds multiply…,” and, in response, we are told, it happened. Scripture does not explain how it happened, although as we read God’s other book—the book of nature—we see that God’s work extended over a long period of time. In these details, the Bible does not say whether the “bringing forth” was fulfilled through God’s natural activity (that which is regular, ongoing, and can be described by science) or God’s supernatural activity (that which is not regular and predictable). Given the many examples of supernatural activity in Scripture, we human beings tend to expect that for something as special as creation of stars or new species, supernatural activity would have been required. But we cannot derive this from the scriptural account and, therefore, it is wise not to second-guess how God might have worked based on the Scriptures.

Indeed, the distinction is softened by Scripture itself, which often speaks of God’s natural activity in ways that sound supernatural. For example, the Psalmist writes of God opening his hand to feed the living creatures (Psalm 104:28). We know how God does this and so did the Psalmist—he did it through natural means—but it was still God’s process and God’s provisions. Job speaks of thunder as being the voice of God (Job 40:9). We know God’s natural activity produces thunder and we can describe the laws that are responsible for it, but the fact that we know how it works certainly doesn’t negate the point being made in the book of Job. When the Psalmist describes the heavens as being the work of his fingers (Psalm 8:3), this does not negate astronomy’s description of the regular and ongoing processes that give rise to stars in God’s universe. Those processes are natural, but they are every bit as much God’s activity as if he were to take huge balls of matter and miraculously fashion sparkling stars with his hands.

Still, given that there is extensive supernatural activity exhibited in God’s interaction with Israel and in the life of Jesus, it is entirely possible that he did work supernaturally in fulfilling the creation command, as well. Even though the miracles described in the Bible primarily serve some theological or pastoral purpose that stems from God’s earnest desire to make his presence known and to deepen his relationship with humankind, we should reserve judgment about whether only God’s natural activity was responsible. It is not clear though, that supernatural activity would often be God’s chosen mode of action millions of years before humans had arrived. Thus, we should not assume with certainty that God would choose to use supernatural flurries of activity if his ongoing regular activity—that described through natural laws—would accomplish the same end, albeit over a longer period of time. For all we know, God may prefer slowness, even though we seem to be inclined to think that faster is better. After all, in the history of Israel and the church, God gave no new prophecy for 400 years before the coming of Christ, and it took the early church five centuries to come to a clear—albeit mysterious—understanding of the Trinity. Even now, two thousand years after Christ, we wait for his return.

In the next part, Darrel responds to Dembski’s lists of non-negotiables and clarifies how he sees BioLogos as different from “Darwinism”.

Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today

My title reflects the book that I published six years ago as The Last Word, which has recently reappeared as Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. In this new edition I have included two substantial new chapters explaining more fully how the model I propose works out in practice. Both versions of the book and the paper I wrote some years before that (from which this series of posts is adapted) cast light on a puzzle which became clearer to me in the early years of the century. At that time I was involved in many discussions within the Anglican Communion on the one hand, and in dialogue with Roman Catholic theologians on the other, in which reference to scripture and its authority was ubiquitous but frequently opaque. That is, everybody says that scripture is authoritative, but few stop to explain what that means in practice. My book gets off to its start by pointing out that in scripture itself, it is God who is authoritative. This may be obvious, but when you chase through the ramifications it becomes less so.

The Christian tradition has assumed, of course, that what scripture says, God says. But even those who were most concerned to make this point – specifically the Protestant reformers – were often, from our perspective, somewhat cavalier in how they applied this. Some reformers were eager to draw on Old Testament narratives and prophecies in order to instruct the princes of their day – I think of Latimer preaching before Edward VI – while others, notably Martin Luther, could say such things as ‘Moses knows nothing of Christ’. What’s more, the idea of the authority of scripture was used as a limiting statute in the sixteenth century (i.e. one should only insist on that which could be plainly shown from scripture, and not insist, on pain of damnation, upon dogmas that did not have scriptural warrant). But in more recent western church life the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ has been used in a maximal sense, especially of course within fundamentalism. And yet the underlying problems of a Christian ‘authoritative’ reading of scripture have not gone away, but only been parked.

The question before us, then, is: how can the Bible be authoritative? This way of putting it carries two different though related meanings, and I shall look at them in turn. First, how can there be such a thing as an authoritative book? What sort of a claim are we making about a book when we say that it is ‘authoritative’? Second, by what means can the Bible actually exercise its authority? How is it to be used so that its authority becomes effective? The first question subdivides further, and I want to argue two things as we look at it:

(1) I shall argue that usual views of the Bible—including usual evangelical views of the Bible—are actually too low, and do not give it the sufficient weight that it ought to have.

(2) I shall then suggest a different way of envisioning authority from that which I think most Christians normally take.

Authority?

Our generation has a problem about authority. In church and in state we use the word ‘authority’ in different ways, some positive and some negative. We use it in secular senses. We say of a great footballer that he stamped his authority on the game. Or we say of a great musician that he or she gave an authoritative performance of a particular concerto. Within more structured social gatherings the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ has particular function. For instance, if someone came into a lecture-room and asked ‘Who’s in charge?’ the answer would presumably be either the lecturer or the chairman, if any. If, however, a group of people went out to dinner at a restaurant and somebody suddenly came in and said, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ the question might not actually make any sense. We might be a bit puzzled as to what authority might mean in that structure. Within a more definite structure, however, such as a law court or a college or a business, the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ or ‘What does authority mean here?’ would have a very definite meaning, and could expect a fairly clear answer. The meaning of ‘authority’, then, varies considerably according to the context within which the discourse is taking place. It is important to realize this from the start, not least because one of my central contentions is going to be that we have tended to let the word ‘authority’ be the fixed point and have adjusted ‘scripture’ to meet it, instead of the other way round.

Authority in the Church

Within the church, the question of what we mean by authority has had particular focal points. It has had practical questions attached to it. How are things to be organized within church life? What are the boundaries of allowable behavior and doctrine? In particular, to use the sixteenth-century formulation, what are those things ‘necessary to be believed upon pain of damnation’? But it has also had theoretical sides to it. What are we looking for when we are looking for authority in the church? Where would we find it? How would we know when we had found it? What would we do with authoritative documents, people or whatever, if we had them? It is within that context that the familiar debates have taken place, advocating the relative weight to be given to scripture, tradition and reason, or (if you like, and again in sixteenth-century terms) to Bible, Pope and Scholar. Within the last century or so we have seen a fourth, to rival those three, namely emotion or feeling. Various attempts are still being made to draw up satisfactory formulations of how these things fit together in some sort of a hierarchy.

Evangelical Views

Most heirs of the Reformation, not least evangelicals, take it for granted that we are to give scripture the primary place and that everything else has to be lined up in relation to scripture. There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition. We simply open the scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’. This is rather like the frequent Anglican assumption (being an Anglican myself I rather cherish this) that Anglicans have no doctrine peculiar to themselves: it is merely that if something is true the Church of England believes it. This, though not itself a refutation of the claim not to have any ‘tradition’, is for the moment sufficient indication of the inherent unlikeliness of the claim’s truth, and I am confident that most people, facing the question explicitly, will not wish that the claim be pressed.

But I still find two things to be the case, both of which give me some cause for concern. First, there is an implied, and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text, straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they, unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that sort. This is simply naïve, and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous. It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology. The assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying. And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. If we are not careful, the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can, by such routes, come to mean simply ‘the authority of evangelical tradition.


The next part of our series explores whether we are unwittingly “belittling the Bible” by appealing to the wrong kind of authority.

(Originally published in Vox Evangelica, 1991, 21, 7–32. Reproduced by permission of the author.)

Today's video features theologian Rev. Lincoln Harvey and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Rev. Lincoln Harvey discusses our desire to "domesticate" the liveliness and abundance of God. Harvey notes that the Trinity highlights both the manyness and oneness of God, which can be hard to Christians to fully understand. While this lack of understanding can be unsettling, Harvey encourages Christians not too force God into too neat of a box. Often, this desire to domesticate can be found in our interaction with Scripture. The Scriptures can be understood, but there is still something lively, mysterious, and beautiful in them that resists our desire to tame them. We should instead approach Scripture, as we approach God, with a spirit of humility and openness.

Having had only very limited prior exposure to Driscoll’s work, I was interested in attending the course to see how he handled certain issues (such as the doctrine of Creation, the nature of Scripture as it relates to science, and so on). Part of the reason for my interest was the fact that our church had explored some of these ideas previously in a similar setting by offering the Truth Project lecture series featuring several prominent advocates of Intelligent Design. That experience led me to request an opportunity to explain the mainstream science position on evolution to the members of that class. This request was denied by my church leadership despite interest within the group – at which point an interested friend hosted an unofficial evening session in his own home (that was recorded and eventually found its way on to YouTube, generating an audience far larger than I had anticipated.) So, given the announcement that the church was offering Driscoll’s series, I signed up. A little online research suggested that Driscoll’s series would indeed generate interesting conversation. I also found that the series has been adapted in book form, so I picked up a copy as well.

Science and sola Scriptura

It wasn’t long before material relevant to the science / faith conversation arose. In the second lecture of the series (Revelation: God Speaks) Driscoll sets forth his views on the nature and roles of general and special revelation in Christian life. For Driscoll, the guiding principle is the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura, which he interprets in the following way:

Now, some also called this Prima Scriptura, but the point is that there are lesser courts of authority. Let me distinguish Sola Scriptura from Solo Scriptura. Solo Scriptura is that Scripture alone is our authority. We don’t believe that. We believe that Scripture alone is our highest authority. The Scriptures, for example, don’t tell us how to perform open heart surgery. The Scriptures don’t tell us how to repair a carburetor on an old vehicle. The Scriptures don’t tell us how to turn a double play. If we want to learn any of those things we need to find that information elsewhere. All of the time we go to science, we go to medicine, we go to sociology, psychology, we go to history, we go to all kinds of disciplines and we learn. And that’s all the result of general revelation, okay?

Back to one of my first points. The sciences, the social sciences, other means of learning all falls under the rubric of God’s image bearers working with general revelation. Some people know things about technology and about the environment and about the human body and about medicine and about diet and nutrition and all these kind of things. And we believe in Sola Scriptura, and that is we have lesser courts of lower authority. You can go to college, go to the doctor, read a philosopher, study medicine, science – whatever it is, that’s wonderful and good. That’s enjoying general revelation in its full, and then testing general revelation by special revelation. That whatever we’re learning there we have to check by Scripture and to see that it agrees with Scripture. If it doesn’t disagree with Scripture, then we have freedom.

Recently, Driscoll has applied this approach to the genomics evidence that indicates humans derive from an ancestral population, rather than one individual couple. This allows us to examine how he applies his view of sola Scriptura to a specific, current scientific issue he feels is of pressing concern for believers to address:

Problems arise, however, when we find truths that seemingly contradict the truths of Scripture and, rather than subject those truths to the authority of Scripture, instead consider those truths to invalidate the truths of Scripture. Such is the case today when it comes to the biblical account of Adam and Eve and some modern scientists’ disbelief of the scriptural account in favor of the scientific account. Believers who are scientists bear the primary responsibility for affirming scriptural truths over scientific ones and figuring out how the truths of science affirm the truths of Scripture—not the other way around. It’s impossible to serve two masters.

So, what are we to do in the face of seemingly contradictory truth between science and Scripture? We have two choices: exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science and wash our hands clean (Paul is clear in Romans 1:18 and 1:22–23 that many people choose just this option), or we take the truths of science and place them within the context of the truths of Scripture as the highest authority.

So, for Driscoll, the choice is a simple dichotomy: Scripture or science. Scripture is the highest court of authority in all matters, and the role of believing scientists is to affirm Scripture. To fail to do so is to “exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science” and to fall into the grievous, idolatrous error Paul describes in Romans 1:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth…

22 Claiming to be wise they became fools; 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. (NRSV)

Even if one chooses not to question the assumptions that might undergird such a view of sola Scriptura (for example, that Scripture and science are “courts of authority” potentially in conflict with one another, or that one’s interpretation of Scripture might possibly be incomplete or even in error), the fact remains that Driscoll’s view sits somewhat in tension with how one notable leader of the Reformation, John Calvin, approached the science / faith issues of his day.

Learning from history: Calvin and science

One issue of potential concern during Calvin’s time was the growing understanding of the relative sizes of the various heavenly bodies. For example, astronomers had determined that Saturn was in fact much larger than our own moon. While this comes as no surprise to us now, nor of any theological importance, at that time this discovery was seen by some in the church to contradict the Genesis proclamation that the sun and moon were the “greater” and “lesser” lights created by God. If indeed Saturn was larger than the moon, would not it be named as the “lesser” light instead? While it might be tempting in the present to dismiss this discussion as trivial, we must remember that for its day, this was a significant concern for some. Which was correct? Science, or Scripture? Could the Bible really be trusted when it spoke about things in the natural world?

Calvin’s approach to this topic may be surprising for some: he advocated for the view that Genesis was accommodated to a scientifically unlearned audience, and not necessarily written with the intent to provide scientific accuracy. As Davis Young recounts in his excellent book John Calvin and the Natural World:

He reminded his readers that … Moses did not treat the stars in a scientific manner, as a philosopher would do. On the contrary, he described the heavenly bodies, “in a popular manner, according to their appearance to the uneducated, rather than according to truth, two great lights.”

This last quotation may be jarring to contemporary Christians who place great emphasis on the idea of the inerrancy of Scripture… Calvin, however, maintained that Genesis 1 is not speaking “according to truth” when referring to the Sun and the Moon. In effect, he said that the Bible does not represent to us the actual reality about the heavenly bodies by providing an accurate picture of their true size. (p. 181)

So, for one of the key leaders of the Reformation a simple science-or-Scripture approach was not seen to be a defining mark of sola Scriptura. Rather, Calvin readily interacted with the scientific findings of his day, even if they posed apparent theological challenges. He was also willing to consider how God may have used inspiration to accomplish His purposes in Genesis in light of what (then) modern science was indicating.

Accordingly, it follows that one can hold a robust view of Scripture and yet explore how general revelation (science) and special revelation (Scripture) work together: not as competing authorities, but as complementary forms of revelation with the same Author. If Calvin can engage the discussion, we are free to do so as well.

In the next post in this series, we’ll examine the third sermon in the Doctrine series: Creation: God Makes.

For further reading:

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears: Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. Crossway, Wheaton Illinois, 2010.

Davis A. Young: John Calvin and the Natural World. University Press of America, Lanham Maryland, 2007.

"Reply the tape a million times ... and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again" (Stephen Jay Gould from "Wonderful Life", 1989 p. 289, Harvard University Press.).

With his standard panache, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued strenuously that evolution had no inherent directionality. It was a cosmic crapshoot - in no way destined to produce anything complex, self-conscious or human. We are mere accidents; a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree" ("Wonderful Life" p. 291). Highly fortunate indeed! Eons ago, a dinosaur-dominated earth held little promise for mammalian ascendancy (let alone primates or humans). Our distant ancestors might have remained little more than scurrying nuisances nipping at the feet of giants if not for a most unlikely calamity - a massive meteor strike which swept away the dinos and forever altered the earth's bio-saga. Who would have guessed?

Evolution's capricious nature seemed to represent a severe stumbling block for the Abrahamaic religious traditions. In their narrative, humans represented the culmination of God's creative work - the very purpose for creation itself. But evolution is an awfully shoddy way of enacting a divine plan. Gould delighted in annoying the faithful by emphasizing this very point:

"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce" ("The Panda's Thumb", 1980, pp. 20-1).

Theologians, however, were quick to point out that the chance element in evolution was neither new nor necessarily contrary to the Judeo-Christian view of God. Human history was replete with chance; evolution only extended the theme. Moreover, chance allowed for freedom - a virtue high on God's agenda. However theologically sound these retorts may have been, their force was often lost on the average believer. The accidental nature of human existence provided just another reason to reject evolution altogether in order to preserve God's special concern for humanity.

Gould was a talented science writer, but he overplayed evolution's whimsy. Increasingly, science is showing that the evolutionary process has many built in constraints which limit its possibilities and bias its pathways. Take, for example, the ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence - the tendency for highly diverse species to independently evolve similar adaptive (analogous, not homologous) traits. Most of us are familiar with the saber-toothed tiger, the scourge of our hominin ancestors. Less familiar are a group of South American marsupials called the thylacosmilids who independently evolved similar protruding saber-teeth. Convergence can also be seen in a number of specifically human traits. For example, we share a mode of locomotion, bipedalism, with birds, kangaroos, and some dinos. The lateralized and convoluted structure of our brains can also be found in octopi, this despite the fact that vertebrates and cephalopods diverged from one another over 450 million years ago.

In his book "Life's Solution" (2003, Cambridge Press) Cambridge Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris documents scores of examples of convergent evolution from insect body designs to the social systems of dolphins and chimpanzees (both fission-fusion). The important lesson is that there are only a limited number of ways that evolution can solve the adaptive problems posed by the earth's ecosystems. Time and again, evolution stumbles upon the same general design features from which to fashion adaptive traits.

Now add to this the Baldwin effect - an idea originally proposed in 1896 wherein organisms are posited to actively shape their own selective forces. For example, suppose some fairly intelligent primates begin fashioning tools, giving them access to new resources and a competitive advantage over non-tool users. Any genetic predisposition facilitating tool use would also be positively selected.

A severe limitation on Baldwin effects has always been the unpredictability of genetic mutation. For any heritable genetic changes to occur (so the thinking has always been) our tool wielding primate would just have to wait around and hope for a lucky "tool use" mutation to pop up. But maybe not. Two recent books, Jablonka and Lamb's "Evolution in Four Dimensions" (2005 MIT press) and Kirschner and Gerhart's "The Plausibility of Life" (2005, Yale University Press) discuss connections between recent work in genetics and Baldwinian processes. What if the primate's tool use actually raised the probability that a tool-relevant genetic change would take place which could then be passed along to offspring?

Recent genetic research (in a field called epigenetics) shows that experiences occurring over one's lifetime can produce heritable genetic changes. For example, mice exposed to two weeks of environmental enrichment (more social interaction, activity, novel objects to explore) show evidence of enhanced memory function (not surprising). More surprising is that their offspring also show evidence of enhanced memory even though they were never exposed to environmental enrichment (Journal of Neuroscience, 29, p. 1496). Thus, the increased environmental stimulation created a genetic change in the parents that was then transmitted to offspring. This change appears to involved altered patterns of gene regulation (how genes are turned on and off during development). Similar effects have been noted in humans (see European Journal of Human Genetics, 14, p. 159).

Convergence, epigenetic inheritance, and Baldwin effects are only a few of the mechanisms serving as directional constraints on evolution's pathways. In his review of the various factors affecting the evolutionary process, anthropologist Melvin Konner concludes:

"There are no intrinsic driving factors in evolution, but there are intrinsic constraints and canalized paths along which either evolution or development may more easily proceed" ("The Evolution of Childhood," Harvard Press, 2010, p. 59, emphasis in original).

Of course, none of these constraining factors guarantee our arrival on the evolutionary stage. They do, however, raise the odds that in time a complex, rational, self-aware creature capable of entertaining both scientific and religious ideas might emerge.

The more we understand evolution, the less it seems like neither the bogeyman that creationists fear nor the universal God-dissolving acid some atheists crave.

Against the repeated claim that the doctrine of inerrancy, unknown to the church, arose first with Protestant orthodoxy, we could cite numerous examples from the ancient and medieval church.¹ It was Augustine who first coined the term "inerrant," and Luther and Calvin can speak of Scripture as free from error.²

Down to the Second Vatican Council, Rome has attributed inerrancy to Scripture as the common view of the church throughout its history. According to the First Vatican Council (1869-70), the Old and New Testaments, "whole and entire," are "sacred and canonical." In fact, contrary to the tendency of some Protestants (including some evangelicals) to lodge the nature of inspiration in the church's authority, this council added,

And the church holds them as sacred and canonical not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without errors, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their Author.³

Successive popes during the twentieth century condemned the view that limited inerrancy to that which is necessary for salvation, and Pope Leo XIII went even further than the inerrancy position by espousing the dictation theory of inspiration. Undoubtedly, this mechanical theory of inspiration is what most critics have in mind when they encounter the term "inerrancy." Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that inerrancy is not an invention of Protestant fundamentalists. Quoting the Second Vatican Council, the most recent Catholic catechism states, "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."⁴

The Princeton Formulation of Inerrancy

Although inerrancy was taken for granted in church history until the Enlightenment, it was especially at Princeton Seminary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it became a full-blown formulation. This view is articulated most completely in Inspiration, a book coauthored by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield and published by the Presbyterian Church in 1881. Their argument deserves an extended summary especially because it remains, in my view, the best formulation of inerrancy just as it anticipates and challenges caricatures.

First, they point out that a sound doctrine of inspiration requires a specifically Christian ontology or view of reality: "The only really dangerous opposition to the church doctrine of inspiration comes either directly or indirectly, but always ultimately, from some false view of God's relation to the world, of his methods of working, and of the possibility of a supernatural agency penetrating and altering the course of a natural process."⁵ Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect. Not only "the untrammeled play of all [the author's] faculties, but the very substance of what they write is evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and spiritual activities."⁶ Even more than the Reformers, the Protestant orthodox were sensitive to the diverse means used by God to produce the Bible's diverse literature. This awareness has only grown, Hodge and Warfield observe, and should be fully appreciated. God's "superintendence" did not compromise creaturely freedom. In fact, "It interfered with no spontaneous natural agencies, which were, in themselves, producing results conformable to the mind of the Holy Spirit."⁷ Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect.

Far from reducing all instances of biblical revelation to the prophetic paradigm, as critics often allege, Hodge and Warfield recognize that the prophetic form, "Thus says the Lord," is a "comparatively small element of the whole body of sacred writing." In the majority of cases, the writers drew from their own existing knowledge, including general revelation, and each "gave evidence of his own special limitations of knowledge and mental power, and of his personal defects as well as of his powers....The Scriptures have been generated, as the plan of redemption has been evolved, through an historic process," which is divine in its origin and intent, but "largely natural in its method."⁸ "The Scriptures were generated through sixteen centuries of this divinely regulated concurrence of God and man, of the natural and the supernatural, of reason and revelation, of providence and grace."⁹

Second, Warfield and Hodge underscore the redemptive-historical unfolding of biblical revelation, defending an organic view of inspiration over a mechanical theory. They note that many reject verbal inspiration because of its association with the erroneous theory of verbal dictation, which is an "extremely mechanical" view.¹⁰ Therefore, theories concerning "authors, dates, sources and modes of composition" that "are not plainly inconsistent with the testimony of Christ or his apostles as to the Old Testament or with the apostolic origin of the books of the New Testament...cannot in the least invalidate" the Bible's inspiration and inerrancy.¹¹ While higher criticism proceeds on the basis of anti-supernatural and rationalistic presuppositions, historical criticism is a valid and crucial discipline.

Third, the Princeton theologians faced squarely the question of contradictions and errors, noting problems in great detail. Some discrepancies are due to imperfect copies, which textual criticism properly considers. In other cases, an original reading may be lost, or we may simply fail to have adequate data or be blinded by our presuppositions from understanding a given text. Sometimes we are "destitute of the circumstantial knowledge which would fill up and harmonize the record," as is true in any historical record. We must also remember that our own methods of testing the accuracy of Scripture "are themselves subject to error."¹²

Fourth, because it is the communication that is inspired rather than the persons themselves, we should not imagine that the authors were omniscient or infallible. In fact, the authors themselves seem conscious enough of their limitations. "The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong."¹³ Yet Scripture is seen to be inerrant "when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense."¹⁴ Inerrancy is not attributed to copies, much less to our vernacular translations, but to "the original autographic text."¹⁵

Notes:

1. See Robert D. Preus, "The View of the Bible Held by the Church: The Early Church through Luther," and John H. Gerstner, "The View of the Bible Held by the Church: Calvin and the Westminster Divines," in Inerrancy, ed. Norman Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980); John A. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); G. W. Bromiley, "The Church Fathers and Holy Scripture," in Scripture and Truth, eds. D. A. Carson and John A. Woodbridge (Leicester: IVP, 1983).
2. Klaas Runia, "The Hermeneutics of the Reformers," Calvin Theological Journal 19 (1984), 129-32.
3. See Alfred Duran, "Inspiration of the Bible," in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910).
4. Dei Verbum (Constitution on Divine Revelation), Art. 11, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Liguori, 1994), 31.
5. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 9.
6. Hodge and Warfield, 12.
7. Hodge and Warfield, 6.
8. Hodge and Warfield, 12-13.
9. Hodge and Warfield, 14.
10. Hodge and Warfield, 19.
11. Hodge and Warfield, 25.
12. Hodge and Warfield, 27.
13. Hodge and Warfield, 27-28.
14. Hodge and Warfield, 27-28.
15. Hodge and Warfield, 42.

While these are indeed complex questions, some of the problems do stem from misunderstandings about what randomness means in a scientific sense and what role it plays in evolution. To help clarify some of these details, we offer these resources.

The “Randomness” installment of our Distinctions series (first posted earlier this year) looks at some of the basic misconceptions about the role of randomness in evolution. While it is understood by many simply to mean blind, undirected and purposeless, in truth, randomness is far more complex and awe-inspiring than this overly-simplified definition. Whether through genetic mutations or the combinations that occur between sperm and eggs, these processes can be seen as the continual unfolding of something that is decidedly not random--creation itself. Randomness, in essence, generates certainty. This is further illustrated in the second video.

In the clip “Randomness” from the upcoming film A Leap of Truth by Ryan Pettey, Richard Colling, Ard Louis, and John Polkinghorne offer several examples of random processes leading to order rather than disorder. As Dr. Louis points out, the scientific definition of “randomness” is quite different from our everyday understanding of the word. In fact, random generation is the most efficient way to generate complexity. Polkinghorne further notes that we live in a world where the balance of random mutations is almost perfectly tuned for fruitful life on Earth. This, we learn, is God's process: Randomness given time, can lead to that which is nearly certain.

This is beautifully illustrated in the following re-post from last year. Here, in a blog called "That's Random," Kathryn Applegate offers two examples of random motion leading to certainty in the process of assembling a virus. Because random processes can lead to that which is almost certain, it is not at all surprising that this has frequently been used by God over billions of years to create order out of chaos--God's creation, by God's way, in God's time.

That's Random

You hear it all the time: “That’s so random!” When used by people of my generation, the word “random” can simply mean “cool” or “surprising.” Or it can mean something like “disconnected,” as in the phrase, “I had a random thought” (which returns 189,000 hits on Google, by the way—random!).

Despite this usage, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability, and that it often implies a lack of conscious intentionality. But what do mathematicians and scientists mean when they say something is random? Can a random process lead to an ordered, even predictable outcome? Is there evidence that God makes use of random processes to fulfill his creative purposes?

These are big questions, and we won’t address them all today. But I think randomness is an important topic to cover for two reasons: 1) it is integral to many processes in biology (and math, physics, chemistry, etc.), and 2) it is commonly misunderstood to be incompatible with Christianity.

As I said above, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability. If you pick a card “at random” from a shuffled deck, you have a small probability of drawing an ace (4 out of 52, or a 7.7% chance). If you flip a coin, you have an equal probability of getting heads or tails.

Randomness also seems to imply a lack of intentionality or purposefulness. After all, you might hope for an ace when you draw a card, but you can’t choose one on purpose. You might call heads when you flip a coin, but you can’t know beforehand what the outcome will be. Thus the outcome is indeterminate, but is it purposeless? Not necessarily. Indeterminacy simply means the result cannot be predicted from the outset.

It should be noted that indeterminacy does not imply that God does not have foreknowledge of future events. Christians ought not to be uncomfortable with the idea of God interacting with his creation through chance. We often describe a seemingly-random (i.e. unplanned by us) sequence of events as being “providential,” or planned by God. A good introduction to the way divine action could drive physical processes can be found in this Question.

In biology, it is very hard or impossible to calculate precise probabilities for most processes, so when we say a process is random, we typically mean it is extremely unpredictable. Eventually we will discuss randomness within biological evolution, but first we must consider some simpler processes, like the self-assembly of a virus.

Viruses are remarkably efficient entities. Coiled tightly within a protein-based shell is a small amount of DNA needed for self-replication. The shell, called a capsid, is made of many repeating protein subunits and is therefore highly symmetrical (see figure). Important biomedical insights have certainly been gleaned from structural studies of viruses, but viruses also teach us about the emergence of order from non-order.

The virus life cycle has four main steps: 1) enter a host cell, 2) hijack the cell’s replication and translation machinery to make many copies of itself, 3) assemble into many virus particles, and 4) exit the cell to invade another host.

When I first learned about this process, I found it very hard to believe it just “happens.” The idea that a bunch of molecules bumping into each other inside a crowded cell could spontaneously assembly into a fully-functional virus seemed a bit far-fetched. Many viral capsids have over 100 protein subunits that must interact with each other in just the right way, or it won’t work. Surely there must be something driving this process, right?

There is! Random motion. I had to see it to believe it. I distinctly remember sitting in class during my first year of graduate school when the professor demonstrated self-assembly of a virus using a 3D model as shown in the following video. In less than 30 seconds, you can watch a jumbled heap of proteins become a beautifully ordered structure.

As the narrator explains, sub-assemblies form and break apart en route to the most stable structure, the full capsid. As the sub-assemblies begin to form, further associations with free subunits become more favorable and as a result occur rapidly, while the final steps may take considerably longer. While the subunits in the model are rigid, in reality the proteins take on multiple conformations, allowing the capsid to “breathe.”

Amazing as it is, the system we just considered—one virus capsid in a jar—is pretty simple. One wonders how self-assembly can happen in a crowded cell, where there are countless other molecules diffusing around, potentially getting in the way. We can’t directly see how it happens in a cell, but we can reconstitute the process in a test tube using different combinations of constituent molecules.

Consider two viruses, where each protein subunit in one virus is the mirror image of the corresponding subunit in the other. Putting the two viruses together by hand would be pretty tricky, because the constituent parts look so similar. But random motion can do the job in short order:

From this model, we can see clearly, in real-time, how distinct complex structures can arise from their parts randomly interacting with one another. Many large viruses also use special scaffolding proteins to assist in the assembly process, and some even use their own genomes as a scaffold. In addition, two closely-related viruses that happen to infect the same cell can exchange parts to create a new virus. This is one way viruses can evolve quickly to evade the host’s immune system.

Here we have seen how viruses demonstrate a principle inherent in God’s world—that order can emerge out of chaos from random processes.

A Case Study: B.B. Warfield, Concursis, and Evolution

A case study that shows how profitable it can be to approach scientific issues with Christological principles is provided by the career of Benjamin B. Warfield. In chapter 3 [of Noll's book], when discussing the doubleness of classical Christology, we saw how Warfield forcefully affirmed “this conjoint humanity and divinity [of Christ], within the limits of a single personality.” It was precisely this regard for the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s person and work that enabled Warfield to handle with relative ease the knotty questions about evolution that arose during his lifetime.

From his position at Princeton Theological Seminary, Warfield wrote steadily from the 1880s until shortly before his death in 1921 about many aspects of his era’s developing evolutionary theories.¹ These writings included major essays devoted to Darwin’s biography (“Charles Darwin’s Religious Life” in 1888 and “Darwin’s Arguments against Christianity” the next year); several substantial articles directly on evolution or related scientific issues (“The Present Day Conception of Evolution” in 1895, “Creation versus Evolution” in 1901, “On the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race” in 1911, and “Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation” in 1915); and many reviews of relevant books, some of them mini-essays in their own right.

In these works, Warfield repeatedly insisted on distinguishing among Darwin as a person, Darwinism as a cosmological theory, and evolution as a series of explanations about natural development. Of key importance was his willingness throughout a long career to accept the possibility (or even the probability) of evolution, while also denying Darwinism as a cosmological theory. In his mind, these discriminations were necessary in order properly to evaluate both the results of disciplined observation (science) and large-scale conclusions drawn from that science (theology or cosmology). Crucially, a Christological perspective was prominent when he applied these discriminations to evolutionary theory.

For positioning Warfield properly on these subjects, it is also vital to stress a conjunction of his convictions that has been much less common since his day. Besides his openness toward evolution, that is, Warfield was also the ablest modern defender of the theologically conservative belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

During the late nineteenth century when critical views of Scripture came to prevail in American universities,Warfield was as responsible as any other American for refurbishing the conviction that the Bible communicates revelation from God entirely without error. Warfield’s formulation of biblical inerrancy, in fact, has even been a theological mainstay for recent “creationist” convictions about the origin of the earth.² Yet while he defended biblical inerrancy, Warfield was also a cautious, discriminating, but entirely candid proponent of the possibility that evolution might offer the best way to understand the natural history of the earth and of humankind. On this score his views place him with more recent thinkers who maintain ancient trust in the Bible while also affirming the modern scientific enterprise and mainstream scientific conclusions.³ Warfield did not simply assert these two views randomly, but he sustained them learnedly, as coordinate arguments.

In the course of his career, both Warfield’s positions and his vocabulary did shift on the question of evolution. But they shifted only within a fairly narrow range. What remained constant was his adherence to a broad Calvinistic conception of the natural world — of a world that, even in its most physical aspects, reflected the wisdom and glory of God—and his commitment to the goal of harmonizing a sophisticated conservative theology and the most securely verified conclusions of modern science. To state once again his combination of positions, Warfield consistently rejected materialist or dysteleological explanations for natural phenomena (explanations that he usually associated with “Darwinism”), even as he just as consistently entertained the possibility that other kinds of evolutionary explanations, which avoided Darwin’s rejection of divine agency, could satisfactorily explain the physical world.

In several of his writings, Warfield carefully distinguished three ways in which God worked in and through the physical world. The most important thing about these three ways is that Warfield felt each of them was compatible with the theology he found in an inerrant Bible, if each was applied properly to natural history and to the history of salvation. “Evolution” meant developments arising out of forces that God had placed inside matter at the original creation of the world-stuff, but that God also directed to predetermined ends by his providential superintendence of the world. At least in writings toward the end of his life, Warfield held that evolution in this sense was fully compatible with biblical understandings of the production of the human body. “Mediate creation” meant the action of God upon matter to bring something new into existence that could not have been produced by forces or energy latent in matter itself. He did not apply the notion of “mediate creation” directly in his last, most mature writings on evolution, but it may be that he expounded the concept as much to deal with miracles or other biblical events as for developments in the natural world.⁴ The last means of God’s action was “creation ex nihilo,” which Warfield consistently maintained was the way that God made the original stuff of the world.

On questions relating to evolution, orthodox Christology became relevant when Warfield invoked the concept of concursus. By this term he meant the coexistence of two usually contrary conditions or realities. In speaking of the person of Christ he had used a closely related term, “conjoined.” For broader intellectual purposes, the key was to apply the same sense of harmoniously conjoined spheres to other domains.

As we will see with somewhat more detail when taking up Christology in relation to Scripture, Warfield held that the biblical authors were completely human as they wrote the Scriptures, even as they enjoyed the full inspiration of the Holy Spirit.⁵ This principle, grounded in Christology and exemplified in the Bible, was also his guide for positing an (evolutionary) approach to nature where all living creatures were thought to develop fully (with the exception of the original creation and the human soul) through “natural” means. Warfield’s basic stance, expressed first about Christ and then extrapolated for Scripture, was a doctrine of providence that saw God working in and with, instead of as a replacement for, the processes of nature. Late in his career, this same stance also grounded Warfield’s opposition to “faith healing.” In his eyes, physical healing through medicine and the agency of physicians was as much a result of God’s action (if through secondary causes) as the cures claimed as a direct result of divine intervention.⁶ Concursus was as important and as fruitful for his views on evolution as it was for his theology as a whole. It was a principle he felt the Scriptures offered to enable humans both to approach the world fearlessly and to do so for the greater glory of God.

Warfield’s strongest statement on evolution came in 1915 when he published a lengthy article on John Calvin’s view of creation.⁷ Although he never stated it in so many words, it is clear that the convictions he ascribed to Calvin were also his own. He summarizes what he read in Calvin: “It should scarcely be passed without remark that Calvin’s doctrine of creation is, if we have understood it aright, for all except the souls of men, an evolutionary one.” God had called the “indigested mass” into existence ex nihilo, with a full “promise and potency” of what was to develop from that mass. Yet, according to Warfield’s summary of Calvin, “all that has come into being since — except the souls of men alone — has arisen as a modification of this original world-stuff by means of the interaction of its intrinsic forces.” Warfield went on to affirm a robust doctrine of providence, whereby “all the modifications of the world-stuff have taken place under the directly upholding and governing hand of God, and find their account ultimately in His will.” Critically, however, he saw these later modifications taking place through “secondary causes.” And once “secondary causes” were viewed as the means by which the original creation was modified, we have, according to Warfield, “not only evolutionism but pure evolutionism.”

Warfield makes clear that Calvin did not himself explicitly embrace evolutionary theory since Calvin “had no conception” of “the interaction of forces by which the actual production of forms was accomplished.” Thus, lacking the information provided by modern students of nature, Calvin did not advocate a “theory” of evolution. But, Warfield insists, he did teach “a doctrine of evolution” that pictures God as producing the material stuff of the world “out of nothing,” but then “all that is not immediately produced out of nothing is therefore not created — but evolved.” Warfield then translates Calvin’s notion of “secondary causes” into what he defines as “intrinsic forces.”Warfield’s summary repeats a second time: “And this, we say, is a very pure evolutionary scheme.”

The point where Christology enters is where Warfield explains the deeper theology at work. In his summary, “Calvin’s ontology of second causes was, briefly stated, a very pure and complete doctrine of concursus, by virtue of which he ascribed all that comes to pass to God’s purpose and directive government.” For readers of Warfield in the twenty-first century, it is frustrating that he did not go further in expounding on this theological basis. He does say that the “account” of how “secondary causes” work is “a matter of ontology; how we account for their existence, their persistence, their action—the relation we conceive them to stand in to God, the upholder and director as well as creator of them.” But for his purposes with this essay, Warfield does not explore those ontological issues. The regret now is that, if he had taken up these ontological questions, he may have considered the Western tradition of univocity that had, in effect, dispensed with concursus in explaining the physical world.

As it is, we still have a most intriguing contribution to theology, science, and science considered in connection with theology. Warfield’s discussion of Calvin on evolution certainly indicated that he thought his very high view of biblical inspiration was fully compatible with comprehensive forms of evolutionary science (as distinct from evolutionary cosmology). Whether Warfield interpreted Calvin correctly or not, whether Warfield understood correctly his era’s scientific discoveries (in which he was well read for an amateur), or whether his own efforts at bringing together his era’s scientific knowledge and his interpretation of the biblical record were correct — these are all important but secondary issues. The main point lies elsewhere. The Scriptures that Warfield trusted implicitly revealed a God to him who created the world, providentially superintended the world, and gave human beings the capacity to explain the world naturally (in terms of “secondary causes”). The key theological principle that enabled Warfield to draw these conclusions was his belief in the classical Christology of Nicea and Chalcedon.

Warfield’s writings on evolution, the last of which appeared in the year of his death, 1921, cannot, of course, pronounce definitively on theological-scientific questions at the start of the twenty-first century. They can, however, show that sophisticated theology, nuanced argument, and careful sifting of scientific research are able to produce a much more satisfactory working relationship between science and theology than the heated strife that has dominated public debate on this subject since the time of Warfield’s passing.

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, entitled "Come and See: A Christological Invitation for Science", click here.

Notes

1. Most of these works are reprinted, with editorial introductions, in B. B. Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture: Selected Writings, ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000).
2. For the direct use of Warfield on the inerrancy of Scripture, see John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), xx.
3. For example, Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954); Russell L. Mixter, ed., Evolution and Christian Thought Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959); D. C. Spanner, Creation and Evolution: Some Preliminary Considerations (London: Falcon Books, 1966); Malcolm A. Jeeves, ed., The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1969); Donald M. MacKay, The Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1974); Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Davis A. Young, Christianity and the Age of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts between Science and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986); J. C. Polkinghorne, OneWorld: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Howard J. Van Till, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about the Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); John Houghton, Does God Play Dice? A Look at the Story of the Universe (Leicester, England: Inter Varsity Press, 1988); Philip Duce, Reading the Mind of God: Interpretation in Science and Theology (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1998); Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007); Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008); and Karl W. Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
4. Warfield deployed a similar vocabulary in a discussion of miracles that he published at about the same time; see “The Question of Miracles,” in The Bible Student (March-June 1903), as reprinted in The Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 2, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), 167-204.
5. See below, 130-32.
6. See Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (New York: Scribner, 1918).
7. ForWarfield’s complete essay, see “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Creation,” in The Works of Benjamin B.Warfield, vol. 5, Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 287-349. The quotations that follow are taken from Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture, 308-9.