There’s a serious point in my playful invocation of Pilgrim’s Progress. Like many of the most complex human endeavors — parenting, farming, becoming a Christian — the life of a scientist is not just an “occupation,” something that occupies us for a while and might then be followed by something entirely different. Being a scientist is as much about being as doing, as much about a particular way of being formed as a person as it is a set of activities or even skills. Training in science is induction not so much into a particular worldview (though it includes absorbing plenty of the kind of cognitive presuppositions that that word suggests) as it is a kind of posture or stance toward the world, toward one’s work, and toward one’s fellow human beings, both scientists and non-scientists. And the life of a scientist is a journey, one freighted with ultimate concerns and laden with values. It is a journey into a set of virtues, the habits and dispositions that make one a person of a particular kind of character.

When we talk about faith and science, we tend to focus on the cognitive content of both endeavors, the truth claims and worldviews that animate these two crucial dimensions of modern human life. These are important matters, and I don’t at all mean to diminish them. At the same time, there are inevitable limits to what any pastor can do to constructively integrate the knowledge content of science — so vast and rapidly expanding that even scientists cannot pretend to be expert in anything but a tiny portion — with the content of Christian faith. But there is another way to approach faith and science which I believe might well be more within reach of most pastors, and more essential to their job description than being deeply literate in the latest scientific discoveries and theories — and that is simply to attend to, and prayerfully support and encourage, the scientific life itself as a vocation that can reflect the image of God and be a place for working out one’s own salvation.

So here is what I wish our pastors — and fellow Christians — knew about the life of a working scientist.

Delight and Wonder

If there is one personality characteristic of the vast majority of scientists I have met, it is delight. There is something about science that attracts people who are fascinated and thrilled by the world. To be sure, any given scientist is delighted by things that you and I may find odd or indeed incomprehensible — the intricacies of protein folding, the strata of Antarctic ice cores, or the properties of Lebesgue spaces (and no, I have no idea what that last phrase really means). But the specificity of their delights is one of delight’s secrets: like love, delight is always most potent when it is particular. It is certainly possible to find lawyers who are delighted by law (I have one friend who can go on at great length, with enthusiasm, about corporate bankruptcies), dairy farmers who are delighted by cows, or lumberjacks who are delighted by trees — but I dare say your chances are much better that when you meet a scientist you will find that they are delighted with the tiny part of the world they study day to day. (At least when they are not frustrated with it — which we’ll examine below.)

In many scientists, delight is matched by wonder — a sense of astonishment at the beautiful, ingenious complexity to be found in the world. This is not the “wonder” that comes from ignorance — “I wonder how a light bulb really works?” — but a wonder that comes from understanding. Indeed, as we progress further into humanity’s scientific era we have been able to disabuse ourselves of a mistaken early-modern notion: that the more the world became comprehensible, the less it would be wonderful. That turns out not to be true at all — ask a scientist. Wonder grows as understanding grows. Indeed, wonder only grows if understanding grows. If we replace our childhood awe of lightning with an explanation like, “It’s nothing but a transfer of voltage across a highly resistive material” (an example of what G. K. Chesterton wittily called “nothing-buttery”) perhaps the world will seem like a less wonderful place. But those who actually pursue knowledge of lightning — of electromagnetism or cloud formation or weather systems or climate — end up being more in awe of the world than they were as children. This is surely one of the remarkable features of our cosmos: the more we understand about it, the more we are in awe of its beautiful elegance and simplicity, and at the same time its humbling complexity.

To be sure, many if not most scientists do not see this wonderful world in the way that most Christians would hope for. For us, wonder is a stepping-stone to worship — ascribing our awe for the world to a Creator whose worth it reveals. For many scientists, wonder is less a stepping-stone than a substitute for worship. Yet they stop and wonder all the same.

Intellectual humility

I doubt that humility is among the first traits most people think of when they think of scientists. And indeed, some scientists (like some academics and intellectuals generally) exhibit a combination of confidence in their own intellect and limitations in their social skills that makes them seem abrasive if not arrogant. A few have made a public career of intellectual overreaching, not least in matters of science and faith. But in my experience (and certainly, let me stress, in the case of my own wife!) this is much more the exception than the rule. If intellectual humility is essentially a willingness to admit what you do not and cannot know, science cultivates humility like few other pursuits can — because in few other pursuits do you so often find out that you were wrong.

Even though we tell the story of science through its high points — the discoveries and confirmed theories that won Nobel Prizes and launched new eras in technology — the actual practice of science, for nearly every working scientist, involves far more failure than success. This is especially true for experimental science, the kind that requires the most direct interaction with recalcitrant reality. On most days, in most labs, the data do not add up, Matlab has an untraceable bug, the laser is on the fritz, and all the cultures have been contaminated when the undergraduate research assistant sneezed. And while each of these everyday setbacks requires immense amounts of patience and persistence to overcome, they are only the quotidian version of the perplexity that begins early in the study of science. Every scientist, in the process of their training, has had to repeatedly discover that their intuitions about the world are simply wrong, or at least incomplete. Even great scientists have come up against the sheer oddity and unpredictability of the world — Albert Einstein, for example, never fully accepted the uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics, something that is now universally accepted by physicists.

This regular confrontation with the limits of one’s own knowledge and skill is not to be taken for granted. The other divisions of the academy, the social sciences and the humanities, deal with matters of such variability and complexity that it is often difficult to say conclusively that anyone, or any theory, is entirely wrong. Marx’s and Freud’s grand theories may not seem nearly as plausible as they once were, but there are thousands of people following their lines of thought without losing the respect of their intellectual peers. But Ptolemaic cosmology or Lamarckian evolution now have, simply, no followers. They have been proved wrong beyond a reasonable doubt (although Lamarck’s ideas, interestingly, turn out to have a grain of truth in a way very different from what he expected). Who is likely to be more intellectually humble — someone who early in her training, and daily in her work, learns that her assumptions have been wrong, or someone who can always argue his way out of any intellectual predicament? It is perhaps no accident that “grade inflation,” in which undergraduates’ grades ratchet ever upwards in a nod to the consumer realities of the modern university, is much less pervasive in the sciences, where you can’t cajole your way into an A. The honest, and humbling, truth is that there is likely more intellectual humility in the average physics laboratory than in the average theology classroom.

For more from the "What I Wish My Pastor Knew" series, visit The Ministry Theorem.

Motivated Belief

As we noted earlier [in this book], scientists are not inclined to subscribe to an a priori [i.e., knowledge that is not dependent on experience or empirical evidence] concept of what is reasonable. They have found the physical world to be too surprising, too resistant to prior expectation, for a simple trust in human powers of rational prevision [i.e., foresight] to be at all persuasive. Instead, the actual character of our encounter with reality has to be allowed to shape our knowledge and thought about the object of our enquiry. Different levels of reality may be expected to have their idiosyncratic characters, and there will not be a single epistemic [knowledge-based] rule for all. A physicist, aware of the counterintuitive natures of the quantum world and of cosmic curved spacetime, is not tempted to make commonsense the sole measure of rational expectation. Because of this, we have seen that the instinctive question for the scientist to ask is not “Is it reasonable?”, as if one knew beforehand the shape that rationality had to take, but “What makes you think that might be the case?” Radical revision of expectation cannot be ruled out, but it will only be accepted if evidence is presented in support of the new point of view that is being proposed. Science trades in motivated belief.

One of the difficulties that face a scientist wanting to speak to his colleagues about the Christian faith is to get across the fact that theology also trades in motivated belief. Many scientists are both wistful and wary in their attitude towards religion. They can see that science’s story is not sufficient by itself to give a satisfying account of the many-layered reality of the world. Those who acknowledge this are open to a search for wider and deeper understanding. Hence the wistful desire for something beyond science. Religion offers such a prospect, but many scientists fear that it does so on unacceptable terms. Their wariness arises from the mistaken idea that religious faith demands that those who embrace it should be willing to believe simply on the basis of submission to some unquestionable authority—the claimed utterances of a divine being, the unchallengeable assertions of a sacred book, the authoritative decrees of a controlling community, whatever it may be—simply declared to be unproblematic deliverances of infallible truth. [This describes the attitude that Polkinghorne likes to call “top-down thinking,” vis-à-vis “bottom-up thinking,” which is mentioned at the end of this excerpt.]

The picture that many scientists have of religious revelation is that it is a collection of non-negotiable propositions, presented to be accepted without further argument or attempt at justification. According to this view, faith is simply a matter of signing on the dotted line without taking too much care about the small print. These scientists fear that religious belief would demand of them an act of intellectual suicide. I believe this to be a quite disastrous misconception. If an uncritical fideism [reliance on faith alone] is what religious belief requires, then I would have the greatest difficulty in being a religious person.

What I am always trying to do in conversation with my not-yet-believing friends is to show them that I have motivations for my religious beliefs, just as I have motivations for scientific beliefs. They may not share my view of the adequacy of these motivations, but at least they should recognize that they are there on offer as matters for rational consideration and assessment. Theology conducted in the context of science must be prepared to be candid about the evidence for its beliefs. This task is one of great importance, since the difficulty of getting a hearing for Christian faith in contemporary society often seems to stem from the fact that many people have never given adequate adult consideration to the possibility of its being true, thinking that they “know” already that there can be no truth in claims so apparently at odds with notions of everyday secular expectation.

While science and religion share a common concern for motivated belief, the character of the motivating evidence is, of course, different in the two cases. [SNIP]  Theology lacks recourse to repeatable experimental confirmation (“Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” Deuteronomy 6:16), as in fact do most other non-scientific explorations of reality. Judgments such as that of the quality of a painting, or the beauty of a piece of music, or the character of a friend, depend upon powers of sympathetic discernment, rather than being open to empirical demonstration. Moreover, I have already said that I believe that no form of human truth-seeking enquiry can attain absolute certainty about its conclusions. The realistic aspiration is that of attaining the best explanation of complex phenomena, a goal to be achieved by searching for an understanding sufficiently comprehensive and well-motivated as to afford the basis for rational commitment.

Michael Polanyi (Source)

Neither science nor religion can entertain the hope of establishing logically coercive proof of the kind that only a fool could deny. No one can avoid some degree of intellectual precariousness, and there is a consequent need for a degree of cautious daring in the quest for truth. Experience and interpretation intertwine in an inescapable circularity. Even science cannot wholly escape this dilemma (theory interprets experiments; experiments confirm or disconfirm theories). We have seen [in another chapter] how considerations of this kind led Michael Polanyi to acknowledge the presence of a tacit dimension in scientific practice, depending on the exercise of skills of judgment, and to speak of science as necessarily being personal knowledge, not absolutely certain but still capable of eliciting justified belief. Recall that he said that he wrote Personal Knowledge to explain how he might commit himself to what he believed (scientifically) to be true, while knowing that it might be false. This stance recognizes what I believe to be the unavoidable epistemic condition of humanity.

When we turn to religious belief, it too cannot lay claim to certainty beyond a peradventure [uncertainty or doubt]—for believers live by faith and not by sight. Yet faith is by no means the irrational acceptance of unquestionable propositions. I believe my religious faith to be well motivated and that is why, for me, Christianity is worthy of acceptance and commitment. Religious people are content to bet their lives that this is so. If theology is to prove persuasive to enquirers in the context of science, it will have to set out the motivations for the assertions that it makes, expressed in as honest and careful a fashion as possible. I believe that the argument will need to have the character of bottom-up thinking, making appeal to specific forms of evidence.

Looking Ahead

In a couple of weeks we will continue exploring Polkinghorne’s approach to “motivated belief,” with further excerpts from this chapter.

References and Credits

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

JIMMY LIN: Currently I’m on faculty at Washington University at St. Louis, where I am a research instructor in the pathology department. Also, a year and a half ago, I founded the Rare Genomics Institute (RGI)—a nonprofit that helps find cures for people with rare diseases.

ER: What qualifies as a “rare disease”?

JL: These are diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntingdon’s disease—diseases that affect less than 200,000 Americans each year. There are over 7000 different rare diseases, and less than 5% of them have any therapy. Altogether, they affect about 25-30 million people.

This creates what we call a “long tail problem”—it’s hard for a top-down research system to create research programs for all 7000 rare diseases. So instead, we are creating a bottom-up platform from which the patients themselves can create research projects and help fund them. We connect patients with physicians and researchers, customize a research program with top medical universities, design the experiment, and then use an online fundraising platform to fund the study through [mostly] friends and family of the patient.

Basically, we create a “foundation in a box.” By partnering with the Rare Genomics Institute, patients and their friends and families who want to study rare diseases don’t have to go through the hoops of creating their own nonprofit or lab—we do that for them. So, instead of creating 7000 different nonprofits, we create a generalized platform from which studies can be conducted.

ER: Who qualifies for care through the Rare Genomics Institute?

JL: Anyone with a rare disease can come to us. The main thing we’re doing right now is diagnosis. When families come to us, they either don’t know the disease that’s affecting them or their child, or they don’t know the gene that’s wrong.

For instance, if a child had a condition that doctors couldn’t identify, his or her parents might come to us for help. What we’d do then is sequence the genes of the mother, father, and child, and compare them to reference genome to determine what mutations each of the parents have. Depending on what the disease is and what the gene causing it is, we can filter out mutations that don’t mean anything using the parents’ genomes—then, after filtering, we can potentially pinpoint the genes that fit the genetic pattern of the disease. This is the first step.

After that, we are building infrastructure to determine the effect of these changes and a way to help. For example, after looking at the literature, we can perhaps design experiments using cells extracted from the patient; this part of the process is different for every disease. Then, if we can determine that there is, for instance, a pathway missing a specific enzyme, we can try using drugs, a bone marrow transplant, or gene therapy to try to put healthy cells into the child… But there’s a variety of diseases, of course, so there’s a variety of different approaches—and we’re just starting to explore these aspects.

ER: How did RGI get started?

JL: It really started when I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins—there was this boy that came to our clinic to be seen. My research was in cancer genome sequencing, and the family had come to our department looking for answers about what was wrong with their son. At that point, the family was almost hopeless—they had gone to so many doctors, run so many tests—I decided I wanted to try to help children like this. That’s when my friends and I decided to start the Rare Genomics Institute.

Currently, there are about 50 researchers associated with the organization, and we are all volunteers. It’s growing much, much faster and been more amazing than we’ve ever imagined—we’re already making an impact. In May of last year, we were able to discover a new disease using the world’s first crowd-sourced, crowd-funded genome. Working with researchers at Yale, we delineated a disease of which our patient was the first identified.

Right now, we’re in the middle of raising funding and hiring staff to make this organization one that is self-sustaining, and to increase its impact even more.

Excerpts from Michael Hickerson Interview

MH: …you call yourself a doxologist. What’s the full term you used in your Jubilee bio?

JL: Medical and scientific doxologist.

MH: How did you decide on that term and what does it mean to you?

JL: I listen to a bunch of teaching by J.I. Packer , who teaches theology at Regent College and is one of the leading thinkers on these things. Interestingly, before any one of his classes, he says “Theology is for doxology,” and then the whole class sings the Doxology together out loud in class. I thought, “Wow, that is so great,” because everybody sometimes learns theology just for intellectual things [instead of for worship].

That’s not just true for theology, it’s for everything: biology is for doxology; chemistry is for doxology. That’s when I started to think, I should consider myself, first and foremost, as a person who praises God in what I do. And then no longer make “Christian” the adjective, right? “Doxologist” is the noun. But then what kind of doxologist am I? So I call myself a medical and scientist doxologist. I would call someone, for example, in the marketplace, a business doxologist. Or, someone who does art, an artistic doxologist. To really have the noun as our identity, and then our vocation as just a descriptor of how we do that.

MH: That’s a great point. A noun is always stronger than the adjective. So, you want that to be the focus, rather than the add-on.

JL: In our current culture, we’re defined by our jobs. It’s having a vocation. I wanted to shift away from that. I didn’t want to be a doctor first and foremost, or a scientist, but one who praises God. And evidently, within science you don’t want to call yourself a Christian Scientist. That’s another religion, so . . .

MH: [laughs] That’s right. I run into that, as well, when I’m teaching or talking about science to Christians. You always run into that stumbling block.

JL: With “scientific doxologist,” people don’t confuse them. You do have to explain what it means. And that gets in a little story actually, on what it means about vocation. It’s a small lesson — a teaching point when you do talk to people about vocation and calling. That’s why I use it.

MH: I guess my final question would be what spiritual practices help sustain you? What helps you stay in contact with God and keep a good foundation?

JL: First, I am interested in many, many different things. I sort of mix it up in terms of spiritual practices. Besides the fundamentals, of course, of quiet time, devotional reading, and scriptural reading, I do theological study because I have to do that academically. I find a lot of time with God through the spiritual disciplines, such as times of solitude — which is very interesting for someone who is in academics to no longer think about ideas but just to be quiet before God — how silence, time to think by yourself, or sitting in silence is also something you should foster.

In terms of spiritual formation, what you really need is definitely a good community of people. I have a very supportive community at my church. I’m the deacon of devotions, so that of course keeps me on track. It encourages me as I, in my own spiritual walk, encourage other people. Fundamentally, I think for all Christians, whether you are academic or no matter your vocation or calling, being in the Word and prayer are the most important things. Doing that and being spiritually fed is what is important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Werner Heisenberg, in a letter to Albert Einstein¹

For many people, science invites awe and religion invites insight. When awe and insight engage, science-and-religion happens.

Ron Cole-Turner²

If we can understand the experiences of the people who work every day in the lab, our dialogues concerning science and religion will be far more fruitful than they would be otherwise. I realised this when someone recently asked me what the highlights had been during my own time as a biologist. I explained that what I appreciated most was the privilege of experiencing science first-hand. My horizons have been expanded, and I now have a better understanding of how vast and complex the natural world is. Appreciating the grandeur of the universe seems to be a universal for humankind, including research scientists in their own peculiar way. Everyone has something to add to a conversation about experiences of awe, as I discovered when I blogged on it recently and invited a number of friends and former colleagues to comment. This sense of awe is a perfect starting point for discussions of science and theology.

Life in the Laboratory

I had always loved finding out how things work, and that was one of the reasons why I chose biology, but actually working ‘at the coal face’ was an eye opener. Living organisms are extremely complicated, so one has to choose only a tiny part of an organism to study: maybe a single gene or a feature of its behaviour. It can take years to understand just one aspect of that tiny part in enough depth to be able to publish an academic paper about it. Experienced scientists describe how the sum of human knowledge is so small as to be insignificant in comparison to what is out there, and I can now appreciate that a little bit. I can also appreciate what fun it is to survey all that un-knowledge, grab a bit of it and try to figure it out.

In the world outside of the lab we hear the headlines about new discoveries, but we have no idea what is behind that one-liner. In reality the story of a discovery in biology may well have started with a graduate student who nervously began their new project, a more experienced scientist who sacrificed precious time to train and supervise them, and the lab head who looked over the data every now and then. There would have been long days and nights in the lab and many false turns before the first piece of promising data emerged. No doubt there were anxious re-runs of experiments to confirm the results, and moments of elation as things started to make sense. The work would have been presented to critical colleagues who suggested further experiments. Frustrating months would have been spent generating the final pieces of data, weeks bent over a computer writing a dense and meticulously referenced paper, submission to a journal, the referees’ criticisms, a few more experiments, resubmission, and a long wait. Finally the paper was accepted and the whole research group joined in the celebration. And this is only the simplest possible version of events – the process of producing successful research can involve large numbers of people over several years, international collaborations, promising leads that go stale, and surprising results from unexpected places.

The ‘real world’ of science is a million miles away from the debates on science and religion that happen in churches, universities and schools throughout the world. Behind every piece of research is a team of people representing different faiths and belief systems, a variety of cultures, social backgrounds and personality types. Perhaps scientists are all a little crazy (who would put in the hours otherwise?), but they’re definitely all motivated in different ways.

The factors that attract people to science are many, though inspiring and supportive parents or teachers can play a large part. The reasons why individuals decide to stick with research, despite all the demands and uncertainties that a life in science brings, are interesting and at times surprising. There is the fascination of understanding the natural world, the value of original research, the prospect of new technologies further down the line, and the privilege of making new discoveries. There is also the opportunity to ask new questions, and the immense satisfaction when things come together and begin to make sense. So far, so predictable. More unexpected drivers are the enjoyable process of tinkering with experimental systems, the opportunity to exercise great creativity, the beauty of scientific data, and a feeling of immense awe when one gets a rare insight into the way the world operates. The rewards for doing science range from the utilitarian to the downright spiritual.

Awe in Science

Awe is an important part of the experience of science – one could almost say it’s a universal. When a scientist feels awe it is usually in response to something complex, precise, ordered, powerful or beautiful. There is an element of unexpectedness and delight, maybe even respect, fear or reverence. Awe always involves the need for some sort of mental adjustment or accommodation: we need to make room in our internal map of the world for this new and amazing experience. The physicist Werner Heisenberg vividly described this process of taking on board a startling new concept when he wrote of his discovery of atomic energy levels:

“In the first moment I was deeply frightened. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a deeply lying bottom of remarkable internal beauty. I felt almost giddy at the thought that I had now to probe this wealth of mathematical structures that nature down there had spread before me.”

Moments of awe are the rare high-points in science, both rationally and emotionally. Finally something is understood. That understanding and the new possibilities it opens up are wonderful, and the story is told and retold. Scientists, as you might expect, respond scientifically, with new questions and investigations. But they also respond in other ways depending on their personalities: aesthetically, using visual representations of the data in different ways; philosophically, as they discuss the ethical implications of the research or the surprising intelligibility of the universe; or spiritually, as they try to make sense of those feelings of awe and wonder at the immensity and beauty of the world.

When Elaine Howard Ecklund carried out some research into the beliefs of scientists in elite US universities, she discovered a surprising fact: 20% of the people that she and her research team spoke to were not members of any religious group, but considered themselves spiritual. For some of these scientists the experience of beauty, awe and wonder in their work led them to believe that there is something beyond science – one could perhaps call it ‘transcendent’ – an experience that motivated some of them in their research, their teaching, and their lives outside of the lab. I remember having a conversation with a colleague who had experienced something along these lines, so I’m not surprised to hear that many others feel the same.

According to the scientist-theologian Alister McGrath, experiences of the transcendent might involve a sense of the ‘numinous’ – a feeling that something ‘other’ might be behind what one is seeing. Or perhaps someone might encounter a deep truth about the unity of reality that strikes them in a particular way. Perhaps more common would be a moment of unexpected clarity – what some might call an epiphany – where suddenly things make sense. Experiences that might be called ‘transcendent’ are rare, but they leave a lasting impression.

The language used by many scientists when they describe the process of discovery is of a reality that was always there. Perhaps it’s not surprising that scientists are ‘realists’; they think that there is a real world outside of ourselves that waits to be discovered. Science does not answer the ultimate questions about the universe, but scientists are human beings so we just ask those questions anyway – sometimes looking for answers in unexpected places.

Spirituality in Science

At the beginning of this piece I mentioned my growing realisation of the size of the scientist’s task. The seeming inexhaustibility of the created order can be overwhelming, but many see this as something positive. There is so much more to explore. As the Jesuit philosopher Enrico Cantore has said, the mystery of the universe lies not in ignorance, but in dazzling intelligibility. Where do these thoughts of transcendence, reality and mystery lead? For Einstein, they were a religion. A Mind other than our own was somehow responsible for this world that we can make sense of using the language of mathematics. For others, the reality we see in the world leads to ideals that transcend differences of language, culture and religion.

We search for meaning, and we long for more. CS Lewis famously describes the world we live in as a pale reflection of the one to come.³ For those who already believe in God, what we see in science makes sense. We live in a world that operates according to principles that we can understand and describe mathematically. We can utilize what we find for good or evil (and everything in between), and what we discover is both beautiful and awe-inspiring. William Whewell, the nineteenth-century polymath and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, said that ‘We must find the right thread on which to string the pearls of our observations, so that they disclose their true pattern.’

For me, what we see in science is not evidence for God, but works well as a thought experiment. What would you expect if God existed? In the context of faith, science increases my sense of awe and wonder and helps me to worship God in a more genuine way. The Christian songwriter Matt Redman said that we sometimes ‘take the extraordinary revelation of God and somehow manage to make Him sound completely ordinary’. Science has the power to expand our horizons and helps us to see how great God is. The dazzling intelligibility of the world increases our humility, as we realise that because we ourselves are a fragile and finite part of the universe, we will never be able to fully grasp what we see in an objective intellectual way.⁴ Our response to what we see in the world is rational, emotional and active: worship as well as systematic theology.

The highest mountain peaks and the deepest canyon depths are just tiny echoes of His proclaimed greatness. And the brightest stars above, only the faintest emblems of the full measure of His glory.⁵

Notes

The main sources for this piece are Enrico Cantore, Scientific Man: The Humanistic Significance of Science (New York: ISH Publications, 1977); Olaf Pedersen, “Christian belief and the fascination of science” in Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, Eds. Robert John Russell, William R. Stoeger & George V. Coyne. (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1988), 125-140.; Alister McGrath, The Open Secret (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).

1. From Enrico Cantore, Scientific Man: The Humanistic Significance of Science (New York: ISH Publications, 1977)

2. Ron Cole-Turner, ‘What Do You Find Most Interesting or Surprising About the S&R Discussion Today?’, Science & Religion Today, 21st May 2012, http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2012/05/21/what-do-you-find-most-interesting-or-surprising-about-the-sr-discussion-today-ron-cole-turner-answers/

3. In C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory. SPCK, 1942

4. Jame Schaefer, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), Chapter 1.

5. Matt Redman, Facedown (Eastbourne: Survivor, 2004).

The first video, “10 Questions with Katherine Hayhoe”, introduces the scientist in a brief and lighthearted interview. Hayhoe is presented with 10 questions concerning her personal life and beliefs. When asked, she explains that one thing people should know about Christianity is that having a relationship with the God of the universe is one of the most incredible experiences that a person can have. As the video unfolds, the viewer quickly begins to realize that, despite her unique profession of two seemingly incompatible beliefs, Hayhoe is a remarkably sane and “normal” individual. Her role model, she explains, is her father-- the person who first introduced her to science and showed her that it could be “really cool”. On a more serious note, the scientist admits that being both a scientist and a Christian can be difficult. The most frustrating thing about her position, she says, is the amount of disinformation which is targeted at her very own Christian community.

In the second video, “Climate Change Evangelist”, Katharine Hayhoe delves into deeper discussion of the perceived conflict between climate change and Christian faith. She explains that admitting her identity as a Christian scientist can be uncomfortable. Since evangelicals are the targets of much disinformation concerning science in general -- and specifically the science surrounding climate change -- many people in the church have a misguided view of the subject and do not look kindly at her career choice. One woman encountered by Hayhoe at a church in Texas, for example, believed that global warming was a lie taught in schools to mislead her children. In an effort to realign misguided views like these, Katharine Hayhoe and her husband wrote a book addressing the deep-rooted emotions often associated with climate change. People fear that addressing the climate issue will bring forth changes in the economy and uproot their way of life. However, Hayhoe encourages her viewers to act out of love, as the Bible calls us to do, rather than out of fear. Acting out of love inspires us to consider the poor and disadvantaged people around the globe when we respond to the reality of a changing climate.

In the final segment of this three part video montage, Hayhoe addresses the question of what climate change means. Specifically, she is concerned about how global warming affects people on a personal level. While global warming generally brings to mind melting ice caps and polar bears, its implications are far more widespread, affecting the lives of everyone around the world- from cotton farmers in Texas to public health workers in Chicago. If nothing is done to change current emission levels, the number of days per year which exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, will begin to increase dramatically, and if emissions are increased, many areas will even develop extreme conditions like those seen currently in Death Valley. Hayhoe’s goal is to demonstrate clearly that the only way to preserve the world for future generations is to significantly reduce dependence on inefficient means of getting energy and instead transition to cleaner renewable energy sources.

Editor's Note: These videos first appeared on the Nova program "The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my previous essay, I discussed “Darwin’s finches” and how surprisingly little Charles Darwin himself had to say about them. In fact, it was actually the British ornithologist David Lack (1910-1973) who conducted the critical research that immortalized the finches in biology textbooks and popular lore. In 1973, the eminent German zoologist Ernst Mayr wrote:

Already well known among professional ornithologists, his work on the Galapagos finches gave David Lack world fame… There is no modern textbook of zoology, evolution or ecology which does not include an account of his work.¹

Ernst W. Mayr

Decades have passed since Mayr wrote these words, and David Lack’s name has largely faded from public discourse. On the other hand, the Galapagos finches have become one of the most recognized symbols of evolution in the world today. Does it really matter whether Lack or Darwin gets credit for describing the evolution of these remarkable birds?

Insofar as evolutionary theory contrasted with religious belief, it makes a big difference. In a culture that is eager to equate evolution with atheism, it should come as no surprise that these birds are only known as “Darwin’s finches”. Darwin’s personal struggles and ultimate rejection of Christianity are well documented, and people are eager to link his loss of faith to his evolutionary theory. David Lack, on the other hand, began his scientific career as an agnostic, but shortly after publishing his famous book on the evolution of Galápagos finches, he converted to Christianity! ²

A Christian at the forefront of evolutionary biology

Lack’s Christian conversion did not mark the end of his scientific achievements, either. In fact, he continued as a prolific researcher until just weeks before he died. Among his many achievements, he was Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (1945-1973), Fellow of the Royal Society, and President of both the International Ornithological Congress (1962-66) and the British Ecological Society (1964-65). His fellow scientists held him in great esteem:

He was described as one of the most outstanding among world ornithologists; he was certainly this, but he was also one of the world’s leading evolutionists. All the time one saw developing his use of birds as material for the study of wider, deeper, biological problems.³

David Lack at the International Ornithological Congress, 1962.

Clearly David Lack was an outstanding scientist, and his commitment to Christianity did not tarnish, hinder, or undermine his research on evolution. But we might also ask, what was Lack like as a Christian? Did he keep his faith hidden from view, afraid that it might compromise his reputation as a scientist? Ernst Mayr, who interacted with David Lack professionally and personally for nearly 40 years, had this to say:

I have known only few people with such deep moral convictions as David Lack. He applied very high standards to his own work and was not inclined to condone shoddiness, superficiality and lack of sincerity in others. This did not always go well with those who preferred to compromise in favour of temporary expediency. David had been raised in an environment in which great stress was layed on moral principles and this attitude was later reinforced by his Christian faith. This explains his extraordinary unselfishness and modesty, and his great devotion to his family, to his students, to his friends, and to all the things that he lived for. The equanimity, indeed serenity, with which he faced death after his terminal cancer had been diagnosed is further evidence of the strength which his faith gave him.⁴

Like Asa Gray⁵ before him, and Francis Collins⁶ after, David Lack was an sincere, devout Christian, as well as a leading scientist who employed evolutionary theory to make brilliant discoveries about the natural world. Though Lack did not see any conflict between his scientific and Christian beliefs, he was sympathetic to the concerns of his fellow Christians. Therefore, ten years after publishing his masterpiece on Darwin’s Finches, Lack wrote another book entitled Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief: The Unresolved Conflict.

Originally published in 1957, this book deals with the very same science and faith questions that Christians struggle with today— topics like randomness and chance, death in nature, miracles, and evolutionary ethics. While it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to completely resolve these matters, Lack offered numerous insights both as a devout Christian and one of the world’s leading biologists.

Let’s take a brief look at how Lack addressed some of these questions.

Blind Chance or Divine Plan?

Evolutionary theory does not invoke supernatural forces in explaining the history of life on Earth; instead, it relies on naturally-occurring processes to account for the vast diversity of life. Additionally, it explains animal behavior largely in terms of survival and reproduction, without appealing to any higher purpose of life. Taken together, does this imply that God is absent, and that our lives are ultimately meaningless?

David Lack responded,

Behind the criticism that Darwinism means that evolution is either random or rigidly determined lies the fear that evolution proceeds blindly, and not in accordance with a divine plan. This is another problem that really lies outside the terms of reference of biology. It is true that biologists have inferred that, because evolution occurs by natural selection, there is no divine plan; but they are being as illogical as those theologians whom they rightly criticize for inferring that, because there is a divine plan, evolution cannot be the result of natural selection.⁷

When rendering judgment on the ultimate meaning of life, biologists are speaking from their person beliefs, not from scientific authority. Moreover, Lack pointed out that many science enthusiasts have employed the concept of “randomness” in ambiguous and misleading ways:

Mutations are random in relation to the needs of the animal, but natural selection is not. Selection, as the word implies, is the reverse of chance.⁸

In support of his view, Lack pointed out that convergent evolution has produced uncanny resemblances between distantly-related species across the world, notably among marsupials in Australia. Different evolutionary trajectories can lead to very similar results.⁹

Death in Nature

After addressing concerns about the seeming “randomness” of evolution, Lack turned to another great concern, the role of death in natural selection:

Various writers–some Christian and others agnostic–have been troubled about natural selection not only because it seems too random, but also because it is so unpleasant.¹⁰

Image courtesy John Marsh Photography via Flikr

Genetic mutations are generally harmful, and for evolution by natural selection to produce new forms of life, an awful lot of organisms must die. For many Christians, it is inconceivable that a loving and merciful God would allow death on such a vast scale.

But Lack also pointed out that rejecting evolutionary theory doesn’t actually get rid of the problem of death. Regardless of what we think about evolution, the brute fact of mass extinction remains. Fossils of innumerable animals, plants, and microorganisms clearly demonstrate that the vast majority of species that have ever lived are now dead. It may be quite troubling for us to observe that our planet is a giant graveyard of natural history, but rejecting evolution will not change this fact.

Some Christians conclude that death could not have been part of the divine plan; instead, it must be the work of the devil, or the result of human sin. But this interpretation contains an implicit assumption that death is always evil. Is this really true? David Lack offered two intriguing insights:

Blue-cheeked Bee-eater (Merops persicus) pair in
courtship, seen in Basai, Gurgaon, India.
Image courtesy Koshy Koshy.

1. For a population to maintain a stable size, all births must be balanced by a corresponding number of deaths. A world in which no animals die is a world in which no animals are born. That means no reproduction, no courtship, and by implication, no singing birds—much to the dismay of ornithologists and people in love!

2. Some people, taking cues from Isaiah 11:6-7, suppose that in a perfect world, animals only eat plants. But in fact, plants themselves depend on the bacterial decay of dead organisms. If animals didn't die, then essential nutrients would disappear from the ground, and plants could not continue to grow. Eventually, there would be nothing left for animals to eat, and all life would cease.¹¹

Miracles

Many Christians are uncomfortable with evolutionary theory because it denies a miraculous, supernatural origin of life. They fear that if those miracles are denied, it might lead people to reject the possibility of miracles altogether, including the central feature of the Christian faith—the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

As a devout Christian, David Lack certainly affirmed the fundamental tenets of the gospel. But at the same time, he explained to his readers that invoking miracles to account for unusual features of the natural world is not particularly helpful when trying to deepen our understanding of God’s great multitude of creatures:

[The biologist's] research depends on repeated observations. It need not, as popularly supposed, consist solely, or even mainly of measurements and experiments, but unless events are repeated, they cannot be assessed by science. Hence truly unique events come outside the domain of science, though biologists are not usually convinced when told they must, therefore, leave such problems as miracles to others. For one of the chief ways in which research has advanced is through the discovery of apparent exceptions to the known rules, and if further study shows the exceptions to be replicable, new regularities are revealed from which modified rules can be propounded. This method has been so successful that the biologist tends to doubt whether there are any types of irregularity, or seeming irregularity, that will not yield to it.¹²

But just because a scientist cannot repeat a particular event doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Both natural history and human history contain unique events that only happened once. As we peer into the past, the difficulty of discerning fact from fiction inspires us to further investigate the mysteries that surround us.

Conclusion

David Lack’s book Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief was quite insightful, but his enduring achievements took place in evolutionary biology, a place where many Christians are afraid to tread. While it is significant that he himself found no contradiction between his faith and his science, perhaps the greatest testament to the compatibility between Christian faith and evolution is the life he led as a believer in both. As we saw in Ernst Mayr’s candid praise, Lack reflected the light of Christ through both his personal and his professional relationships.

Today, many voices in our culture still insist that evolution is incompatible with a sincere faith in Jesus, but a careful look at history demonstrates otherwise. In the future, perhaps more people of faith will have confidence to study biology knowing that one of the most iconic symbols of evolution—the Galapagos finches—owe their fame in large part to a devout Christian named David Lack.

Notes

1. Mayr (1973) “David L. Lack.” Ibis: 433.
2. Larson, E. J. Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York, Basic Books, 2001: 218. See also Lack, David. (1973) “My life as an amateur ornithologist.” Ibis: 431.
3. Alister C. Hardy (1973). "David L. Lack." Ibis: 436.
4. Mayr (1973) “David L. Lack.” Ibis: 433.
5. For more about Asa Gray, see the BioLogos FAQ “How have Christians responded to Darwin’s Origin of Species?”
6. See Francis Collins’ autobiography The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for his Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007) (book info)
7. Lack, David. Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief: The Unresolved Conflict. Methuen & Co., 1957: 67.
8. Lack, p65.
9. For more on convergent evolution and the possibility that evolution could be compatible with some form of divine purpose, see the work of Simon Conway Morris, especially The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? Templeton Press, 2008.
10. Lack, p72.
11. Lack, pp75-76.
12. Lack, p82.

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

Author's Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many people say that science and religion need to be even further apart. I disagree, however. And there are many scientists who agree with me.

I am a Christian. I believe that God is the ultimate reality and that the world, including me, was created by God. But this is not just an idle affirmation, a faith statement to be recited in church on Sunday. I find my experience of the world enriched in several ways by my belief in God.

For starters, my first contact with the world that God created is through its great beauty. I write these words from my desk in a sunroom on the back of my house. Outside my window a row of Newport plums is in bloom, their delicate pink flowers lighting up the landscape. My andromedas are also blooming. The dogwood, whose branches brush my window when the wind blows, is starting to bud. Directly in front of me the sun is coming up, visible through the forest. New spring foliage at the tops of the trees is becoming illuminated. In a few minutes I will have to pull my blind to keep the sun out of my eyes.

A choir of birds is singing, celebrating the arrival of the new day. I can tell from their joyous song that they must not be Red Sox fans. The sound of the birds is so welcome, in contrast to the traffic noise from the front of my house, which starts up shortly after the birds each morning.

Scientific explanations exist for all that I see and hear outside my window. And explanations can be proposed for why humans enjoy nature so much. But faith is God is not about explanations. We do not believe in God because we need to explain this or that feature of the world. That is what science is for. We believe in God because we see something deeper in the world, something that transcends the scientific explanations.

The experience of natural beauty is available to everyone, and only the flattest of souls cannot enjoy scenes like the one outside my window right now.

As a scientist, however, there are other layers to this experience. Underneath the artistic beauty of nature lies the deeper beauty of a system of natural laws. All the wonders in front of me are built from a few dozen different atoms -- hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. They combine and recombine to make life possible. Their molecular arrangements are the pixels of nature's most beautiful scenes.

These atoms are all built of protons, electrons, and neutrons. In all the atoms, electrons hum about tiny nuclear cores, following an amazing set of mathematical laws. I can still recall those giddy undergraduate days, decades ago, when I learned to solve the equations that specify what these electrons can do. The solutions were difficult and required the better part of a math degree to produce, but they were elegant beyond belief.

I remember working into the wee hours of the morning, losing track of time, hoping that I wasn't making mistakes along the way. And then finally a solution appeared on the paper in front of me that was so breathtakingly beautiful that I knew there was no way I had made a mistake. The solution was so simple. All you had to do was plug numbers into the final result -- simple integers like one, two, three -- and electronic arrangements would pop out. It was Sudoku on steroids.

The beauty of these mathematical patterns is a rich part of the scientific experience of nature. It is what draws people into physics and often turns them into detached and marginally functional mystics, like Newton and Einstein.

What seems the most remarkable of all, though, is the way that the whole system works together. That sun coming up in front of me is 93 million miles away. It takes eight minutes for the light generated by its fusion reactions to make the long trek to earth. Some of the light arriving outside my window is absorbed by chlorophyll molecules in the plants and becomes stored energy. Some of this energy was in the lettuce I ate last night in my salad. Now that energy is driving my metabolism, keeping me alive, letting me experience this new day, powering my fingers now on my keyboard. Some of the sunlight warms the ocean after a long New England winter, coaxing summer into existence. The light makes it possible to view the scenery outside my window. Everything I see becomes visible only when light strikes it.

I also note that this same multi-tasking sun provides the gravitational force that keeps the earth in its stable orbit, tracing out a mathematically perfect ellipse several billions times in a row.

The full experience of a new day is a complex mix of wonder and science, facts and beauty, mathematics and color. Science explains much of it, and what is left over is not so much in need of explanation as it is in need of celebration.

My belief in God provides a framework for this celebration. In some way that I cannot articulate, I praise God for each new day, dimly aware that I am sharing the experience with the artist who put it all in place and put me here to enjoy it.

This piece originally appeared April 21, 2010, on The Huffington Post.

Along the side of our patio in front of our family garden, I grow grapes. I was inspired to grow them from the tradition of my mother's homeland in Cyprus, where grapes, olives, figs and lemons adorn the patios of each house. I was challenged to grow them well by the words of Jesus in John 15: "I am the vine, you are the branches, I will prune you to produce much fruit." Pruning is the secret to successful grapes, but that's another story.

The point is that in tending that grape arbor and our family garden, and exploring the beautiful landscapes we are blessed with in Virginia, my wife Elizabeth and I, along with our three daughters, are in communion with the Creator and Sustainer of heaven and earth. That may sound like a lofty statement, but for me, nature, His created order, is where I find Him most personally. I have known and recognized this since I was a boy.

Though born in Richmond, I was raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, where my father and I would fish along the Elizabeth River and the Chesapeake Bay. With my friends, I hunted in the Great Dismal Swamp. My father grew up on my Grandpa's farm in Tennessee near Bristol and he took our family back there often. My grandfather was one of those vanishing breeds of men who had fidelity and love for the land. He was dependent on the land for his food and a few cash crops for income. He was intimately tied to the rhythms of the seasons and his work in the fields.

My grandfather and my aunts and uncles looked at this work as a partnership with the Lord. They taught me how to care for the land, as well as the names of plants that grew in the forests and along the streams that surrounded their farms. They also taught me skills that made me appreciate their way of life. Through these early experiences, I became fascinated with an essential question: What makes nature tick? I also developed an interest in the spiritual relationship between God and His creation. And so the journey began.

I took up the study of biology at Virginia Tech focusing on stream ecology, and then worked as a field biologist surveying rivers throughout the Southeast. Eventually, I returned to graduate school to study forest ecology in the Shenandoah National Park. My faith in the biblical account of creation was challenged by professors who taught evolution as the mode of creation of living things.

This challenge I brushed aside until I began teaching biology at a community college in Clifton Forge. The words in the textbooks and the words of Genesis took on new meaning. Did they contradict each other? Could all forms of life really evolve by chance? Weren't we created in His image? My students questioned me about this conflict and I started a search for the answers.

For several years I wrestled with these questions as an intellectual exercise. I began to make progress only when I started answering with my heart along with my head, aided by that other gift received from my parents, trust in the power of prayer. Looking back, this doubt and questioning, this need to have all the answers, made my faith real exactly as it taught me that I don't need to have all the answers: that is where faith comes in.

I do know with certainty that God created the heavens and the earth, and manages and sustains His creation even today. I cannot know with certainty how He did it with such precision and beauty. How God created is still a mystery that science, by its methods, tries to discover and cannot fully explain, and one that the Bible is mostly silent on.

To me, there should be no contradiction between science and the Bible. In the beginning, God was there and science cannot speak to that. It is by faith that I know that God created the world not by chance, but for his purposes and glory. The precision of natural order and its beauty have always focused me on the Creator, just as Paul states in Romans that all creation bears witness to God. The more I study nature and natural sciences, the more it drives me back to God who made all things.

In time, I was hired by The Nature Conservancy in Richmond as the ecologist and director of a new biological inventory for Virginia. Then another faith question came. Why did the Church not speak to the Christian practice of stewardship as it relates to creation? Why did many in my profession worship the creation and not the Creator?

I stumbled upon the work of Wendell Berry, who has since become one of my favorite authors. In a short essay he wrote in 1988 entitled God and Country, he said we must deal with the true meaning of Genesis 1:28 where God told Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it." He was right. Berry noted that many people use the words "dominion" and "subdue" as "unconditional permission to use the world as they please." I came to realize, like many, that such an interpretation is contradicted by the rest of the Bible.

The ecological teaching of the Bible is clear. God made the world and it pleased Him. It is His and He loves it. He has never given up title to it. He wants us to take excellent care of it. In Genesis we see it in His instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden; in Leviticus 20, we see it in the Sabbath year and the Jubilee—laws governing land use, land rest and God's ownership of the land; in Psalm 24 David affirms "the earth is the Lord's and everything in it"; Jesus, in Matthew 6, tells us not to worry, for if God cares for the birds and plants, he'll also care for you; and in Romans 8:19, Paul says the creation eagerly awaits freedom when right relationships will be restored.

Biblical ecology is really a moral understanding of what God expects of us in relation to the natural world, but also in relation to the other people with whom we share it. This kind of stewardship has only been recently talked about in the Church. It means careful management, not destruction and abuse. It is infinitely practical because a healthy planet is in our best interest (we depend on its fruitfulness, after all), but biblical stewardship is also an act of loving our neighbors as ourselves, of loving even our children and grandchildren, by leaving them a decent place to live.

Psalm 8 lays out a mystery that, with the rest of Scripture in mind, invites a response in action as well as praise: "When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him?" After more than 20 years with The Nature Conservancy in Richmond, Elizabeth and I have made a home for our family and have a church home, as well—all places in which we can respond to that mystery by bearing fruit. And though my answering the call to use my talents and time in each of those realms branches in many directions, it is always rooted in my awe of God, who created and sustains the universe and seeks a relationship with us. It is a call I live out in my vocation of protecting and restoring the lands and waters in Virginia, and a call our family lives out in our garden, in our frequent excursions in the outdoors, our worship of the Lord in church and at home, and, yes, even in growing grapes.

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

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

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

From Fun and Games to Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Further Reading:

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

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



]]> Sun, 13 May 12 12:53:04 -0700 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/scientists-tell-their-stories-owen-gingerich?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/scientists-tell-their-stories-owen-gingerich?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication When it came time to go to graduate school, one of Owen Gingerich's science professors told him “If you feel a calling to go to astronomy, you should give it a try, because we shouldn’t let atheists take over any particular field.”

Dr. Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and history of science at Harvard University. He grew up in a Christian home and attended a Christian college in northern Indiana that had a motto of “Culture for service”, something that was very important in thinking about what he might do with his life.

When it came time to go to graduate school, one of his science professors told him “If you feel a calling to go to astronomy, you should give it a try, because we shouldn’t let atheists take over any particular field.”

And so he went on to a career in astronomy. In the late 1980’s, Dr. Gingerich had a unique opportunity to give a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania on the topic of science and Christian faith. Since then, he’s been trying to help people better understand God’s creation. For example, God could have made the universe in many different ways, but given the particular way it appears, it suggests that we wouldn’t be here if the universe were not very, very old, because out of the big bang came hydrogen and helium, but not oxygen and the iron we need for our blood, for instance. Those things came from the interiors of giant stars and had to cook for long, long periods of time before we got those elements abundant enough for sustainable life. It’s a marvelous picture, and Dr. Gingerich is actively involved in telling people about it.

A member of a church that I was attending once told me that I was “giving bullets to the enemy” because I claimed to be a Christian and an Evolutionary Biologist. I responded (shamefully, with equally as little Christ-likeness) by saying that it was also possible to lead people astray by telling them that, to be a Christian, they had to dismiss scientific evidence in favor of something akin to fortune telling using sheep entrails—i.e. “Creation Science.” Understandably, this touched a nerve. Please don’t misunderstand me; I was not trying to be dismissive of his viewpoint, I was trying to be understanding, compassionate and loving. I confess to failing miserably at the attempt.

But you should not think that evolutionary biologist colleagues can be any less judgmental, or that I can be any more forgiving of their attitudes. That’s why when the evolutionary biologist accused me of having “no integrity” for saying that I could be both a Christian and an Evolutionary Biologist I responded that I was not the One he would have to answer to regarding his unbelief. I guess it isn’t surprising that that seemed to touch a nerve as well. For your information, I pray the same prayer for both my non-Christian, scientist colleague and my church acquaintance; that they both would come to the realization that we all need desperately God’s grace and forgiveness.

On the other hand, I must admit that in my least charitable moments I just pray that they would get a grip, start enjoying some hobby, or maybe a spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend, and in the process forget to accuse me, and others like me, of giving aid and comfort to those evil folks who stand on the other side of the philosophical fence. My prayer for myself is that my frustration over such interactions would leak quickly out the bottom of my left foot, never to return.

I really would like to be much kinder and gentler than the oft-times nasty, vindictive, hyperbolic tirades pulsating between the extreme elements of the so-named (by the other ‘side’) ‘spiteful, hell-bound evolutionists’ and the ‘brain-dead Christians.’ But it really is tempting to challenge the attitudes of the opposing evolutionist and creationist guerilla fighters mentioned above, and I suppose such an exposé could be both entertaining and enlightening. In fact, it might even cause my friends, who stand firmly in one camp or the other, to smile and maybe even take pity on us poor souls sitting on the razor wire fence between the warring factions.

That gives me an idea. Maybe my position is sort of like being a U.N. Peacekeeper in Lebanon. I mean you can’t get between the two opponents without getting shot at, you’re not supposed to shoot back, and you look somewhat silly in those powder blue helmets. In other words, no one takes you seriously, and your only useful role is as a negative example for parents to use: “Eat your broccoli and drink your milk, or you might grow up to be a U.N. Peacekeeper...or even a Christian Evolutionary Biologist.” The analogy of being a member of a mainly powerless peacekeeping force also illustrates how silly the “bullets to the enemy” accusation is. I mean why in the world would I prance (I am confident in my level of masculinity) into the camps of the vehemently-positive-of-their-correctness combatants, hand them ammunition and then prance (see above) back into no-man’s land all the while being shot at from both sides?

Hmmm. Maybe that is exactly what I am doing. I mean, look-it, very religious people who (at least according to my evolutionist friends) occupy the territory of mindless oafs see me as Satan’s Toady. To these religious adherents, I am Scut Farkus’ (a la A Christmas Story) right-hand man, Grover Dill: I have green teeth, dress in a James Dean-esque leather jacket, terrorize unsuspecting kids into submission (in my case, into believing the heresy of Evolutionary Biology), and am only brave when my enormous minder—made up of degrees, books, etc.—is starkly visible. As appealing as this image is to me, I really don’t fit the stereotype; my teeth are actually a shade of yellowy-brown due to my long-lasting love affair with espresso.

What about the opposing viewpoint of my hyper-enlightened, hyper-rational, hyper-intelligent, hyper-etc. evolutionist colleagues? Unfortunately, to them I am 1) suffering from a delusion – self-induced, or pathological, 2) a spy for those anti-evolution wackos, or 3) someone who just wants to be able to make loads of money from writing books and articles on how a person can be both a Christian and an Evolutionist. (O.K., so that last one is my idea.)

Some might conclude from the above that I, and others of my ilk, feel like a person from an ethnic minority at a skinhead convention—a bit vulnerable and a bit undervalued. Well then are Christian Evolutionary Biologists simultaneously heretical and ignorant? Realistically, if I am giving ammunition to each of two opposing factions, how then can I hope to be a card-carrying member of either? I guess my answer is that putting a bunch more cards into my wallet just increases the size of the lump I have to sit on. In other words, I either have to be content with a throbbing pain in my derriere, or I have to jettison trying to simultaneously please two groups of fairly discontented people. Christ talked about trying to serve God and the pursuit of money. I think that when I get depressed about not feeling a part of either of the groups that I truly like and understand—i.e., “Mindless Christians” and “Godless Evolutionary Biologists”—I am suffering from putting people ahead of God.

I intend this essay as a challenge to both myself, and anyone else interested enough to take the time to think about the various issues. The position of Christian Evolutionary Biologist continues to challenge me because I don’t see how all the pieces can possibly fit into a coherent picture. As someone who demands neat answers I find this frustrating and confusing. I do, however, believe that what I am outlining gives some sort of a platform for discussion, at least if we take Theodosius Dobzhansky’s words – quoted at the first of this essay – to heart. For this to happen, Christians need to refrain from using the Bible as a Biology/Geology/Chemistry/Physics textbook in order to prove to non-Christian Evolutionists that they (the Christians) are not unintelligent.

As an aside, Christians also need to quit trying to prove God’s existence through probability formulae. There is no danger of this outcome of course, but if we were able to prove God’s existence in this manner, then we would be God, and that would be a pretty disappointing turn of events. I really want to be careful here to not be ungracious, yet I have to say that misusing the Bible and attempting to prove God’s existence through cleverness tends to prove the non-Christian Evolutionists’ point...that some Christians—in their zeal to see themselves as triumphing over non-Christians—really can look pretty unintelligent.

In the same way, Evolutionists need to quit trying to convince people that understanding evolutionary processes is anywhere near as important as investigating the possibility of having a parent/child-type relationship with an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God Who is able to judge people and send them to Heaven or Hell depending on whether or not they are members of His family. It flat won’t make a bit of difference if I work out the natural selection coefficients that were necessary to produce every species that ever existed if I end up denying God’s existence to my eternal regret.

The Apostle Paul wrote that Christians were people that should be pitied most if the basis of their religion (the resurrection of Christ) was found to be a hoax. In my weak humanity, I would have to disagree somewhat with this Pauline hyperbole. I would say that it is a whole lot better to have had a difficult time here on earth because you tried to live a “Christian life” and then die to realize that there is nothing on the other side (or actually not realize it because you aren’t there...well...you know what I mean) than it is to put your hope in your intellectual exercises and then die, come face-to-face with God, and thus discover that you weren’t nearly as clever as you supposed. I would suggest that the latter state would be infinitely and eternally worse than being a person from an ethnic minority at a skinhead convention.

When astrophysicist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman first published the following posts as a paper in the BioLogos Scholarly Essay series, the essay’s subtitle asked the question, “Can Recent Scientific Discovery Inform and Inspire Our Worship and Service?” Over the next few weeks, we will look at Dr. Wiseman's answer to that query—an emphatic “Yes!”. But in this first installment we begin by describing some of the reasons such a posture of worship through science is not more common in the contemporary church than it already is.

Oh Lord My God, when I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; How great Thou art, how great Thou art

(Carl Boberg, 1885; Trans. Stuart Hine 1949)

The words of this great hymn convey the proper overwhelming sense in which the wondrous Creation of God should translate directly into a response of awe and praise from mind, body, and spirit. The writer sees and hears the wonders of nature with his body, considers with his mind what all this implies, and responds with songs from his soul.

But is this worshipful response happening in our Christian congregations today? I believe this kind of response to the Creation can and should happen within the hearts of God’s people and wherever congregations of believers are gathered. Such power can even unify believers who differ on lesser matters as we all look up outside of ourselves at the same wonders and respond with the same praise. As an astronomer, I have felt the sense of being “blown away” by seeing images of countless distant galaxies, or even by just looking up at the array of stars overhead on a dark moonless night and sensing something of the “big-ness” of God.

There are impediments to realizing the fullness of this kind of worship experience for many Christian congregations today. I believe four of the main culprits are ignorance, distraction, controversy, and uncertainty.

Let me start with the first, and clarify up front that by ignorance I am simply referring to being uninformed, rather than the sometimes more negative connotations of the word. How up-to-date is the scientific knowledge of average, educated, committed evangelical church members and pastors?Americans, both adults and schoolchildren, are not ranking favorably compared to the rest of the world’s developed nations in science knowledge these days. We enjoy our technological achievements and resulting gadgets, but true comprehension of scientific principles and recent discoveries is not a strong part of our culture and national conversation these days.

This is reflected directly in what kinds of things are (and are not) discussed in church. In my own generally very good church experience growing up in mainstream America, I can only remember science and nature being discussed in a general way (e.g., we should look at the beauty of flowers and mountains and animals and thank God), except for once in a specific way in a children’s sermon (where we were told we should not believe we came from monkeys!). That was a while ago, but how are science issues handled today? Do pastors speak about the evidence from cosmic background light for a spectacular beginning to the universe? Are the genetic codes being mapped out for animals and humans resulting in praise for God’s amazing “blueprint”? Are the advancements in nanotechnology and biotechnology and medicine subjects for discussion of good and poor uses of technology in church? The answer to these is, of course, “no”, for the most part, yet even issues seemingly more relevant to the daily lives of parishioners are often driven by current technology and scientific advancement, and an informed congregation can better understand how to praise, pray, discern, dialogue, and serve.

Related to being uninformed is the condition of distraction for many evangelical Christians today. The distractions of overloaded schedules, pressured jobs, divided families, and even church environments of entertainment-based worship and activities can impede a lifetime of quiet listening, learning, and contemplation. If there is no encouragement from church leaders to learn and incorporate nature and current scientific discovery into contemplation and praise and service, then there will be no space available in the lives and activities of congregants for what should be the resulting awe and praise.

But what does it mean to be informed about science in today’s evangelical congregations? Too often this has implied a direct relation to controversy, the third reason science is not often inspiring worship these days. There are many voices trying to “inform” Christians about science, and for the average evangelical congregant, discernment about which authority figure to believe can be difficult. Many times Christians are presented with a clear and strong implication that scientific conclusions, especially on issues related to origins of the universe and of life, are part of the secular “World” camp rather than the camp of “God’s Truth”. And Christians “know” that they must be on one side or the other of this stark line of worldliness. Often in more conservative churches a teaching will come from the pulpit that goes something like this: “Scientists tell us that *...+, but they cannot give a reason how *...+ happened; but WE know how: God is responsible!” Therefore any serious consideration of a scientific understanding of the development of the universe and life implies that one is “compromising” the teaching of the Word of God, rather than studying the details of how God works. In Scripture, however, never is the study and experience of nature seen as somehow antithetical to knowing and following the Lord; just the opposite in fact!

This often boils down to the correct interpretation of Scripture. Through sermons, radio spots, television shows, and literature, evangelical Christians are hearing adamant messages conflating the acceptance of modern scientific discovery with worldly compromise, or else providing alternative ideas that are not entirely satisfying. From Young-Earth Creationists, they hear that a literal reading of the Biblical creation account is the only correct one, so all scientific discovery must be reinterpreted to fit a recent Creation. But this robs them of the sense of awe we glean from the magnitude of space and time revealed by astronomy, geology, and fossils. From the Intelligent Design community, they hear the message that life (and perhaps the entire universe) is too complicated to develop through natural processes alone, and therefore that God’s work requires miraculous inputs of information into the natural world. This implies that somehow natural processes must not be fully God’s processes, or that God’s work through them is somehow inadequate. They also hear the message to “teach the controversy,” so that somehow by proclaiming that there is a controversy about natural processes as an adequate explanatory tool for natural history, the controversy will in fact become real. They are then surprised to find out from either advanced scientific study or from the Evolutionary Creation voices that in fact there is no great controversy in the scientific community about the basic structure and timeline of the natural history of the universe and life; that in fact there need be no theological debate about how God brought (and is bringing) the universe and life into being, rather, the issue is whether God is in fact real and responsible for all we know and are. And yet even this unifying message can sometimes seem to gloss over the central theological issues of suffering and death and fallen-ness in Creation. So every approach to origins and evolution evokes some difficulties and challenges with which the Christian congregant must grapple.

Next week, Part 2 concludes Dr. Wiseman's discussion of the stumbling blocks that can stand between the church and its appreciation of science as a means of worship, and turns to the ways that the pursuit of God through study of the created world can help overcome those difficulties by pointing us directly to the Lord.

Perusing the writings of atheistic scientists and philosophers like Daniel Dennett, one could easily get the impression that arriving at a simpler explanation for something equates to a revelation that things are “lower, cruder, and more trivial.” But at the heart of Barr’s critique is the observation that in fundamental physics and advanced mathematics, “simpler” does not mean more chaotic and inchoate, but rather more elegant and beautiful. Those who hold to a philosophical reductionism “overlook the hidden forces and principles” that govern the processes of cosmic evolution.

Barr’s article lays out the way that the work of scientists and mathematicians exploring the fundamental principles of physics (from Kepler to Einstein to those currently running the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland) actually suggests “that order does not really emerge from chaos, as we might naively assume; it always emerges from greater and more impressive order already present at a deeper level.” This excerpt gives his first example, the starting point from which he guides us into strangely beautiful world of particle physics, and towards the discovery that “matter, although mindless itself, is the product of a Mind of infinite profundity and infinite simplicity.”

Fearful Symmetries

“Let’s start with a simple but instructive example of how order can appear to emerge spontaneously from mere chaos through the operation of natural forces. Imagine a large number of identical marbles rolling around randomly in a shoe box. If the box is tilted, all the marbles will roll down into a corner and arrange themselves into what is called the “hexagonal closest packing” pattern. (This is the same pattern one sees in oranges stacked on a fruit stand or in cells in a beehive.) This orderly structure emerges as the result of blind physical forces and mathematical laws. There is no hand arranging it. Physics requires the marbles to lower their gravitational potential energy as much as possible by squeezing down into the corner, which leads to the geometry of hexagonal packing.

At this point it seems as though order has indeed sprung from mere chaos. To see why this is wrong, however, consider a genuinely chaotic situation: a typical teenager’s bedroom. Imagine a huge jack tilting the bedroom so that everything in it slides into a corner. The result would not be an orderly pattern but instead a jumbled heap of lamps, furniture, books, clothing, and what have you.

Why the difference? Part of the answer is that, unlike the objects in the bedroom, the marbles in the box all have the same size and shape. But there’s more to it. Put a number of spoons of the same size and shape into a box and tilt it, and the result will be a jumbled heap. Marbles differ from spoons because their shape is spherical. When spoons tumble into a corner, they end up pointing every which way, but marbles don’t point every which way, because no matter which way a sphere is turned it looks exactly the same.

These two crucial features of the marbles—having the same shape and having a spherical shape—should be understood as principles of order that are already present in the supposedly chaotic situation before the box was tilted. In fact, the more we reduce to deeper explanations, the higher we go. This is because, in a sense that can be made mathematically precise, the preexisting order inherent in the marbles is greater than the order that emerges after the marbles arrange themselves. This requires some explanation.

Both the preexisting order and the order that emerges involve symmetry, a concept of central importance in modern physics, as we’ll see. Mathematicians and physicists have a peculiar way of thinking about symmetry: A symmetry is something that is done. For example, if one rotates a square by 90 degrees, it looks the same, so rotating by 90 degrees is said to be a symmetry of the square. So is rotating by 180 degrees, 270 degrees, or a full 360 degrees. A square thus has exactly four symmetries.

Not surprisingly, the hexagonal pattern the marbles form has six symmetries (rotating by any multiple of 60 degrees: 60, 120, 180, 240, 300, and 360 degrees). A sphere, on the other hand, has an infinite number of symmetries—doubly infinite, in fact, since rotating a sphere by any angle about any axis leaves it looking the same. And, what’s more, the symmetries of a sphere include all the symmetries of a hexagon.

If we think this way about symmetry, careful analysis shows that, when marbles arrange themselves into the hexagonal pattern, just six of the infinite number of symmetries in the shape of the marbles are ex-pressed or manifested in their final arrangement. The rest of the symmetries are said, in the jargon of physics, to be spontaneously broken. So, in the simple example of marbles in a tilted box, we can see that symmetry isn’t popping out of nowhere. It is being distilled out of a greater symmetry already present within the spherical shape of the marbles.”

In the full essay, Barr gives a richer description of how this most basic kind of symmetry is just one sort of order, and how even this form points to other much more complex kinds of symmetry whose properties may be described only through the tools of complex mathematics. As he says, “the symmetries that characterize the deepest laws of physics are mathematically richer and stranger than the ones we encounter in everyday life.” But even more important than the fact that such mathematical concepts exist and are beautiful, more important even than the way such esoteric mathematical symmetries have suggested imminently practical experimental projects, is the way they point to a universe that is anything but brutish and trivial, though its elegance may be hard to see:

“It is true that the cosmos was at one point a swirling mass of gas and dust out of which has come the extraordinary complexity of life as we experience it. Yet, at every moment in this process of development, a greater and more impressive order operates within—an order that did not develop but was there from the beginning. In the upper world, mind, thought, and ideas make their appearance as fruit on the topmost branches of an evolutionary tree. Below the surface, we see the taproots of reality, the fundamental laws of physics that shimmer with ideas of profound simplicity.”

This essay appears with the permission of First Things. To read Barr’s complete essay, please click here.

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

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

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

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

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, Lincoln Harvey, Tutor in Theology at St Mellitus College in London, explores the intended role of humans in God’s creation as seen in Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. It is significant, he notes, that in the beginning humankind is placed in a garden. The Biblical narrative, however, does not remain here, but journeys from this garden to the city in the book of Revelation where culture—whether the sciences or the arts—reflects God’s intention for his creatures to “grow into the fullness of its stature.” As a demonstration of this point, Harvey examines the Eucharist, the center of Christian worship in which grain and grape are transformed into bread and wine as an offering to God from the goodness of his creation. Therefore, the exploration of creation can be understood as a priestly vocation to tend to and engage with the world around us. Ultimately, the science and religion debates seem to indicate a failure on the creature’s part to appreciate the generosity of God and prevent one from seeing the consistency of science and theology.

Transcript

With lots of due considerations in place, if we take the Christian scriptures and consider it in what Saint Athanasius called its “scopic whole” rather than telescoping in to particular verses and chapters, but actually take a step back and a deep breath and begin to consider the shape, the scopic whole of the Scriptures, then it perhaps has theological significance that the journey begins in a garden, that the human creature is placed within a garden, not necessarily a static state of paradise but something that needs to be tended and kept and something in which there is rhythms and seasons and something in which the creature participates and engages and shares in being with as God’s representative. And having been placed in a garden and needing to engage with the creation in nature, it’s perhaps fruitful for the Church to take that overarching shape on board and to see culture broadly considered within God’s purpose for the creature to grow into the fullness of its stature.

And therefore, culture—be it the arts or the sciences, be it human endeavor—is part of the creature journeying from a garden to a city, accompanied by God, enabled by God to offer back through Christ and the Spirit the goodness of creation perfected. At the center of the Church’s worship, we find the Eucharist, and it’s probably again fruitful to consider the way in which the Eucharist as the pivotal event of Christian worship does not offer back to God nature unrefined, it doesn’t offer grain and grape, but instead the Church offers through the Son and the Spirit bread and wine, which Colin Gunton, an important theologian in these areas, has called “nature manufactured.” But the human creature in its liturgy offers the work of human hands: the grain* and the grape manufactured. If you like, at the center of Christian worship is technology, and therefore, for the Church to step back from the debates about science and faith, science and religion is somehow to see the scientific exploration of the creation as part of that priestly vocation of being placed in the world, engaging with that world, and then through the Son and the Spirit, offering back that world as God’s representative.

I imagine or I wonder whether or not the growing dualism or growing conflict between science and religion is actually a rebellion of the creature, failure of us to see the generosity of God and the way in which the theology and the science are more intimately and beautifully related than we would dare to imagine. So, it is almost a natural inkling of the fallen creature to create these conflicts that absolutely prevent us from seeing the systematic coherence and beauty of God’s generosity to us.

*Originally bread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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