A few months ago, I provided an overview of Polkinghorne’s views on natural theology. However, perhaps the best place to get acquainted with his position is to read the title chapter from his book, Belief in God in an Age of Science. First delivered as the Terry Lectures at Yale University in October 1996, this eloquent little book contains five chapters and a short epilogue. Readers are invited to explore the rest of the book on their own. I especially recommend the highly original second chapter (“Finding Truth: Science and Religion Compared”), in which he compares the ways in which physicists struggled to understand the dual nature of light (as a wave or a particle) in the early twentieth century with the ways in which early Christian thinkers struggled to understand the dual nature of Jesus (as divine and human). Unfortunately we won’t be presenting additional chapters here, but neither the print nor the electronic version of the book is very expensive!

In the fourth sentence below, Polkinghorne defines “belief in God” in terms of the proposition “that there is a Mind and a Purpose behind the history of the universe.”  This excerpt presents some evidence for a divine mind behind the visible world revealed to us by science, while the next (coming in about two weeks) discusses some evidence for divine purpose.

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

Belief in God in an Age of Science (part 1)

What does it mean to believe in God today? Different religious communities propose different answers to that fundamental question. I speak from within the Christian tradition, though much of what I say in this chapter would, I believe, find endorsement from my Jewish and Islamic friends. For me, the fundamental content of belief in God is that there is a Mind and a Purpose behind the history of the universe and that the One whose veiled presence is intimated in this way is worthy of worship and the ground of hope. In this chapter, I sketch some of the considerations that persuade me that this is the case.

The world is not full of items stamped “made by God”—the Creator is more subtle than that—but there are two locations where general hints of the divine presence might be expected to be seen most clearly. One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year history of evolving development following the big bang. The other is the “thinking reed” of humanity, so insignificant in physical scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself. The universe and the means by which that universe has become marvelously self-aware—these are the centers of our enquiry.

Paul Dirac (source)

Those who work in fundamental physics encounter a world whose large-scale structure (as described by cosmology) and small-scale process (as described by quantum theory) are alike characterized by a wonderful order that is expressible in concise and elegant mathematical terms. The distinguished theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, who was not a conventionally religious man, was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations. [Remember that Polkinghorne was a student in Dirac’s lectures on quantum physics; see here.] It was a fitting affirmation by one whose fundamental discoveries had all come from his dedicated pursuit of mathematical beauty. This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty.

Attempts have been made to explain away this fact. No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have molded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded by pressures for survival. Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life. Remember that Sherlock Holmes told a shocked Dr. Watson that he didn't care whether the Earth went round the Sun or vice versa, for it had no relevance to the pursuits of his daily life!

Even less plausible, in my view, is the claim sometimes advanced that human beings happen to like mathematical reasoning and so they manipulate their account of physical process into pleasing mathematical shapes. [Polkinghorne cites Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks, p. 413] Nature is not so plastic as to be subject to our whim in this way. In 1907, Einstein had what he called “the happiest thought of my life,” when he recognized the principle of equivalence, which implied that all entities would move in the same way in a gravitational field. This universality of effect meant that gravity could be expressed as a property of space-time itself; physics could be turned into geometry. Einstein then embarked on a search for a beautiful equation that would determine the relevant geometrical structure. It took him eight years to find it, culminating in the discovery of the theory of general relativity in November 1915. It was a truly beautiful theory but now came the moment of truth. On 18th November, Einstein calculated the prediction made by his theory for the motion of the planet Mercury. He found that it precisely explained a discrepancy in relation to Newton’s theory that had baffled astronomers for more than sixty years. Einstein’s biographer, Abram Pais, says “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him.” Whilst the great man himself said, “For a few days, I was beside myself with joyous excitement.” [Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, p. 253]. It was a great triumph but, if the answer had not come out right, the aesthetic power of the equations of general relativity would have been quite unable in itself to save them from abandonment. It was indeed nature that had spoken.

There is no a priori reason why beautiful equations should prove to be the clue to understanding nature; why fundamental physics should be possible; why our minds should have such ready access to the deep structure of the universe. It is a contingent fact that this is true of us and of our world, but it does not seem sufficient simply to regard it as a happy accident. Surely it is a significant insight into the nature of reality. I believe that Dirac and Einstein, in making their great discoveries, were participating in an encounter with the divine.

Old French Bible moralisée (c. 1208-15), Codex Vindobonensis 2554,
fol. lv, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (source)

It has become common coinage with contemporary writers about science to invoke, in addressing the general public, the idea of a reading of the Mind of God. [Polkinghorne cites Paul Davies, The Mind of God and Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.] It is a small, but significant, sign of the human longing for God that apparently this language helps to sell books. There is much more to the Mind of God than physics will ever disclose, but this usage is not misleading, for I believe that the rational beauty of the cosmos indeed reflects the Mind that holds it in being. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in uncovering the structure of the physical world (to use Eugene Wigner’s pregnant phrase) is a hint of the presence of the Creator, given to us creatures who are made in the divine image. I do not present this conclusion as a logical demonstration—we are in a realm of metaphysical discourse where such certainty is not available either to believer or to unbeliever—but I do present it as a coherent and intellectually satisfying understanding.

Looking Ahead

We continue with the excerpt on purpose in about two weeks.

References and Credits

Excerpts from John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998), copyright Yale University Press, are reproduced by permission of Yale University Press. We gratefully acknowledge their cooperation in bringing this material to our readers.

Editorial Policy

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

For more than a century, evangelicals and fundamentalists have typically rejected both evolution and higher biblical criticism. Sometimes there are good reasons: the claims of some biblical scholars are so outrageous and the claims of some scientists so anti-religious, that a strongly negative response is entirely appropriate. Too often, however, the evangelical encounter with modern science conforms to what historian Mark Noll has called “the scandal of the evangelical mind”—namely, “that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Attitudes toward science have been crucial to this analysis. As Noll says, “since 1960 creationism has done more than any other issue except abortion to inflame the cultural warfare in American public life.” (p. 192)

Readers who want to know more about Noll’s book and its reception should go here and here. His conclusions about evangelicals and science are fully consistent with those I am about to present.

Evangelicals in Tension with Science

Evangelicals exhibit considerable tension and ambivalence when it comes to science, especially human evolution. On the one hand, evangelicals enthusiastically embrace the findings of science, when it comes to most applications in medicine and engineering. They also accept the experimental sciences, such as physics, chemistry, physiology, or thermodynamics. They have no problems with gravitation, the periodic table, the circulation of the blood, or the law of entropy. Here, their attitude is highly empirical: if it can be shown from repeatable experiments and observations, it’s true and presents no challenge whatsoever to religious belief.

On the other hand, evangelicals are quite hesitant to accept some conclusions of the so-called historical sciences, such as geology, cosmology, and evolutionary biology. Fundamentalists reject the very legitimacy of those sciences, and have created their own alternative explanation, “creation science,” which comports with their particular views of biblical authority and hermeneutics. Evangelicals are more ambivalent. As we’ve seen, many evangelicals accept the big bang and modern geology, with a 4.65 billion-year-old earth and the enormously long history of living things before humans arrived on the planet. But evolution–understood here to mean the common descent of humans and other organisms–presents very serious problems for many, perhaps most, evangelicals. This motivates them to look for alternative views.

The alternatives evangelicals embrace are precisely those we have studied in this series. Some eagerly support the YEC view. Others prefer one of the many varieties of the OEC view. Many like the strident tone of the ID movement, with its vigorous assault on biological and cultural “Darwinism” and its near-universal rejection of human evolution. For most evangelicals, however, TE is probably not a viable option at present, for biblical and theological reasons.

Reconciling Evolution with Scripture

Most evangelicals do not see any reasonable way to combine human evolution with the following beliefs:

• the uniqueness of humans, who alone bear the “image of God”
• the fall of Adam and Eve, the original parents of all humans, from a sinless state, by their own free choices to disobey God
• the responsibility of each person for their own actions and beliefs, within a universe that is not fully deterministic
• the redemption of individual persons by the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

Evangelicals cannot and must not be separated from these crucial beliefs about human dignity, freedom, responsibility, sin, and redemption. The 64-dollar question is: can these beliefs be maintained without simultaneously affirming the necessity of an historical, separately created first human pair? The answer is probably in the hands of evangelical academics, especially theologians and biblical scholars. Can they be persuaded that the scientific evidence for evolution is sufficiently strong to warrant a re-examination of the traditional view? Can a credible gospel and credible science be harmonized?

There exists an enormous gap between popular conceptions of science–conclusions, methods, and attitudes–and those of scientists themselves. This gap is not unique to science among practitioners of specialized knowledge, and it is not unique to evangelicals among the lay public. But it is real and very significant, and it affects theologians and biblical scholars no less than anyone else. Those who try to bridge this gap are mostly scientists (in their role as educators at colleges and universities and insofar as they write books for lay readers) and science journalists. Many influential members of those professional communities are skeptical or even strongly hostile toward Christian beliefs, and this can exacerbate an already difficult state of affairs. If ways can be found to popularize good science, while showing appropriate sensitivity to the concerns of evangelicals, it would be a very good thing.

Signs of Hope

Certainly there are reasons to hope. The conversation about science and religion is considerably broader now than it was at the time of the Scopes trial in 1925. Back then, many Protestants faced a very grim choice. On the one hand, they could follow politician William Jennings Bryan and the fundamentalists, rejecting modern science in the name of biblical authority and orthodox beliefs. On the other hand, they could follow theologian Shailer Mathews and the modernists, rejecting biblical authority and orthodox beliefs in the name of modern science. There was no one out there like John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, Joan Centrella, Owen Gingerich, Simon Conway Morris, William Phillips, or Ian Hutchinson—to name just a few of the many top scientists today who accept evolution while affirming the divinity of Jesus, the bodily resurrection, and the actual divine creation of the universe. But they are all scientists, not theologians (except for Polkinghorne, who is both). In Galileo’s day, it was the scientists who eventually convinced the theologians and biblical scholars to accept Copernicus’ theory of the earth’s motion around the sun. But, it took a long time, and the process was difficult and often painful. Thus far, the biblical scholars and theologians who have tried to move the conversation forward have not been very well received, as Richard Ostling has so capably reported. I suspect we are in for more of the same.

It’s Your Turn to Talk

That’s what I think. What do you think? I’ll mainly be listening quietly, since I’ve now said all I wanted to say. Thank you all for hanging in there for ten months—far longer than I had originally anticipated. After a short respite I’ll return with a new series, but I’ll keep the topic under wraps for the time being.

The tenth anniversary of the human genome has been marked by some striking new genetic insights into human evolution and diversity. Do these new discoveries have any significance for the dialogue between science and religion in general, or for our sense of human uniqueness in particular?

The publication of the Neanderthal genome sequence in May 2010 set the pace. Not surprisingly -- given that our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee was around 5 to 6 million years ago, compared to a mere half a million years for our last common ancestor with the Neanderthal -- it turns out that we are genetically far closer to the Neanderthals than to the apes. In all, only seventy-eight changes in the genetic letters ('nucleotides') that would change the amino acid sequence of particular proteins were found in the Neanderthal DNA that were the same as the chimpanzee sequence but different in the human. Amongst other differences, 111 duplications of small DNA segments were found in the Neanderthal but not human sequence. Genetically we are closely related twigs on the great evolutionary bush of life.

But we knew that already. More surprising for many was the provocative finding that non-African humans are genetically closer to Neanderthals than African humans. In fact, the European and Asian genomes that were sequenced appear to contain one to four percent DNA of Neanderthal origin, and the gene flow that occurred appears to have been almost entirely from Neanderthal to human, rather than vice versa. How come? The most likely scenario is that there were a few instances of sexual reproduction between Neanderthals and human individuals belonging to the population that is thought to have emigrated out of Africa to populate the world sometime after seventy thousand years ago, explaining why the Neanderthal DNA sequences are not found in African genomes. The contribution of the Neanderthal genome has remained in European and Asian populations ever since.

To put this in perspective, most of our genes are very similar anyway to those found in Neanderthals and chimpanzees, and to other mammals like mice. We all share a "how-to-build-a-mammal" instruction manual, and the relatively minor genetic differences between us (minor relative to those we share in common) are the icing on the cake, as it were, that make us a human rather than a mouse, a chimp or a Neanderthal.

The year 2010 saw yet another twig appear on the hominin branch of the evolutionary bush, this time one even closer to the Neanderthals than our own. This story begins with the discovery by a Russian team of a sliver of finger bone from a remote Siberian cave in the Altai Mountains, known as the Denisova Cave. The team stored it away, thinking it was from one of the Neanderthals that frequented the cave between thirty thousand and forty-eight thousand years ago. But when DNA extracted from the bone was eventually sequenced, the results -- published just before Christmas -- revealed a population distinct from both humans and Neanderthals.

The finger appears to belong to a novel hominin population that shared a last common ancestor with Neanderthals more recently than humans, and overall is genetically closer to Neanderthals than to humans. It is too early to say whether the so-called 'Denisovans' represent a separate species and fossil data will be required to clarify that question. But what the results do suggest is that Melanesians -- the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia -- have inherited as much as one-twentieth of their DNA from the 'Denisovans', indicating that some limited inter-breeding took place between these ancient populations. Most fascinating of all is the idea that multiple hominin lineages were coexisting in Europe and Asia, along with modern humans, as recently as twenty-thousand to forty-thousand years ago.

Do these findings have any particular theological significance? It is difficult to know why this should be the case. In the Judeo-Christian tradition humankind uniquely is made "in the image of God". The suite of capabilities that emerged during human evolution is necessary but not sufficient to do justice to this much discussed theological insight. Our particular genetic instruction manual generates large frontal lobes, advanced cognitive abilities, rationality, language, consciousness and the ability to choose between right and wrong. It is this suite that gives us the ability to pray, worship and engage in communal religious practices.

But the idea of being made "in the image of God" is not encompassed simply within a static list of such human qualities. Theologians have drawn attention to the dynamic, relational aspects of the concept. It is humanity-in-relation-to-God, together with God-given responsibilities to humans in relationship with each other, that are thought to be more central to the idea. When did such spiritual capabilities and responsibilities first come into being? It is really difficult to know, but the answer certainly seems more rooted in God's intentions and purposes for humankind than in genetic change per se. Students can spend a long time being trained in the finer points of drama, but the play only gets off the ground when the actors are finally given their lines.

It seems quite likely that more twigs will continue to appear on the hominin branch of the bush of life as genomics continues to extend its reach. Such discoveries as such do not appear to raise any new theological questions. But other 2010 discoveries did highlight two genomic insights that do have relevance for religious views of human identity. The first insight comes from further Genome Wide Association studies that continue to subvert any lingering commitments to genetic determinism, for example the idea that there are genes "for" a particular human trait. The second insight comes from the finding that we are all more genetically different from each other than we realized even a few years ago. Genetics is underlining the uniqueness of each human individual. By the end of 2011 it is estimated that more than 30,000 human genomes will have been sequenced. Watch this space. Theological reflections on these findings will be the topic for Part 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Intelligent Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With his compelling personal story of becoming England’s “most reluctant convert,” his towering intellect, and his inimitable eloquence, American evangelicals’ lionization of Lewis is certainly understandable.² But when we attempt to lionize people we often ironically end up taming them, paring their claws so that our heroes and our preconceptions can safely cohabitate in our imaginations. But Lewis is no safer a lion than Aslan, and he will not go quietly into our tidy evangelical boxes. To be frank, American Evangelicalism’s infatuation with Lewis is in many respects somewhat odd. For here is a pathologically populist movement with a penchant for Big Tent Revivalism, an obsession with liturgical innovation, a deep-seated suspicion of ecclesiastical tradition, and a raw nerve about the doctrine of justification, falling head-over-heels for a tweed-jacketed, Anglo-Catholic Oxford don—a curmudgeonly liturgical traditionalist who was fuzzy on the atonement, a believer in purgatory, and, as we shall see, whose views on Scripture, Genesis, and evolution position him well outside of American Evangelicalism’s standard theological paradigms. All of that is to say that Lewis was not “just like us”—any of us—and if we would do him justice, we must be prepared to be surprised by Jack.

In what follows, I would like to look at three areas relevant to faith and science discussions where Lewis’s stated views might be surprising for his American Evangelical admirers—namely, his views on Scripture generally and Genesis in particular, his views on Adam and the doctrine of the Fall, and his views on evolutionary science and the myth of ‘Evolutionism.’

Reflections on the Scriptures: Lewis on the Bible, Myth, & Fact

Lewis derived his theological understanding of the Bible from his reading of Scripture, his intimate knowledge of the Church Fathers and the Medieval Doctors, and also from his awareness of modern biblical scholarship. While Lewis was regularly critical of Modernist biblical scholarship’s naturalistic dismissal of the miraculous, its pedantry, literary tin-ear, and over-eagerness to conflate Jesus’ story with the stories of pagan mythologies (he had precious little patience for Rudolf Bultmann, for instance ), he was not at all given to the knee-jerk reactionary Fundamentalism which has held so much sway in American Evangelical culture. In fact, Lewis incorporated many of the more well-supported conclusions of modern biblical criticism into his theology of Scripture, not least critical opinions about the historicity of much of the Old Testament. In good Anglican fashion, Lewis creatively drew upon the deep resources of the Church’s grand Tradition in order to think through the contemporary problems posed by modern critical scholarship. Here I wish to focus on three features of Lewis’s theological conception of Scripture—his understanding of the Bible as being incarnational and sacramental in character, and Christotelic in focus—before turning to his theological reading of Genesis 1-3.⁴

Inspiration and Incarnation

According to Lewis, the Bible is both a vessel of the divine Word and also a profoundly human collection of documents. In his longest, most substantive piece on Scripture, chapter XI of Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis frames a thoroughly incarnational understanding of the Bible:

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naïvety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.⁵

Lewis’s reference to “[the] human qualities” of the Bible’s “raw materials” is suggestive. As Peter Enns puts it in his book Inspiration & Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, the Incarnation of the Son and the inspiration of Scripture are “analogous.”⁶ Lewis clearly agrees. He goes on in the chapter to articulate a theology of Scripture precisely in incarnational terms:

For we are taught that the Incarnation itself proceeded “not by the conversion of the godhead into flesh, but by taking of (the) manhood into God”; in it human life becomes the vehicle of Divine life. If the Scriptures proceed not by conversion of God’s word into literature but by taking up of a literature to be the vehicle of God’s word, this is not anomalous.⁷

According to Lewis, the means whereby God gives us Scripture is not by faxing us transcripts of inner-Trinitarian dialogue direct from Heaven, but rather, on analogy with the Incarnation, by taking up very human literature and utilizing it to communicate His Divine life to us.

“We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table.”⁸ But God has instead deigned to give us a very human book, just as He deigned to send us a fully human Savior. Lewis makes this point most poignantly in his Introduction to J.B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches where he writes:

The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant-woman’s breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King.⁹

For Lewis, God’s work in the inspiration of Scripture not only communicates but also emulates God’s humble, self-effacing work in the Incarnation. If the heart of Christianity, “an incurably irreverent religion,” should be the Incarnation, “an irreverent doctrine,” then it ought to come as no surprise that that doctrine should be most fundamentally communicated via an irreverent book.

A corollary of Lewis’ incarnational and sacramental view of Scripture is that when it comes to studying the Scriptures we must be prepared to be surprised. Lewis warns against “the Fundamentalist’s” procedure of attempting to frame our ideas of Scripture a priori, deducing parameters for what the Scriptures can and cannot be from our preconceptions about God. Lewis thinks such an approach to be a nonstarter:

[There] is one argument which we should beware of using…: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done–especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.¹⁰

Instead, says Lewis, we should take a humble, a posteriori approach, looking and seeing just what kind of book it is that God has actually given us before making grand doctrinal declarations. “To a human mind,” Lewis recognizes, an incarnational Bible “seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle.”¹¹ But it appears that this is what God has given us, and we must trust that God knows what He is doing. As Lewis says, “Since this is what God has done, this, we must conclude, was best.”¹²

Myth Became Fact

For Lewis, the Word is also like the sacrament. Just as ordinary water, bread, and wine are taken up into and become conduits for and communicators of the Divine life that we so desperately need, so, also, all-too-ordinary human writings are taken up into and become conduits for and communicators of the Divine life and word. In Lewis’s view, we must receive the Divine word by approaching Scripture in a sacramental manner. We “receive that word,” as Lewis says, again, “not by using [Scripture] as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.”¹³ For Lewis, at least when it comes to the Old Testament, receiving the Word means more than simply paying critical attention to the surface meaning of the text, the sensus literalis. Instead, we must press beyond the surface to the sensus plenior, to the “second sense” of the Old Testament, namely, Christ Himself. “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God,” Lewis once wrote in a private letter. “The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”¹⁴ While such Christological sensus plenior interpretation may have fallen out of favor with many Protestants (to say nothing of thoroughgoing Modernist historical-critics), Lewis believes that “[we] are committed to it in principle by Our Lord Himself.”¹⁵ Citing Jesus’ words to His disciples on the road to Emmaus, Lewis argues that Christ “accepted—indeed He claimed to be—the second meaning of Scripture.” Citing a litany of Dominical sayings and New Testament texts, Lewis is clear that Christ is mysteriously the true spiritual center, climax, coherence, sum, and substance of the Old Testament Scriptures.¹⁶

Lewis stands in good company in thinking along these lines. The “good teachers” from which Lewis learned this hermeneutic are undoubtedly Aquinas, Bernard of Clairveaux, Augustine, Origen, and Irenaeus, not to mention the Apostles and Christ Himself. In short, Lewis is standing within the mainstream tradition of pre-Reformation theological interpretation. But Lewis is not simply striking a traditionalist posture. Like a scribe trained for the Kingdom, he is prepared to bring forth treasures new and old. By positioning himself within the grand tradition of pre-modern theological interpretation, Lewis frees himself to follow his highly-attuned modern literary-critical instincts regarding the historicity of much of the Old Testament while simultaneously upholding both a robust belief in the historicity of the Incarnation and a vital theological hermeneutic. He writes:

The earliest stratum of the Old Testament contains many truths in a form which I take to be legendary, or even mythical—hanging in the clouds, but gradually the truth condenses, becomes more and more historical. From things like Noah’s Ark or the sun standing still upon Ajalon, you come down to the court memoirs of King David. Finally you reach the New Testament and history reigns supreme, and the Truth is incarnate. And “incarnate” here is more than a metaphor. It is not an accidental resemblance that what, from the point of view of being, is stated in the form “God became Man,” should involve, from the point of view of human knowledge, the statement “Myth became Fact.”¹⁷

He sets up the above paragraph by saying, “[The Christian story] is like watching something come gradually into focus; first it hangs in the clouds of myth and ritual, vast and vague, then it condenses, grows hard and in a sense small, as a historical event in first century Palestine.”¹⁸ Apart from the Incarnation, then, much of the Old Testament would be but “myth,” “ritual,” and “legend.” These elements of the Old Testament only become tangible historical “Fact,” for Lewis, in the person and work of Christ.

Next time, Williams looks at how this understanding of Scripture framed Lewis' reading of Genesis 1-3.

Note

1. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001), 66
2. See Smietana, Bob, “C.S. Lewis Superstar: How a reserved British intellectual with a checkered pedigree became a rockstar for evangelicals,” http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/december/9.28.html
3. “Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see?,” wrote Lewis in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Walter Hooper, ed., Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 156
4. I owe the word “christotelic” to my teachers at Westminster. See especially the discussion in Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005)
5. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1986), 111-12
6. See note xii above.
7. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 116
8. Ibid, 112
9. Lewis, “Modern Translations,” in God in the Dock, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 230
10. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 112
11. Ibid
12. Ibid, 113
13. Ibid, 112
14. Lewis in a letter, 8 November, 1952, in W.H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C.S. Lewis, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 247 cited in Martindale and Root, The Quotable Lewis, 72
15. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 117
16. Ibid, 117-19
17. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Essays, (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 129
18. Ibid

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Theology of the cross

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

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

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

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

Why is evolution so disconcerting to Christians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crucifixion is disconcerting too

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

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

Redemption extends to all of creation

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Explore this Topic Further

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

Notes

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

Behe and IC

Since we have previously explored Behe’s idea of irreducible complexity in an entire series, we will not revisit it here in great detail. It is important, however, to reemphasize how Behe defines irreducible complexity (IC). As we noted in the first part of that series, Behe frames his ideas on IC as a counter to Darwin’s ideas of gradualism.

For Behe, the argument for IC is a critique of gradual evolutionary processes, of the kind that Darwin saw as necessary for his theory to hold. When Behe introduces and defines IC in his book Darwin’s Black Box, he has a key quote from Darwin on gradualism explicitly in view:

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

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

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

(Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39)

The definition of an IC system is thus straightforward: it is a matched group of components, where all the components are necessary for the function of the system. The necessity of each component can be demonstrated by attempting to remove it – if the system no longer works if even one component is removed, it is by definition IC.

Behe and exaptation

The standard response to Behe’s argument from IC is to discuss the evolutionary concept of exaptation: that new systems and functions are cobbled together from components that have functional roles in other systems already present in the cell. Behe discusses, and ultimately dismisses this idea in Darwin’s Black Box as follows:

In Chapter 2 I noted that one couldn’t take specialized parts of other complex systems (such as the spring from a grandfather clock) and use them directly as specialized parts of a second irreducible system (like a mousetrap) unless the parts were first extensively modified. Analogous parts playing roles in other systems cannot relieve the irreducible complexity of a new system; the focus simply shifts from “making” the components to “modifying” them. In either case, there is no new function unless an intelligent agent guides the setup.

So for Behe, two points are clear: parts selected for function in one system cannot be exapted for use in other systems since they would require too many modifications; and the emergence of a new function is the indication that an intelligent agent is guiding the process.

Behe has responded to my previous posts to claim that the tandem duplication event that brought about the Cit+ actualization event should not be considered a gain-of-FCT mutation under his criteria:

The gene duplication which brought an oxygen-tolerant promoter near to the citT gene did not make any new functional element. Rather, it simply duplicated existing features. The two FCTs comprising the oxygen tolerant citrate transporter locus -- the promoter and the gene -- were functional before the duplication and functional after. I had written in my review that one type of mutation that could be categorized as a gain-of-FCT was gene duplication with subsequent sequence modification, to allow the gene to specialize in some task. Venema thinks the mutation observed by Lenski is such an event. He has overlooked the fact that there was no subsequent sequence modification; a segment of DNA simply tandemly duplicated, bringing together two pre-existing FCTs.

As an aside, quibbling over whether this mutation constitutes a “genuine gain-of-FCT” mutation is not my purpose here, since the definition is Behe’s to define, and I am not aware of anyone else in the scientific literature who uses Behe’s definitions. That said, I consider it passing strange to claim that a series of events that produced a gene that has a new sequence and functional properties distinct from either of its component parts does not constitute the production of a new “functional coded element.” If nothing else, it is a functional coded element that has not previously existed, cobbled together from parts of other functional coded elements, displaying new, adaptive properties. If according to Behe’s definition that’s not “new” or a “gain” then I guess it’s not, but that seems to me to torture the words “new” and “gain” beyond recognition. But I digress.

The important point for our purposes, however, lies elsewhere. Note carefully how Behe describes the Cit+ actualization event. By dividing the new aerobic citrate transporter gene into two previously existing FCTs, Behe is describing an exaptation event. The one FCT (the aerobic promoter) starts off as a necessary component of a gene transcribed when oxygen is present. As such it is under selection for that function, which has nothing to do with expressing a citrate transporter. The second FCT (the citrate transporter amino acid coding sequence) is under selection to be a citrate transporter, which has nothing to do with the function of the gene the promoter comes from. The Cit+ actualization event, then, exapts these two FCTs by placing them together to create a new function (which Behe does not mention).

And here’s the kicker: the new system (expression of the citrate transporter when oxygen is present) requires both FCTs in order to work. It has become a system of “well matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function” (i.e. transporting citrate in the presence of oxygen) “wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

In other words, it is a new IC system – a small and relatively simple system, yes, but nonetheless IC. Now, I’m fairly sure that Behe would not define this system as IC, since the documentation of an IC system evolving would seriously undermine his thesis. I am interested, however, in how he will handle this development, on two fronts. First, he would need to explain specifically why two exapted FCTs that are required together for a basic function does not constitute an IC system (if indeed he wishes to preserve his definition). Secondly, given that he allows for exaptation in this case, he needs to explain how exaptation is not a threat to IC in general. In Darwin’s Black Box he disallows exaptation altogether, but that option is no longer on the table.

In the next post in this series, we’ll continue to explore the evidence for exaptation as a means to build new FCTs, and go on to examine the implications of this evidence for Douglas Axe’s proposed limit to evolutionary mechanisms.

For further reading:

Blount, Z.D., Barrick, J.E., Davidson, C.J. and Lenski, R.E. (2012). Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population. Nature 489; 513- 518.

Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2006).

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

Michael J. Behe (2010). Experimental evolution, loss-of-function mutations, and “The first rule of adaptive evolution”. The Quarterly Review of Biology 85(4); 419-445.

Genesis is one of my favorite books of the Bible. I read through it probably once every few months and repeatedly grind my Hebrew language skills on its opening chapters. Unlike Leviticus (at least in the opinion of most people I know), the Genesis narrative is exciting and adventurous. Some of our favorite stories come out of the book: Noah and the Ark, The Tower of Babel, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, and so on.

But no story is perhaps as infamous and well known as the creation account (or accounts) as presented in Genesis 1-2. Almost every Christian or Jew, even those less than devout, know the opening words to the tale: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We know that God created the earth in six days. We know Eve was taken from Adam's rib for a companion. We know that God called the general creation “good”, the special creation of man “very good” and, at the very end of it all, took a day of rest (which I'm sure most of us would call “very good.”)

Of course, we know all of this. Yet we challenge it (and are challenged by it), continually, when we consider the variety of interpretations of how this story intersects the world as described by science. With Genesis, are we dealing with a literal scientific account, where “day” means 24-hours; are we dealing with metaphorical “days” in which epochs or periods of time or even processes are being described; or are we readers of a creation mythology from the Ancient Near East that doesn’t have anything directly to do with material origins? Interpretations go on and on, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying the creation debate knows. By and large, however, we can probably categorize Genesis interpreters into three camps: the Young Earth Creationists, the Old Earth Creationists, and the Theistic Evolutionists.

Now, I have the unique benefit of falling into all of these individual camps at one point or another in my life, sometimes even mixing them up. I have made a strong transition from being a die-hard Young Earth Creationist to being convinced that the evolutionary story is, in fact, the more substantiated and evidenced position. I say this with no pride, since my own transition involved many agonizing questions, a whole lot of reading, and a significant internal spiritual battle: what I believed about when and how the earth was created would not only change the way I read Scripture, it would also change certain aspects of how I viewed the Creator.

While I've certainly learned a lot of information on my journey, it was not an accumulation of facts that has kept me following Christ through all the ups and downs, but Jesus himself, and the knowledge that truth is not something which the Christian should find spiritually threatening. Nevertheless, those same ups and downs—and my internalization of each of these views on creation in turn—has provided me with one simple realization about the debate over scripture and evolution: most of us are not so committed to finding the truth about Genesis and creation as we are to sustaining and maintaining our own interpretive boundaries and the boundaries of the communities which influence us. In other words, the debate is often not so much over Genesis—or even over whether we can all follow the same God when we believe different things about how he created—it's over our own ability to be right. I know this because admitting that I was wrong was the most difficult part of my own transition.

Interpretive communities

While I am pretty convinced of the truth of an evolutionary portrait of reality and an ANE reading of Genesis similar to that espoused by scholars like Peter Enns or Bruce Waltke, I can still make this claim about interpretive communities because my intention is not to dissuade others from debating the issues involved, but to ask that we simply recognize our own limits and check them as often as possible. This is part of following Jesus, is it not? Unfortunately, vigorous debate often deteriorates quickly into screaming matches where proponents of one position or another simply are talking heads, speaking past each other and forgetting our fellowship in Christ. We play into the same interpretive competition that the Pharisee and Sadducee scribes were well known for, each claiming to have a proper interpretation of the Scriptures, but all the while forgetting that interpretive arguments matter exceptionally little if a genuine search for God is not at the forefront. This is certainly not to insist that the discussions cease, but rather, to insist that these discussions can only be propelled forward if individuals—of whatever stripe—step outside of their own interpretive boundaries and communities and humbly present themselves before God, seeking His truth alone. It is to insist that “system maintenance” must die along with the self, because only then can we allow Scripture to interpret itself. Unfortunately (and this is an issue that goes way beyond the Genesis text), too many of us are more committed to a specific model than we are committed to seeking God’s truth, whatever inconvenience to us that truth proves to be.

In 2006, for instance, I heard a popular and well-trained Young Earth paleontologist make the following statement: “If all the evidence turns against young earth creationism, I will still believe it because that's what the Bible says.” I followed up with him in a conversation a year later over lunch and quickly realized that I did not misunderstand his statement. For him, the parameters of his convictions were set in concrete and the truth of the overarching story of Christianity rested on these parameters not being crossed. In his view, the Bible absolutely and fundamentally teaches a universe which came into existence 6,000-10,000 years ago; to deny that is to deny Scripture, and if evidence turned up to the contrary one must not alter those parameters but, instead, search (perhaps in vain) for counter-evidence or be willing to live in blind faith. For this paleontologist, confident Christianity hinged on the stability of those borders of interpretation. Transition wasn't allowed.

But I have heard and read statements coming out of the two other camps of thought that share this kind of certainty over interpretation, too. There is a sense of doing injustice to scripture, thereby doing an injustice to Christianity, and, thereby again, doing an injustice to God if one strays from the preferred reading. One Old Earth Creationist remarked in a popular book that an interpretation of Genesis that allows for evolution is a “contradiction in terms” and it's an unfortunate thing to “blame God for it.” Genesis, in the mind of this thinker, specifically precludes any interpretation which leads to the sort of story evolution tells. To think otherwise is to “blame” God for something which he intentionally tells us is otherwise against his nature.

I have equally heard some theistic evolutionists deride—in a very spiritually shallow and personally offensive way—those who do not accept an evolutionary viewpoint. As one who went through an interpretive evolution on biological evolution, I can say confidently that I believe my own transition would have been much easier both intellectually and spiritually if not for feeling as if certain theistic evolutionists accused me of intentionally lying or being mentally ignorant. It seems that all three camps are at least sometimes plagued by the issue of pride—especially in the cases of a few strong advocates. But pride is nothing less than the cement by which interpretive barriers are built, helping them become unmovable walls that protect the interpretive communities within.¹

On the other hand, one of the great benefits of the fall of positivism (or verificationism) and the rise of postmodernism was the realization that total objectivity among individuals is a false conception. And, since individuals make up communities, neither are camps of thought above error and immune from being wrong. Yet way too many Christians continue to approach Genesis as if we can interpret it on its own terms, completely and totally, without reference to our own location in history and culture. We're still functionally positivists. But it is an illusion that we’re above the interpretive fray, and we must realize time and again that we are subjective individuals, affected by a number of factors and people. We are deeply influenced by those that speak into us, those that we trust, and those that we find credible. As W. Randolph Tate writes,

Interpretations...must be consistent with the established interpretive framework of the interpretive community. The worldview of the interpretive community sets the parameters within which interpretations are accepted or rejected.²

The Bible takes a slightly different angle and puts it this way: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, we are not objective data-interpreting individuals but fallen men and women, even as followers of Jesus.

So it’s when groups of folks line up on either side of an issue and make their positions part of their identity that the debate over interpreting Genesis reaches a near stalemate. It's communities against communities, PhDs against PhDs, experts against experts, and—perhaps more internally—interpretive parameters against interpretive parameters. The truth is that as long as we are first and foremost committed to maintaining the community in which we are involved, there will be very little chance of us getting at the real issues and the best conclusions, much less giving an adequate witness to our God, both Creator and Redeemer.

New eyes, fresh air

I mentioned earlier that I spent time in all three major camps of thought on this issue. I was a hard-lined Young Earth Creationist, debating on forums and writing creationist papers in college. I argued for the existence of modern-day dinosaurs, major flood geology, and so on. I was convinced I was right, that defending the truth meant digging my heels deeper into the sand. But two questions plagued my thoughts: first, I asked whether Christianity fell to pieces if I was wrong. Second, I asked whether I was committed to Christ or, rather, to myself and my interpretations. With that as my first major paradigm shift, I eventually came to accept an Old Earth view. I sat comfortably within the Old Earth view for several years, but the Lord was still at work in me, and, once again, brought those two questions to my mind. Back to the books I went, back to the Bible I went, and back to prayer I went.

Through months of extremely difficult and heart-rending transition, I found myself considering a particular reading of Genesis that I would have regarded as unacceptable as a YEC. But then I was confronted with this even more important point about Christianity: often God finds what is unacceptable to us very acceptable to Him! That included me, personally, and I felt the warmth of God’s grace flow over me. In the wake of that change of heart, people accused me of rejecting my background, my Christian education, and my interpretive communities. And, yet—whether I was right or wrong—I knew God accepted my path towards this new reading of Creation as a genuine search for Him. My spiritual struggle—contrary to what I thought while it was happening—was not a struggle to reject bad data and exegesis, it was a struggle to reject myself.

While the “facts” were important, that spiritual struggle was even more so for me. What was God showing me in the midst of it all? Was thinking differently about the creation making me appreciate the Creator less, or more? Did reading Genesis differently mean only that I had been wrong, or that it was somehow less true? What did any of this have to do with my sense of calling to love and serve God and my fellow men? In a way, I’m still figuring this out. But I can absolutely testify that the struggle transformed every single one of these questions. Indeed, for the first time, I believe I saw God as much this-worldly as other-worldly. I saw nature as intimately intertwined with itself, still being woven together by God’s hand. I saw Scripture as a beautiful expression of God’s desire that man should participate in creation. I saw that my fellow men and my fellow Christians were all on a journey, much the way I was. And I saw myself as a flawed, stubborn, and prideful man, yet forgiven for the times I’ve pitted myself and my presuppositions about Scripture against God, its author.

As settled as I am now, I have not forgotten that the common ribbon which ties together all of these transitions is my commitment to keep asking questions within my own circle, too—realizing that God still has much to teach all of us. I have learned the continuing importance of stepping outside of my camp and making sure I haven’t become merely a product of or a willing prisoner to thinking a certain way, unwilling to consider that it and I might be incorrect. I came to realize that everyone (including myself, of course) has stories and life experiences that become the framework in which they read Genesis 1-2. And if I stopped pretending that I, myself, could be perfectly objective, then I also had to stop pretending that those in the community that I trusted were necessarily objective, themselves.

Ultimately, I had to be willing to be wrong and to see that my friends might be wrong, too. That’s not something that any of us are “naturally” very good at, but it is possible when we realize that the world does not depend on us being right, but upon Jesus being right. For me, seeking truth rather than presupposition requires that we all be able to approach the communities that have influenced us deeply, and ask not just “what” they say but “why” they say it. We all have to guard our hearts even more than our heads. Frequently reminding myself to walk back to the edge of my own camp—to follow Jesus’ example and withdraw to a solitary place—has shown me that there is room to breathe outside our familiar interpretive parameters. At certain times, I have found it to be the most refreshing air I've ever tasted.

Notes

1. Though, admittedly, the theistic evolutionists tend to have a greater sense of leeway when it comes to how the claims of Genesis 1-2 affect Christianity as a whole. It would be an odd thing to say that to not interpret Genesis 1-2 as an evolutionary metaphor is to reject Christianity. As far as I know, most Christian evolutionists are very much willing to acknowledge that Young and Old Earth Creationists are still within appropriate spiritual bounds, even if not scientific ones. It seems to me that if individual theistic evolutionists choose an issue about which to be rigid, it’s the Fall and the existence of Adam.
2. Tate, W. Randolpy. Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008, p 222.

With the complete genome sequence in hand, we knew the sequence and location of our genes, but what we didn’t know was how all those genes are regulated: how do the trillions of cells in our bodies know when to turn on or off all those genes? How do the hundreds of distinct cell types develop and function together, when they are all running on the same DNA “operating system?”

That’s where the ENCODE (short for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project comes in. Launched in September 2003, shortly after the announced completion of the Human Genome Project, the goal of the ENCODE project is “to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome, including elements that act at the protein and RNA levels, and regulatory elements that control cells and circumstances in which a gene is active.” In other words, the project seeks to understand how the genome “works.”

Early this month, researchers from ENCODE released more than thirty papers presenting their findings. During a Science magazine online chat, the project’s data coordinator, Ewan Birney, explained the outcome:

The ENCODE project aimed to start our understanding of how the human genome works. We know that (nearly) all the information that determines a human is in the genome, as we all start off as single cell with this DNA. However, we had a patchy understanding of how it works, in particular away from protein coding genes.

To work out how the genome works, we used the fact there are many tiny machines (proteins and RNA - RNA is very like DNA) in each of our cells which know how to "read" parts of the genome. By monitoring where these little molecular machines are on the genome, or how parts of the DNA are copied into RNA (there are quite a few different types of RNA as well), we start to gain some insight into the genome.

We did many such experiments, across different cell types (eg, one cell type was very similar to a liver cell type; another was very similar to a white blood cell). This way not only can we see what is similar, we can also see differences between these cell types.

There is a lot more to get to know and understand here - this is definitely closer to the start than the end. But it is a substantial amount of data, and analysis, to start on this journey.

According to the abstract of one of the lead papers from Nature, this extraordinary glut of data “enabled us to assign biochemical functions for 80% of the genome, in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions.” Only 2% of the genome codes for proteins, but 80% or more has some biochemical function. As a Science news article put it, these 30 papers “sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases.”

The pro-Intelligent Design organization The Discovery Institute has heralded the discovery as the “demise of junk DNA.” Casey Luskin writes for their blog Evolution News:

Let's simply observe that it provides a stunning vindication of the prediction of intelligent design that the genome will turn out to have mass functionality for so-called "junk" DNA. ENCODE researchers use words like "surprising" or "unprecedented." They talk about of how "human DNA is a lot more active than we expected." But under an intelligent design paradigm, none of this is surprising. In fact, it is exactly what ID predicted.

The extent to which the ENCODE project been able to identify function has been surprising—even exhilarating—though scientists have for some time been getting glimpses of the many ways in which segments of DNA can be “active.” Even in 1970 biologists knew that some non-coding DNA had function, and by 2003 there was a large body of work demonstrating that many non-coding elements acted as promoters, enhancers, insulators, and so on. Indeed, in recent years many have come to appreciate the fact that “junk” was never really an appropriate metaphor in the first place. Still, because sequencing of multiple genomes has shed such extraordinary light on key evolutionary mechanisms, many geneticists have focused on function primarily in terms of which regions do or do not contribute to the evolutionary fitness of their host, rather than whether they were merely "doing something" biochemically. What the impressive ENCODE project has done is open a treasure trove of new information that can only accelerate the pace at which researchers are able to explore the incredible subtlety and complexity of DNA, and refine the very concept of “functionality.”

So with all this in mind, is ENCODE a stunning victory for ID, as Luskin believes? Bryan College biologist Todd Wood thinks not. He writes, “I don't think that function equates to design, nor do I think that design requires or predicts function. They're not the same thing… my understanding of function does not require me to hypothesize God (or an anonymous designer, if you must) as the proximal cause.”

We agree. Indeed we would go on to say that evolution and design are not mutually exclusive. So while finding function is not sufficient to prove design, recognizing that function has arisen by way of evolution does not indicate that God was not at work. We at BioLogos believe God providentially works out his purposes—his designs—through the elegant processes of evolution, not in opposition to them.

Amazing as the new data are, it only strengthens and enhances our evidence for evolution. While much of the genome is “doing something” biochemically, it is still likely that the majority of the sequence is evolutionarily neutral (Senior Fellow Dennis Venema discusses the evidence for this “neutrality” in a post on our site, including a striking comparison between 29 different mammal genomes and the human genome). In fact, another ENCODE researcher participating in the Science magazine chat, John A. Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington School of Medicine, thinks the findings align beautifully with evolutionary theory:

ENCODE's data provide a unique and powerful window through which to view evolutionary change. We can see those changes directly by lining up the genome sequences of many different organisms -- these line-ups have revealed millions of regions where all the genomes agree, indicating sequences that have been specially preserved by evolution while others have decayed away (ie freely changed their letter codes). We now see that a large proportion of these 'conserved' regions are lighted up by ENCODE annotations, indicating that they are marking spots in the genome that contain important instructions for cell function.

We’ve discussed “junk” DNA previously, including a multi-part series by Dennis Venema, and we’ve received many emails over the past few days asking for our comments on the ENCODE findings. On Monday and Tuesday, Dr. Venema will begin to offer his own thoughts on ENCODE.

A special thanks goes to Darrel Falk, Mark Sprinkle, Kathryn Applegate, Dennis Venema, and Tom Burnett for their contributions to this post.

In Tennessee and across the country, many others weighed in on the subject over the next few weeks, including two essays (here and here) on the BioLogos Forum. But soon after that, other issues crowded that story off the front page. Now, though, teachers and students across my state are returning to science classrooms, and we will all get to see what effect the law has in practice. Again speaking as a Christian, a biologist, and educator and drawing on all three of those perspectives, I’d like to offer my own reflections on the bill’s likely effect on Tennessee teachers and students, beginning with this excerpt from the bill itself:

The teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy . . . The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, directors of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies. (Tennessee HB368 / SB893)

As an evangelical, I think this bill could be more detrimental than helpful to Christian teenagers’ faith. Many students who are particularly interested in the sciences and theory of evolution are already in the uncomfortable position of hearing pro-Intelligent Design doctrine from the pulpit on Sunday and then listening to their science teacher’s evolution instruction on Monday. I was one of those students—sitting in more than one congregation under pastors who were particularly antagonistic to the theory of evolution, and who made not-so-subtle comments that it cannot co-exist with authentic Christian faith. Having a keen interest in the sciences and wanting to explore the data so widely accepted by the scientific community, I felt confused and ostracized in my church. I wondered if I would have to choose between my faith and intellectual integrity. The church family I trusted clashed with the science that I also trusted, causing a near catastrophe for my faith. I am thankful to the few people who offered me grace, allowing for my questioning of some of what I heard in church without labeling me a heretic.

Though the conservative Christian community may view this bill as a “win for the faith,” it is actually a loss if it reinforces the idea that this is simply an issue of science vs. scripture. Evolution is central to modern biology; trust in the authority of the Scriptures is central to Christian faith. But this fight mentality between the two established communities is detrimental to our young teenagers who are seeking to grow in faith, but who cannot seem to reconcile scripture and scientific data. We need them to seek after that reconciliation, not be told it can’t be done. Whatever they are hearing from the pulpit, the science classroom should be the one place that students can learn science. Students may well emerge with bitterness towards the church for dismissing the evidence of evolution not only so quickly, but in what is so often a haughty and condescending manner. Worse yet, students may emerge with bitterness that they were forced to choose between faith and intellectual integrity. Is this really an all or nothing argument? Are the two truly diametrically opposed?

In my world, these two have reconciled, and they now co-exist in peace. It has been a very long road to get there and I could not have done it without both access to good data and the freedom to explore it. Having taught teenagers in an evangelical church for years and having observed in many biology classrooms as well, I know that many students are still struggling for this same reconciliation. That reconciliation is perhaps most easily attained when the seeking student is able investigate evolution in the science classroom without harassment from opposing religious forces. With this freedom, the student may very well realize that the fear that he/she may have regarding evolution is really just a fear of the unknown, and that it is possible to have intellectual integrity and to praise God for initiating and sustaining the evolutionary process.

In Tennessee’s science classrooms there are surely many teachers who begrudge being told that they must teach evolution, and who are relieved that they can now present it as a controversy and/or allow Intelligent Design as an alternative. They, too, will likely see this law as a “win.” But isn’t public science education is about giving students an accurate picture of the state of science, not about teachers’ philosophical opinions? As has been pointed out before, most Tennessee science teachers have not had the training to teach about religion or philosophy; they have been trained to teach about the basic principles of the biological world.

This bill may be particularly frustrating, then, to teachers who do simply want to teach science. From the many hours I’ve spent in secondary biology classrooms this year, I can say for sure that time is of the essence. Tennessee teachers have barely enough instructional time to cover what students must know to pass the end-of-course biology test required for graduation; they do not have extra time to spend covering material that is not science. I have seen classroom arguments over evolution’s feasibility that ate away precious instruction time and only left a greater rift between the two camps and no doubt, a frustrated teacher. News of the Intelligent Design movement’s success in creating political and legal controversy is misplaced content in the secondary biology classroom.

Furthermore, as it allows teachers to frame biological evolution in terms of “controversy”— something that is a topic for debate—this law will likely not result in students who are more engaged in understanding science, but instead, only in more confusion (and possibly antagonism) in the classroom. Educators welcome debate in many cases because debate encourages critical thinking that leads to “formal thought,” the Holy Grail of Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. But the practice of science is about proposing hypotheses and testing the data, not primarily argumentation. And if the science community is not “debating” evolution, why should high school science students be debating evolution as part of their biology curriculum?

The bill is correct in stating that the purpose of science education is to “inform students about scientific evidence” and “help students develop critical thinking skills necessary to becoming intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens.” I certainly agree, though I question whether it needed to be legislated. Rather, my answer is: “Let’s actually do it!” Before bringing “debate” and “controversy” about scientific theories into the classroom, let’s instead teach our students about sound scientific practice; let’s give them opportunities to learn how to research and to employ the scientific method in everyday life. Let’s focus on teaching them about observing the indicators of climate change, the intricacies of DNA, conservation of ecosystems, and the principles of molecular and cell biology. Let’s give them the tools—specific to science— that help them think critically and work out problems, rather than undermining faith in those very practices and the community of people that uses them every day. Let’s not teach them to live in denial of the ordinary dependability of science, let’s not teach them to distrust scientists who have no interest in “debate,” but want to understand the world God made.

In Tennessee and elsewhere, let’s give both our students and those scientists the grace and support they need to merge authentic faith and intellectual integrity.

Asa Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gray responds to Darwin's theory

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

But it is also important that we engage believers who disagree with us (on human origins, especially) with charity and humility as a witness to our common identity in Christ—that we may be known by our love for each other in tandem with our demonstrated love for the secular world that does not yet claim Christ as Lord and Savior.

While the BioLogos Foundation is committed to both of these aspects, we are especially pleased that our desire to engage in gracious dialogue with fellow believers who reject biological evolution has been receiving increased and very favorable attention in both the Christian and secular press. More importantly, we are being joined in that reconciling project by those who have often been defined primarily as our “opponents,” rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

First, A Tale of Two Scientists, the cover story of Christianity Today’s July-August 2012 issue, featured the accounts of BioLogos Foundation President Darrel Falk and Todd Wood, Director of the Center for Creation Research at Bryan University. Though Wood does not accept biological evolution on theological grounds, both men recognize its strength and explanatory power. But more importantly, both reject the warfare model between science and faith (and between Christians who think differently) as being, in Wood’s words, “detrimental to the Church.”

Second, our Southern Baptist Voices series has become a model for how such dialogue can be pursued, even in the sometimes no-holds-barred context of the web. Several installments in our ongoing dialogue with Southern Baptist theologians have been covered by the Erin Roach of the Baptist Press (on May 25th , June 6th, and July 3rd) and on on July 19th by Lillian Kwan of the Christian Post. And just this past week, Associated Press reporter Travis Loller highlighted the series in an article picked up by the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets across the country.

To make it easier for readers to find the entire Southern Baptist Voices series and join in the conversation themselves, we’ve launched a new landing page here: Southern Baptist Voices. It is our hope and prayer that this initiative will set the stage for future dialogue between evolutionary creationists and those who hold other perspectives, as well.

In Part 1 of this essay I pointed out that metaphysical naturalism is not necessary nor inextricably tied to the practice of science, and that essentialism is only one of the historically-Christian ways to think about being human. As a case in point, we can identify the Patristic Fathers and Medieval Christian thinkers who discussed a relational alternative for understanding the nature or being of persons.¹ Roughly, the idea is that the three persons of the Trinity are what they are and who they are in virtue of their relationship with each other, not based on some intrinsic properties that ground their uniqueness as persons in the Godhead. That is to say that Father, Son and Spirit co-constitute each other, or are bound up together with enabling each other to be distinctly the persons that they are. Far from a static form of being and relationship, there is a dynamic interrelatedness in the Trinity. Father, Son and Spirit mutually constitute each other while enabling each other to be particularly who they are and engage creation and salvation in particular ways suited to who they are as persons. Father, Son and Spirit are being in community.

By analogy of relationship, humans are what we distinctly are in our being and personality in virtue of our relationship to God, creation and each other. Our involvements with others necessarily shape who we are as particular persons. The personal realm, then, is characterized by a dynamic relationality, as persons have ongoing mutually constituting influence on each other. This is part of the “dynamic order” of creation “that is summoned into being and directed towards its perfection by the free creativity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That orientation of being is, of course, distorted and delayed by sin and evil, and returns to its directedness only through the incarnation and the redeeming agency of the Spirit. But evil distorts the dynamic of being, does not take it away.”² Like the relationality of the persons of the Trinity, we are being in community.

We can also pursue the doctrine of creation as an alternative to essentialism, to see if it sheds any light on possibilities for what it means to be human in a non-reductionist sense.³ As other writers have been exploring in the Forum over the past few weeks, the biblical claim that humans are created in the image of God is important to the Christian of view of humankind. This may sound like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, for there are both Christians and non-Christians who claim that if humans arose through evolutionary processes, then we cannot be made in God’s image. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring as a way of showing that there are strong alternatives to a strictly essentialist understanding of being human.

The Image of God

Over the centuries, the dominant view of humans as the imago Dei has been grounded in the idea that there is something distinctive about the creation of humans that both sets us apart from the rest of the animals and that marks us as unique kinds of creatures. Though we are clearly both distinctive and unique, does affirming the imago Dei require this kind of essentialism? On the one hand, Genesis 1:27 has often been interpreted as grounding humanity’s being in the divine image of God on Earth. On the other hand, recent discussions in human evolution have focused on several independent lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis of common ancestry among primates and humans: fossil evidence over the last 6 million years; homologies or anatomical similarities between humans and the primates; biogeographical distribution of supposed human ancestors; similarities in developmental biology between humans and primates; and several lines of genetic evidence favoring common ancestry. In addition, our current best understanding of the genetic diversity of humans is inconsistent with models that assume all humans descended from a single original pair of individuals. Instead, the current best data and models indicate the human ancestral population was never smaller than several thousand individuals.⁴

On the surface, then, what contemporary evolutionary science currently says on human origins appears to challenge cherished beliefs and understandings of many Christians. However, to understand what implications, if any, an evolutionary development of humans might have on the image of God, we first need to get clear on what it means to be the imago Dei, and that has to be settled theologically, not scientifically.

Historically, some of the most popular proposals for the imago Dei were rooted in human rationality, human freedom or human creativity because it was thought that humans alone among the animals possessed one or more of these qualities. There are two problems with this traditional line of thought. First, investigations since the early 18th century have progressively led to the conclusion that such qualities of humans mark a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind (e.g., brains of mammals and humans are anatomically homologous, dolphins, primates, and some species of birds exhibit degrees of rationality and creativity). The degree of difference may be significant, but a difference in kind is necessary for the traditional line of essentialist thought.

Second, if we look to the Incarnation for clues to the imago Dei we find that Jesus’s humanity is never depicted as exercising extraordinary powers of rationality, freedom, creativity, and so forth. Primarily, Jesus lived as an embodied person in relationship with the Father, other humans and creation as enabled by the work of the Holy Spirit. In other words, Jesus’ human life in Scripture indicates that the divine image is a special relationship, or form of relationality: to be in relationship with the Father as a created, embodied person; to be sustained or upheld in this relationship with the Father through the perfecting Spirit; and to be in relationship with other persons and all of creation.⁵ Moreover, this special relationship is also a vocation to mirror or reflect the glory, life and worship of God.⁶

If to be the image of God is to be sustained in a special relationship with the Father, each other and creation through the Spirit, then the imago Dei is not grounded in intrinsic qualities that particularly mark humans as distinct from the rest of the animals, as essentialism would have it. Christians can understand Genesis 1: 24-31 and 2: 4-5, as many of the Patristic Fathers did, as an account of our unity and connection with the rest of creation as well as of our special relationship with God and role in God’s kingdom. So if Father, Son and Spirit created human beings through evolutionary processes, we would have continuity and connection with all of creation while still being the imago Dei. Evolution does not threaten human specialness before God unless it is viewed as a replacement for divine creative activity (which, of course, is what Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and Answers in Genesis all do repeatedly).

If evolution is broadly right as an account of the creation of all living things (an empirical matter), and if some form of essentialism is found to be consistent with such an account (a philosophical and biological matter), Christians would then have two options for how to understand what it means to be human. We can look for some stable, unique intrinsic features in virtue of which we are human; or we can look to the special Spirit-sustained relationship we have with God, creation and each other. Both are biblically consistent, though I judge understanding the imago Dei as special relationship to make better sense of the whole of the Bible, as well as our experience in the world.

Notes

1. See Gunton, The one, the three and the many and Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, T&T Clark (2003).
2. Gunton, The one, the three, and the many, p. 166.
3. Gunton, The Triune Creation; Robert C. Bishop, “Recovering the Doctrine of Creation: A Theological View of Science,” 31 January 2011.
4. For example, see Dennis R. Venema,“Genesis and the Genome: Genomics Evidence for Human-Ape Common Ancestry and Ancestral Hominid Population Sizes,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol. 62, No. 3 (2010): 166-178.
5. See Gunton, The three, the one, and the many.
6. As such, the imago Dei has an inextricable missionary focus towards extending the kingdom. See N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, HarperOne (2012).

In a Nutshell

The meaning of the “image of God” has been debated for centuries in the church. A common view is that the image of God refers to the human abilities that separate us from the animals. However, scientists have found that abilities like communication and rationality are also present in animals on a basic level. Plus, theologians do not see the image of God as human abilities. Some theologians see the image of God as our capacity for a relationship with God. Other theologians see it as our commission to represent God’s kingdom on earth. Both of these theological positions are consistent with scientific evidence. Whether God created humanity through a miracle or through evolution, God gave us our spiritual capacities and calls us to bear his image.

In Detail

The “image of God” is a key concept in Christian theology, foundational to Christian thinking about human identity, human significance, bioethics, and other topics. Many Christians see evolution as incompatible with the image of God. How could God’s image bearers have evolved from simpler life forms? Doesn’t image-bearing require miraculous creation of humans rather than shared ancestry with chimpanzees? And when in the evolutionary process did humans attain this image? These questions are tied to many other issues concerning human origins, including the soul, the Fall, and the historicity of Adam and Eve (see sidebars), but in this article we will focus specifically on the image of God.

See “How does the Fall fit with evolutionary history?” and “Were Adam and Eve historical figures?”

The phrase “image of God” does not appear many times in the Bible, but the importance of the concept is emphasized by its repetition in the creation account:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. -- Genesis 1:26-27

From this text, it is clear that part of bearing God’s image is ruling over the animals. Genesis 9:5-6 reveals another aspect of image bearing: all human lifeblood is sacred because all humans are made in the image of God. The emphasis on Judeo-Christian thought on the sanctity of human life is derived in part from this passage. In the New Testament, the idea is expanded further as Christ is revealed as the true image of the invisible God (2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15).

For centuries, theologians have discussed these and other passages, debating the meaning of the image of God (“imago Dei” in Latin). Being made in God’s likeness is not a matter of our physical appearance, because humans don’t all look the same. But to what does the image of God actually refer? Many ideas have been suggested over the centuries, producing a huge body of theological writing. While hard to summarize, we give a brief overview below of three common themes for the image of God. After developing this theological context, we’ll consider how these ideas intersect with evolution.

Image of God as our abilities

A common view is that the image of God refers to human abilities. When people talk of the things “that make us human,” they refer to abilities like reason and rationality, mathematics and language, laughter and emotions, caring and empathy, and cultural products like music and art. Often the motive is to distinguish humans from animals by showing that humans have unique abilities that make us special and superior to animals. Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wrote something like this when he said “Man's excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.”¹ Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) also emphasized intellect and rationality in his discussion of image bearing.² But Augustine and Aquinas were not speaking of intellect as an aptitude for math or music; Aquinas instead writes of an “aptitude for understanding and loving God.” In fact, the modern emphasis on reason comes more from secular Enlightenment ideas than from Christian theology. During the Enlightenment, the image of God was connected to ideas like the natural dignity and majesty of humankind that separates us from the brute beasts of the animal world.

Scientific evidence is piling up that humans have more in common with animals than was once thought. Genetic evidence shows that humans and chimpanzees share much of their DNA. Studies of animal behavior (particularly of chimps and other apes) show that animals not only laugh and cry and care for each other, but can learn sign language and even have basic reasoning ability. In fact, Christian neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves writes that “any attempt to set down a clear demarcation between the reasoning abilities of nonhuman primates and humans is found to have become blurred.”³ Obviously, humans have a much larger capacity to reason than animals, but reasoning is not a uniquely human ability. As neuroscientists and animal behaviorists learn more about animals, they see how traits appear in a rudimentary form at a level similar to human children.⁴ Whether or not one accepts evolution, evidence from living humans and animals does not show a distinct difference in kinds of abilities (only degree).

See “Made in the Image of God: The Theological Implications of Genomics” a 2-part blog by Denis Alexander.

Another challenge for this picture of the image of God is the place of people with mental disabilities. If a person is impaired in reasoning or language, are they bearing less of God’s image? Are they not showing his true likeness? The Christian answer to these questions is No! The Bible repeatedly teaches that God values all people, particularly those who are rejected by society or unable to care for themselves.⁵ In fact, Genesis 9:5-6 points to image bearing as the reason that all human life is valuable. This is a major motivator for Christians who seek to protect the unborn, the poor, and the aged. Surely bearing God’s image must mean something other than using our abilities.

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ANSWER HERE.

Notes

1. Saint Augustine The literal meaning of Genesis, Book 6, Chapter 12 (Google books, p. 193)
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 93 (html)
3. Malcolm Jeeves, “Neuroscience, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Image of God” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (2005) 57.3, p. 178 (PDF)
4. Similarly, many human traits have been replicated in artificial intelligence, particularly logic and math but also conversational language and computer-generated art.
5. For more see, Kathy McReynolds “More Than Skin Deep” BioLogos Forum June 2010

As we’ve seen in recent essays (and comments) touching on Biblical scholarship, philosophy, theology, and anthropology, the imago Dei is a complicated idea, linked to the question of whether what makes humans unique among the creatures on earth is physical, cultural, spiritual, or some combination of all three. As Christians who seek to frame what the natural sciences tell us about our physical humanity with what the Bible suggests are our defining human qualities, we tend to focus on what Genesis means when it says Adam was “made in the likeness of God”; but it is helpful to remember that the first mention of God’s image in human form looked forward to the full revelation that would come in Christ. Thus, we ought also seek to understand Jesus as the model towards which Adam always pointed, and by which we should understand both Adam and ourselves.

Going one step further, we should also look forward from Jesus to the life of the Church. For if Jesus was the true image of God, then at Pentecost, the new community of believers took on the role of imaging the continuing presence of God in and for the world. The Church was constituted as the very Body of Christ, charged with making him known in their lives as well as their words. Thus in the structure and life of the Church we also see something important about the imago Dei.

Perhaps one way to hold in tension the various interpretations of the image—that is, to affirm the incomplete truths available through the relational, functional, substantial, and elective models—is to look at a literal image of the way the social aspect of imaging God via the Church interacts with the intensely individual and personal aspect of imaging God in individuals. Picking up on Kathy McReyolds’ sketch of personal transformation through encounters with those with disabilities (More than Skin Deep), I’d like to turn our attention towards the work of Chicago artist Tim Lowly, whose monumental portrait of his disabled daughter (Temma on Earth, 1999), is pictured above. Lowly’s work compels us to recognize the image of God even in one who lacks markers of those other roles, capacities, and relationships, and highlights two linked characteristics common to Jesus and Church: brokenness that does not merely equate with imperfection, and a social picture of our essential identity in Christ. By allowing Lowly to place Temma’s identity and humanity at the center of our attention, we can reframe our sense of what it means to bear the image of God and reflect the crucified Christ as his Body.

Profoundly Other

Born in North Carolina but spending his youth in South Korea (where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries), Tim Lowly attended Calvin College and began work as an artist in Michigan. But his life and work took an unexpected turn in 1985, when Tim and his wife Sherrie’s daughter was born and suffered a medical emergency during her first two days home from the hospital. In 2002, journalist Fred Camper’s incredibly sensitive article treated the Lowlys’ physical, emotional and spiritual journey with Temma at length, and I encourage readers to turn to that essay for the full narrative background to Tim’s approach to his daughter and his art. But the central facts are that for all of her now 27 years, Temma’s host of physical and mental disabilities have made her completely dependent on others, and have meant that the relationship she has with her parents (and they with her) is a radical departure from ‘normal.’ Temma’s “profound otherness” challenges most of our expectations about the human capacity to image God. Speaking to Camper, Lowly describes Temma:

It's unlikely that she thinks in a way that we would call thinking," he says, "because our ways of thinking are based so much on learning, experience, sight, socialization, and history, and I doubt any of those things have any bearing on Temma. I don't even think comparing her to animals makes sense. There's a certain wholeness to the way animals think that I don't think Temma is capable of. I'm pretty sure she does have an inner life, but I don't think she has the mental mechanisms that would make it correspond in an understandable way to the way we think.

And yet Lowly has produced hundreds of paintings and other works that feature Temma, some of them monumental in scale, none of them shying away from questions of the purpose, value, and meaning of her life for their family, and for ever-widening circles of community. Certainly there is a political component to Lowly’s work that addresses inequity in culture and church. Generally, he says, the church has been compassionate, but “nearly always from perspective of the able-bodied and the ‘whole’ vs. the disabled, never mind that none of us measure up to complete wholeness.” Yet his work also reflects the way Temma, in her “otherness,” creates community. Artist-in-residence and gallery director at Northpark University since the mid-1990s, Lowly has often made Temma a physical presence in the studio and classroom. Carry Me, 2002 (drawing on panel, 108" x 48," at left) depicts students from an advanced class holding Temma, but they were also involved completing the project. Another large work, Culture of Adoration, 2008, shows Temma as the model in a drawing class, with Lowly drawing the parallel between that scene and the adoration of the Magi at Jesus’ birth. That comparison pictures the way a community forms around loving attention and worship, but subverts artistic and cultural expectations that only what is beautiful should be valued. Lowly notes that while Temma is often alone, in some ways she’s never alone: “She’s cared for by her parents, but that relationship extends out to a much broader church outside her family.” Both paintings, then, are images of Christ’s corporate body as much as they are of Temma or the painting students who carry and draw her.

What bearing, then, does Lowly’s particular way of seeing and depicting his daughter have on us, on our sense of the imago Dei? Part of his ongoing artistic project is to understand and interrogate the way the traditions of perspective in Western art and culture presuppose and privilege the individual, solitary and unified point of view as the most important, the most true. In the wake of modernist emphases on self-expression in art, Lowly also sees value in pursuing ways of working that bring out the meditative (and even prayerful) craft aspect of painting, and that at least partially de-emphasize his and other artists’ subjective positions. He increasingly works from photographs (and collages of many individual pictures), and has more and more sought to bring collaboration into the making of his work. When Lowly takes Temma as his subject, these features of his practice emphasize the way that, in the Church, our individual identity is experienced as a tension between brokenness and wholeness in the Body.

Broken Together

There is a sense in which we look at Temma and we want to affirm that she is made in the image of God by denying that the image of God has anything to do with her physical, material body. Indeed, one way to approach the problem made visible through Lowly’s painting is to imagine the soul as imparted to (or trapped in) the physical frame. This certainly fits with saying that the image-bearing role of humanity in general is an act of the grace of God, not something dependent on our abilities. But in the election model, we are reminded that God didn’t call Abraham just to a “spiritual” identity, but also to physically constitute a people sent into the very concrete physical world.

Likewise, if we recognize Jesus as our model for the image of God, we will not deny the physicality of the human experience, nor the incarnation, nor even Christ's suffering on our account. Indeed, we must affirm the goodness of creation and our physicality, even—especially—in its brokenness because Jesus, himself, was broken. Even after the resurrection, his wounds were not abolished or erased, but remained tangible marks by which the Lord revealed himself every bit as much as he did in his creative and healing power. And in the Revelation image of the victorious Christ, we have another picture of that essential and persistent sacrificial brokenness in the Lamb who appeared “as if slain.”

What of the Church? Similarly, the Church remains a fragmented whole when it is at its best—broken open to be dispersed into the world. And though it is also all-too-often broken by own individual and corporate sin, even that finds its meaning and redemption in the image of bread broken in the Lord’s Supper—the way that sharing brokenness together unites the individuals in a congregation with each other and with Christ. As a reminder of Jesus’ own individual body, communion addresses both of those senses; it is the means of both healing and sending.

Christ’s commission to the Church, then, presents a profoundly social model of being the continuing revelation of God for the world. We bear the image of God together, and the image of God is only fully realized when we are members of a community, in relation to other human beings (even if that relationship is one of complete dependence), as opposed to seeking independence. This does not and ought not compromise the absolute worth of each individual, but should remind us that part of our worth is tied up in our integration with the whole body of Christ.

One last example of Lowly’s work gives iconic form to this inter-relation between image-bearing, self, identity, and the community of the Church. Made to commemorate Temma’s 25th birthday in 2010, At 25(right, and below), is a collaborative piece constructed of 25 individual, two-sided panel blocks that fit together something like a puzzle. On one side is a black and white portrait of Temma, while on the reverse, the individual blocks have been painted and gilded in different patterns and techniques. Lowly constructed the piece, but sent each block out to be completed by 30 different artists, either working alone or in pairs. In requesting them to do their sections of the composite portrait in an “artistically neutral” style, he was asking them to subjugate their artistic personae and self-expression to the depiction of Temma. Not every artist was able to do that to the same extent, so the final object is an image of the imperfection of our self-giving—or our inability to see others without looking through our own particular lenses of self—even while being a testament to the compassion and care of Lowly’s dispersed community.

Most importantly for this discussion, At 25 suggests that our image-bearing of God does not rest on our individual “fitness,” much less how well we “fit in.” Rather, it is carried by the whole human community, most fully in the broken Body of Christ. In this respect, brokenness is not something to be corrected; it is something that makes the particular community of the Church possible. Individuals may not be able to fulfill or even recognize the functional aspects of the imago Dei, they may not even be capable of the relational aspects—or of returning expressions of love or kindness or thanks, or even awareness. But the whole body, the beloved community, the nation God set apart for himself and the world, is called to be the image of God for each of us—precisely when we can’t.

Tim Lowly is Assistant Professor of Art at Northpark University. An inter-disciplinary artist, he works with painting, drawing, installation, digital media, photography and music: both individually and collaboratively. His work has a lyrical realism and quiet spirituality that have contributed over the last thirty years to the development of a international reputation. While Tim’s art and music address a variety of subjects, the central pillar of his work has been his daughter Temma who is, in his words, “profoundly other”. The clinical diagnoses of “multiple impairment” or “spastic quadriplegia” do little to address the compelling presence of this young woman and the way her being and essence have shaped her father’s work.

Lowly was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina in 1958. The son of medical missionaries, he spent most of his youth in South Korea. He attended Calvin College and received a BFA degree in 1981. His wife Sherrie Lowly is a United Methodist Pastor. They reside in Chicago, Illinois. Since 1994 Tim has been affiliated with North Park University in Chicago as professor, gallery director, and artist-in-residence. Tim is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles.

For additional information (including exhibitions and collections) see Tim’s personal website.

All images © Tim Lowly.

For the past twelve years, I have had the privilege to teach in the Bible Department at a prestigious Christian university. Most of my students have been raised in Christian homes and have attended conservative, Bible-believing churches all of their lives. These students believe that they have a pretty solid understanding of what the image of God entails; at least they think they do until they encounter the world of disability. Disability creates a dissonance in their worldview that they are not expecting. All of a sudden, what they thought they understood about the image of God comes crashing down like a house of cards. The image of God and disability just do not seem to go together.

The following quotes from some of my student’s papers are representative of many and their experience with the disabled “strange other.” What is communicated loud and clear is the challenges disabilities raise for their conception of the image of God:¹

I believe that those with disabilities are equal to us … but I discovered a hidden evil in my heart. Deep in my heart, hidden from the world, I believed that children born with disabilities that would normally not survive its first few days should be allowed to die.

I think I could have intellectually acknowledged that all men and women are created in the image of God … In this class I was challenged to see the realities of disability and ask if I really did believe that God created these individuals in his image and salvation was for them too.

Though I have always known that these individuals are created in His own image, I often found myself secretly thinking that they were miserable and often a burden on others.

Sometimes I feel pity for disabled individuals because they are not “normal”. I feel that their disability is hindering them from experiencing the best life possible. I think disabled people experience a lesser quality of life because they cannot physically and/or mentally do as many things as a “normal” person could.

Now, these young people are not more spiritually or morally bankrupt than others in contemporary society. In fact, to the contrary, these Christian students are considerably more spiritually and morally sensitive in general because of their commitment as Christ- followers. Still, these views have been nurtured and influenced by two factors, one that is cultural and one that is religious: 1) the pervasiveness of a reductionist view of human being fostered by scientism; 2) a wooden, literal interpretation of Genesis 2:7 which says that “the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.”

Taken together, these two factors present a skewed view of human being, one that focuses on the physical and material rather than on the spiritual and essential. This is one of the reasons why my students twinge and recoil a bit at the thought that persons with disabilities can be made in God’s image. “They just don’t look like it,” they say, zeroing in on what is physically seen. This view has had enormous consequences for people with disabilities. In fact, Adolf Hitler, as part of developing his approach to the weaker members of society in his book Mein Kampf, identifies the stronger (better looking and functioning) members of society as “images of the Lord” in contrast to the weaker members who are mere “deformities” of that image, and who ought to be cleansed from society. Many have argued that Hitler’s ideas concerning those with disabilities were inspired solely by Darwinian evolution. However, these quotes from Mein Kampf reveal a horrific misuse of Scripture, not evolutionary ideas.

Furthermore, with regard to evolution, a face value exegesis of Genesis 1 & 2 does not dictate that the physical stuff God used to create human beings was special or unique or that the image itself resides in it. It shows, rather, that all matter was formless and void until God, who acted and willed out of his good pleasure and sovereign choice, brought order and harmony to it. This applies as well to the creation of human beings who are uniquely created in God’s image. If this image is not merely physical stuff, what is it? What does the literary and historical context of Genesis 1 & 2 reveal?

There are three views on the image of God: 1) Substantial; 2) Relational; and 3) Functional. The functional view sees the imago Dei as a function or role that humans fulfill--such as being priests or having dominion. The relational view has to do with humans imaging God in their ability to have spiritual relationships—primarily with God, but also expressed in terms of our male and femaleness and other nuances. The substantial view essentially says that God’s image is imprinted on the person’s soul as an image is impressed on a coin, and has much to do with human capacities like our free will and ability to reason. It has been predominant in Christian theology in the West since about 600 AD.

But though we do have specific capacities that bear on our responses to God, as the substantial view says, the human being is an embodied soul who has both relational and functional capacities, as well. The relational implications include the biblical truth that among all God’s creatures, only human beings can know Him and be consciously aware of Him. Most importantly, he knows us and can be in relationship with us even when we do not acknowledge him out of rebellion, or cannot respond to him because of disability. If we consider the Substantial view’s emphasis on conscious awareness, ability to exercise freedom, and decision-making capacities alone, however, some human beings may not qualify as persons, whereas some non-human animals might.

Against this, a more holistic view affirms that all human beings bear God’s image, regardless of capacities. The image of God cannot be lost or compromised in anyway. Even the poorest functioning human being profoundly reflects God’s image.

In an unexpected and peculiar way, my students discovered this truth about the image of God when they began to interact with people with disabilities in my classroom. This truth about the image utterly transformed and they began to see people with disabilities quite differently. The following quotes come from the same students quoted at the beginning:

What I came to realize is that since the disabled are people, they deserve life. As humans made in the image of God, we are to try to preserve our fellow disabled brothers and sisters who are also made in the image of God.

When I went to the day group home, it was an amazing experience. I really enjoyed interacting with everyone there. I was able to paint with them, and one of them sang to me and taught me to dance; it was so much fun. It was great to see how each and every one of them was so unique and made in the image of God.

In this class I was challenged to see the realities of disability and ask if I really did believe that God created these individuals in his image and salvation was for them, too. As a result of what I have learned from this class my answer to these two questions is a resounding yes! God loves individuals with disabilities and knows the depths of their hearts and minds on a level I could never comprehend. Who am I to doubt who God knows, who He loves, and to whom He offers the gift of His Son.

At the beginning of the semester, disability was a foreign world for me. That world was new and uncomfortable. I had no idea how to interact with anyone with a profound disability and had little desire to learn how. Throughout this course, the walls of misconceptions, fears, and insecurities that I have built up to distance myself from disability have slowly been chipped away. As I learned more about disability, my fears and discomfort were replaced with compassion and joy. Exposure to individuals and families with disabilities was the most effective way to break down those walls. Having the opportunity to observe and interact with individuals with disabilities was invaluable. Participating in disability ministry is not burdensome, as I had initially worried, but freeing. I left the night feeling uplifted, loved, and so aware of God’s mysterious presence within broken humanity.

During Jesus’ ministry on earth, often the best way to find him was to seek out those society considered strange, unclean, or undesirable; Jesus often sought them out, himself, in order to show that God’s love for us does not depend on our merits or abilities, much less our outward appearance. Similarly, my students today meet the Lord anew—and discover that same message of God’s unmerited grace and love—when they seek out relationships with those our society finds strange and broken, with those who they could easily avoid seeing at all. Rather than judging with the eyes alone, my students learn to recognize their cultural and theological blind-spots, and see both the disabled and themselves in the light of Christ’s love. Relationships are transforming; and relationships with people with disabilities can transform not only our image of them, but of the God who made in His image, and dwells with us in places deeper than the skin.

Notes

1. All student quotes used by permission. Names are left out to protect student privacy.

In the last post in this series, we introduced a paper by Chen and colleagues that sought to identify new genes in various Drosophila (fruit fly) species. The youngest (i.e. the most recently evolved) gene they found is one specific to Drosophila melanogaster, the species of fruit fly beloved by geneticists as a model organism. The gene is named “p24-2” (not the most imaginative name, but it serves its purpose) and the gene it is duplicated from is called “Éclair”. The Éclair gene is found in a number of Drosophila species. A simplified “family tree” of three Drosophila species (D. melanogaster, D. simulans and D. erecta) is shown below. The duplication event that generated the p24-2 gene happened within the lineage leading to D. melanogaster, but after D. melanogaster and D. simulans separated as distinct species:

Since the entire genomes of these species are now sequenced and available online, it is possible to look at the chromosome region where the Éclair gene is found in all three. By looking at this region in D. melanogaster, we see that the brand-new p24-2 gene is almost right next door to its “parent” gene, Éclair. Below is a screen shot taken when looking at this region using a Drosophila “genome browser” that is freely available online. The red arrow indicates the Éclair gene, and we can see p24-2 is just one gene over, and seems to be nested within another gene called “Unc-115b”. The green arrows are pointing to two different “versions” of how p24-2 is made into an mRNA working copy. The Unc-115b gene (blue arrow) has five different mRNA versions. (One of the p24-2 mRNA versions has a lot of Unc-115b sequence that is not used when the p24-2 protein is made).

(Click Image to Enlarge)

Finding a duplicated gene next door to the sequence it is copied from is pretty common in genomes – when chromosomes are copied or recombined during cell division, side-by-side copies of parts of chromosomes show up every now and then. It’s also not surprising to see a new gene cobbled together with another gene. In this case, Unc-115b and p24-2 are overlapping but separate functional entities: they each have their own protein sequences, but each includes the code of the other as a sequence that does not actually translate into protein. The details of how this “cobbling” happens aren’t important for this discussion, other than to note that the mechanisms are known and not rare. In the chart above, then, the orange sections indicate the active parts of the transcribed sequence, while the gray are sections that are included in the RNA molecule, but do not get used directly to code for the new protein.

When we look at this same chromosome region in D. simulans and D. erecta, however, p24-2 is missing. Éclair and Unc-115b are there, but p24-2 is not, since it arose after D. melanogaster separated from its common ancestors with the other species. (Note: this entire region is a mirror image in D. simulans and D. erecta when compared to D. melanogaster due to a large scale chromosome inversion that covers this whole area. So, while it looks “backwards” compared to the image above, that is not surprising, it’s expected):

(Click Image to Enlarge)

So, with the p24-2 gene in D. melanogaster, we have a bona-fide, recent gene duplication event. This gene is brand new, evolutionarily speaking (less than 3 million years old, given the calculated speciation times of D. melanogaster and D. simulans). Not only is it brand new, it is also essential for survival in D. melanogaster: if you remove it, the fly dies. Obviously, since every other Drosophila species lacks p24-2, this gene is not essential for survival for any other species. It’s new, and now it’s necessary.

Do new, essential genes refute the Intelligent Design (ID) argument from Irreducible Complexity (IC)?

So far, nothing we have discussed explicitly threatens the ID argument from IC, though it does threaten the ID argument that new information cannot arise through evolution, a topic we have discussed in detail before. Michael Behe, the main ID proponent of the argument from IC, has commented on this research by Chen and colleagues (thanks to commenter “Bilbo” for pointing this out). Behe’s rejoinder was to a blog post by biologist and atheist blogger Jerry Coyne, who used the paper by Chen and colleagues to attack Behe’s ideas. Since Behe’s reply deals with his understanding of how gene duplication relates to his argument from IC, I will quote it here at length:

I have never stated, nor do I think, that gene duplication and diversification cannot happen by Darwinian mechanisms, or that “they play almost no role at all” in the unfolding of life. (As a matter of fact, I discussed several examples of that in my 2007 book The Edge of Evolution. That would be silly — why would anyone with knowledge of basic biochemical mechanisms deny that, say, the two gamma-globin coding regions on human chromosome 11 resulted from the duplication of a single gamma-globin gene and then the alteration of a single codon? What I don’t think can happen is that duplication/ divergence by Darwinian mechanisms can build new, complex interactive molecular machines or pathways. Assuming (since he is in fact critiquing them) Professor Coyne has been attentive to my arguments, one background assumption that he may have left unexpressed is that he thinks the newer duplicated genes discovered by Professor Long’s excellent work represent such complex entities, or parts of them.

There is no reason to think so. A gene can duplicate and diversify without building a new machine or network, or even changing function much. The above example of the two gamma-globin genes shows that duplication does not necessarily result in change in function. The examples of delta- and epsilon-globin, which, like gamma-globin, presumably also resulted from the duplication of an ancestral beta-like globin gene, show that sequence can diversify further, but function remain very similar. Even myoglobin, which shares rather little sequence homology with the other globins, has not diverged much in biochemical function.

In his recent work Professor Long discovered that many of the new genes were essential for the viability of the organism — without the gene product, the fruitflies would die before maturity. Perhaps Professor Coyne thinks that that means the genes necessarily are parts of complex systems, or at least do something fundamentally new. Again, however, there is no reason to think so. The notion of “essential” genes is at best ambiguous. We know of examples of proteins that surely appear necessary, but whose genes are dispensable. The classic example is myoglobin. It is also easy to conceive of a simple route to an “essential” duplicate gene that does little new. Suppose, for example, that some gene was duplicated. Although the duplication caused the organism to express more of the protein than was optimum, subsequent mutations in the promoter or protein sequence of one or both of the copies decreased the total activity of the protein to pre-duplication levels. Now, however, if one of the copies is deleted, there is not enough residual protein activity for the organism to survive. The new copy is now “essential”, although it does nothing that the original did not do.

The main points of Behe’s reply can be summarized as follows:

1. Gene duplications and subsequent changes to the copies (diversification) can and do happen, but the results are nothing really “new”— no new molecular machines or pathways (nor parts of such pathways), nor much in the way of new functions.
2. Duplicated genes can become essential simply by “sharing” the original function, and then reducing their share to a minimum, perhaps through the amount of protein that each copy makes. Again, this is not anything really new, since the copy doesn’t do anything that the original didn’t do already. So, the finding that some gene copies are essential genes is not a threat to the IC argument.

Note that Behe’s reply makes predictions that can be tested with further research. These predictions might be summarized in this way:

1. If IC is correct, duplicated genes will not be part of new, complex molecular pathways or machines.
2. If IC is correct, duplicated genes that are both essential should “share” the original function.

Testing IC with new research

Behe’s reply to the Chen paper is of course hypothetical and speculative – as demonstrated by his own comment that “there is no reason to think” that the duplicated genes are components of new complex pathways or systems. Accordingly, the validity of Behe’s reply depends on its ability to hold up over time as more work is done. Of note, the functions of p24-2 and its parent gene Éclair have been studied intensively since 2010. These studies, as we shall see in the next post in this series, shed quite a bit of light on these questions.

For further reading:

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

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

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

Left: "Abrahamic Covenant" by Christoph Weigel, 1695.
Courtesy Pitts Theological Seminary, Emory University.

The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. - Ishmael ¹

For the destiny of humans and the destiny of animals is the same: As one dies, so dies the other; Both have the same breath of life. And humans have no preeminence over the animals…All go to the same place; All come from dust, And to dust all shall return. - Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

What is humankind’s place among the animals? Should we even count human beings among the animals at all? Perhaps we—as men and women—are something else entirely? Such questions are not new. Indeed, they are as old as writing itself and similar ponderings about human identity occupy the most ancient of texts. While many of these primeval writings have crumbled in the winds of time and have come to us only in fragments, the Genesis account of human and animal origins remains a living document that occupies a vital place in the life of Christian practice and thought. In the first chapter of the Genesis narrative we read that humans—male and female—were created in the image (tselem) and likeness (demuth) of God. But what does this mean? There is certainly no shortage of proposed answers, and over two thousand years of theological tradition bears witness to this fact. Here, however, we are not primarily interested in tradition—as valuable and insightful as it may be—but we are concerned with what the Bible itself has to say.

Taking the authority of Scripture seriously demands that we engage with Scripture in light of both its original languages and its original cultural context. If we are to avoid—as much as it is possible—projecting our own personal, modern and post-modern cultural presuppositions onto Scripture, then we must be willing to do some of the hermeneutical (or interpretive) hard work. In other words, if we want to allow Scripture to speak for itself, we must be hyper-aware of the cultural lenses we are wearing when we read it. Interpreting the Bible through five hundred years of Protestant tradition, fifteen hundred years of Roman Catholic tradition, or one hundred years of Seventh-Day Adventist tradition won’t do.² Rather we must venture to take off the thick hermeneutical lenses of tradition and boldly attempt to go into the world of the sacred text itself so that we can allow the ancient inspired words to shape the lenses or our reading.

With this approach to Scripture in mind, I believe it is useful to address the matter of the image and likeness of God (or imago Dei) by first asking what the imago Dei is not. Throughout the centuries, theologians, philosophers, and others have posed a number of answers to the question of what the imago Dei is. The vast majority of these answers have focused on one or a few characteristics that humans alone have and that non-human animals lack. For example, Evangelical Christian author Kay Warren explains: “Animals and people are two different classes of created beings and they will never be equal in their worth. As precious as animals are to our daily existence, they operate from instinct, not volition. Only people have a spiritual dimension. We are the ones created in the image of the Creator, the only ones with a soul.”³ In a similar manner, political commentator Ann Coulter, citing “the story of Genesis”, maintains: “It’s not merely opposable thumbs and a bipedal gait that make us distinct from the other beasts. It is consciousness of our mortality, a moral sense, language, mathematics, art, beauty, music, love, longings for immortality, a sense of symmetry, the soul’s ascent, the ability to accessorize, and our fascination with Branson, Missouri…We are in God’s image, and we’re the only ones in God’s image, which is why we eat escargot rather than worship them.”⁴ While these are two popular contemporary voices, similar views are espoused by numerous academics as well. In this way the imago Dei has, for many, become synonymous with one central characteristic or several key traits that make humans unique among and/or superior to animals.⁵

As intriguing as such perceived indicators of human uniqueness are, and regardless of the scientific status of claims for such distinguishing human traits, the idea that there are particular physical features and/or behavioral characteristics that make men—and not beasts—in the image and likeness of God is not one that is found anywhere in the pages of Holy Scripture. With regard to humans as “the image and likeness of God,” a literal and consistent reading of the Genesis narratives discloses that the imago Dei designation does not refer to unique characteristics or capacities which humans posses in a way that excludes other non-human animals.

Hebrew scholar Phyllis Bird informs us that the scriptural context of the phrase “image and likeness of God” makes it plain that “its theological significance is in the place it gives to humans within the created order, not in any physical or moral attribute of the species, in either its present or ‘original’ state.”⁶ In the Bible the imago Dei is not about exceptional human capacities or characteristics that automatically qualify humans as being included in the imago Dei category. There is no reason, explains Bible scholar James Barr, to believe that the author of Genesis chapter one “had in his mind any definite idea about the content or location of the image of God.”⁷ The terms “‘image’ and ‘likeness’…make no statements about the nature of human beings.”⁸ When we read of “the creation of human beings in God’s image (Gen 1:26)…the biblical narrative remains silent…about any qualities of human nature that might account for their special standing.”⁹

If we are to properly understand the meaning of the texts, then, says Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann, we must confidently resist “the tendency to see the image and likeness of God as a something, a quality.”¹⁰ Consequently, a literal reading of the early Genesis accounts demands that no specific anthropological content or characteristics may be directly equated with the imago Dei. If one is to take the findings of biblical exegesis seriously, then—apart from theological tradition—the image of God cannot be defined on the basis of particular physical traits or behavioral characteristics. This means that—according to a straightforward reading of Genesis and the rest of Scripture—humans are not said to be biologically or behaviorally unique in a way that is related to their being named the “image of God.”

In addition to the broad consensus among biblical scholars that the image of God in humans, when understood within its original Hebrew linguistic and Ancient Near Eastern context, has nothing whatsoever to do with an appeal to the human possession of particular characteristics which non-human animals lack, research in biblical exegesis has similarly revealed that there is no essential or substantial super-natural divide between humans and other animals. Scripture, when read in the original languages, clearly describes both “man and beast” as possessing “the breath of life” and refers to both equally as “souls.” In this way Scripture makes no ontological or metaphysical distinctions between humans and non-human animals. Instead, the scriptural “emphasis lies on the commonality that exists between the humans and the rest of the animal creation.”¹¹

While the use of the Hebrew word nephesh, often translated as “soul”, to describe humans has been taken by some as an indication that humans are substantially set apart from the animals, the nephesh is not an exclusive possession of humans. Indeed, the Hebrew text describes both humans (Gen 2:7) and animals (Gen 1:21, 24) equally as nephesh hayyah or “living souls.”¹² Thus, Bible Scholar Gordon Wenham explains that in Genesis 2:7, which describes the human being as a nephesh, “it is not man’s possession of the ‘breath of life’ or his status as a ‘living creature’ that differentiates him from the animals—animals are described in exactly the same terms.”¹³ In Genesis, “human beings…are only one subset of God’s ‘living beings,’ into whom God has breathed the breath of life” and established as “living souls.”¹⁴

According to the biblical understanding, then, “what is distinctive about human beings is not that they have a ‘soul’ which animals do not possess, nor that they have a ‘spirit’ which other creatures do not possess.”¹⁵ It is clear, then, that “the possession of nepheš is not a unique characteristic of the human person.” Indeed, “unless one is ready to grant that animals have ‘souls’ in the same way that humans are alleged to have, then we might better conclude that the Genesis account is referring to the divine gift of life: ‘the human being became a living person.’”¹⁶ Consequently, “claims for a ‘special creation’ of humanity in comparison with animals and the material world conflict with the strong assertion in Genesis 2 that, physically (organically), Adam does not differ from the ‘beasts of the field.’”¹⁷ The theological language of anthropology in Genesis 1 and 2 “underscores Adam’s linkage with the animal creation, not his difference from it.”¹⁸

Whatever else the imago Dei might be, then, a clear and consistent reading of Scripture does not permit us to equate it with either a non-material soul which animals lack or some unique physical characteristic or behavior which animals lack. These conclusions regarding what the image and likeness of God in humans IS NOT lead us directly to our discussion of what the imago Dei IS.

In Part 2 of this series, Dr. Moritz examines how the phrase "image and likeness of God" is used within Scripture itself.

Notes

1. Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (New York: Bantam, 1992), 146.
2. I mention SDA because the prophecies of Ellen White and her interpretations of Genesis have played a significant role in shaping contemporary Evangelical understandings of the text. See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 74. For an online lecture on this topic see http://vimeo.com/38687776
3. Kay Warren, “Puppies Aren’t People: When compassion for animals goes too far,” (Accessed May 22, 2012) http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2009/04/kay_warren_puppies_arent_peopl.html. In this essay Kay Warren cites the theological views of her husband Rick Warren.
4. Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), 266.
5. For example a recent group of Genesis interpreters concludes, “Evidence points to the fact that man is a unique creation, made in the image of God.” David N. Menton, “Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?” in War of the Worldviews: Powerful Answers for an Evolutionized Culture, ed. Ken Ham, Bodie Hodge, Carl Kerby, et al. (Green Forest, Arkansas: New Leaf Press, 2006), 43-59.
6. Phyllis A. Bird, “Theological Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo G. Perdue (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2001), 262.
7. James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis: A Study of Terminology, ” Bulletin of the John. Rylands Library 51 (1968-69), 13.
8. Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol 2, trans. Leo G. Perdue (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 115
9. Kathryn Tanner, “The Difference Theological Anthropology Makes,” Theology Today 50:4 (Jan 1994), 573.
10. Claus Westermann, Creation, trans. John H. Scullion, S.J. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 57-58.
11. Iain Provan, “The Land Is Mine and You Are Only Tenants (Leviticus 25:23): Earth-keeping and People-keeping in the Old Testament,” CRUX 42:2 (Summer 2006): 5.
12. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, 1st ed. trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 136.
13. Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15 (Waco: Word, 1987), 61.
14. Provan, “The Land Is Mine and You Are Only Tenants,” 5.
15. Ray Anderson, “Theological Anthropology” in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. Gareth Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 85 (emphasis added).
16. Joel B. Green, “Restoring The Human Person: New Testament Voices For A Holistic and Social Anthropology,” in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering, and Michael Arbib (Vatican City State and Berkeley, CA: Vatican Observatory and CTNS, 1999), 5.
17. Lawson G. Stone, “The Soul: Possession, Part, or Person? The Genesis of Human Nature in Genesis 2:7” in What About the Soul?: Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology, ed. Joel B. Green (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 50.
18. Ibid., 57.

I want to express my gratitude to those associated with BioLogos for the chance to dialogue with them. I have found their material to be challenging and thought provoking, and look forward to continuing the conversation. In the area of science, to call me a novice would be a kindness, and so to question their evaluation of the scientific evidence for the evolutionary process would be inappropriate for me. However, I do want to raise some questions about their evaluation of theological issues, especially concerning the image of God in humanity. I refer especially to their response to the question, “At what point in the evolutionary process did humans attain the ‘Image of God?’”¹

The BioLogos response begins by correctly noting that the precise meaning of the image of God has been the subject of debate throughout Christian history, but they believe the majority view sees the image of God as “characteristics of the mind and soul,” such as “the ability to love selflessly; engage in meaningful relationships; exercise rationality; maintain dominion over the Earth; and embrace moral responsibility.” They see these characteristics as being acquired through the evolutionary process, though they also state, “We do not know if humanity received the image of God by the immediate onset of a relationship with God or by a slower evolutionary process.” Further, since they identify the image with characteristics of the soul, they add in a discussion of the soul, “We also cannot know whether God directly intervened in the evolutionary process at this point [referencing Gen. 2:7], or whether the unfolding evolutionary process produced the human soul.” It is at this point I wish to question whether or not it is possible for the image of God to be produced through the evolutionary process apart from the special intervention of God. BioLogos seems to lean toward the image being produced through evolution, but is ultimately non-committal on the possibility of divine intervention. I want to argue that there is good reason to argue for the necessity of divine intervention in giving to humans the image of God.

I have no strong objection to the list of characteristics given in the BioLogos response, though I would see most of them as underlying the capacity for relationship with God, which I see as central to the image. Nor do I have any necessary objection to the idea that God used the evolutionary process in developing the brain and other physical abilities of human beings necessary for exercising some of the characteristics involved in the image. Nor do I think that Gen. 2:7 requires the direct intervention of God in implanting the soul (though it certainly allows it). The problem, rather, is in not recognizing that the image of God in Scripture seems rather clearly linked with something immaterial in the human constitution (whether it is called soul or spirit) that could not have come into being by evolutionary processes. My argument for affirming the necessity of direct intervention of God in the creation of humanity in the image of God rests on three assertions. Let me try to state and defend them.

First is the assertion that central to the image of God is the capacity for relationship with God. I do not think this would be rejected by those in the BioLogos community. Within the BioLogos response the phrase “relationship with God” is found numerous times in association with the image of God. They may not like the part about such a capacity being central to the image of God, but the fact that the image of God is what distinguishes humans from other animals in Genesis 1, coupled with the fact that it is humans, and not other animals, who engage in personal relationship with God throughout Scripture, makes a fairly strong case for linking “image of God” to “capacity for relationship with God.”

The second assertion is that this capacity for relationship with God is something that continues after the death of the body, and is associated with something in human beings that continues to exist after the death of the body. Here I recognize that there has been a growing chorus of voices advocating monistic views of the human constitution,² but they all seem to fail to account for the strong biblical evidence for human existence in the intermediate state.³ That which survives death is called the soul in some places (Gen. 35:18; Rev. 6:9-10) and the spirit in others (Eccles. 12:7; Heb. 12:23), but it is identified with the person himself in II Cor. 5:8 and Phil. 1:23. Jesus says to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Both of their bodies would soon be in graves, but the words “you” and “me” seem to affirm an existence apart from their bodies.

The third assertion is that whatever it is in human nature that survives the death of the body (soul or spirit) must be non-material, and could not be produced by the evolutionary process.⁴ Alvin Plantinga, in an argument against materialism, asks, “How could an immaterial soul have come to be by way of evolutionary processes?”⁵ He quotes Richard Dawkins,

Catholic morality demands the presence of a great gulf between Homo Sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom. Such a gulf is fundamentally anti-evolutionary [and hence wholly heretical?]. The sudden injection of an immortal soul in the timeline is an anti-evolutionary intrusion into the domain of science.⁶

I would change Dawkins’ wording from “Catholic morality” to “The image of God in humans” but the conclusion is the same. I cannot imagine how an immaterial reality, which survives the death of the body, could be produced by natural processes, such as evolution, even God-guided evolution. I do not think this is a God-of-the-gaps argument that could eventually fall to advances in science, but a logical argument, based on the intrinsic difficulty of seeing how the natural and mortal could produce something immaterial and capable of surviving the death of the body. Even if someone were to question my association of the image of God with the spirit or soul (assertion 1), I would argue that the mere existence of an immaterial spirit/soul that survives death (assertion 2) yields the same necessity of divine involvement in the creation of the immaterial aspect of human nature (assertion 3), which is my chief contention.

Notes

1. Subsequent references are taken from the response given at http://biologos.org/questions/image-of-god, accessed 10/14/2011.
2. Joel Green has been perhaps the most prominent voice advocating monism (see Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008] and Joel Green, ed., What About the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology [Nashville: Abingdon, 2004]), though a similar view has been affirmed by a number of his Fuller Seminary colleagues who advocate a “non-reductive physicalism” (see Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). For a more complete presentation of views, see Joel Green, In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005).
3. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) gives a strong defense for dualism primarily from the evidence in Scripture for the intermediate state.
4. I recognize the objection here of William Hasker and the idea of emergentism, or emergent dualism, in which a distinct soul or self emerges from the complex configurations of the biological organism, similar to magnetic fields generated by physical objects but distinct from them. See Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), for the fullest presentation of his view. The difficulty of his view lies in attributing to material stuff the power to generate a non-material reality. This difficulty is raised by Alvin Plantinga (see n. 5 below) and others and emergent dualism is as of today still a minority view in philosophical circles.
5. Alvin Plantinga, “A New Argument Against Materialism” (plenary address for the Evangelical Philosophical Society, Atlanta, GA, 18 November 2010).
6. Ibid. No source for Dawkins is given.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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