Evolution and the Problem of Evil

Let me begin by expressing appreciation for the commitment and intent of BioLogos. Francis Collins was speaking at nearby Tulane University a couple of years ago when my son was a senior in high school, and I brought him along to hear this noted Christian biologist’s presentation to help prepare him for challenges he would experience (as he is now) in college. This is a tremendously valuable ministry. However, as a philosopher and a theologian I do have concerns about some of the theological implications of the BioLogos theistic evolution view, particularly regarding the problem of evil.

The problem of evil is one of the most persistent and intuitive challenges to the Christian faith and the existence of God. The classic defenses or theodicies that have been used to answer this challenge include the Freewill Defense (God is not responsible for much of evil because it is caused by the free actions of humans), the Soul Making Defense (God allows or sends some evils or suffering in order to build human character in overcoming adversity), and the Eschatological Defense (although the cause of some suffering may be beyond our understanding, whatever suffering we may experience in this life cannot compare with an eternity of blessing in heaven).

These theodicies or defenses to the problem of evil, however, normally presuppose the standard view of divine creation. Were one to propose creation by means of theistic evolution, some of the presuppositions for these responses to the problem of evil no longer function. Therefore, advocating some form of theistic evolution poses problems for standard explanations of the problem of evil.

Cornelius Hunter has recently published Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil,¹ an excellently researched book which re-examines Darwin’s motives for developing the theory of evolution. Hunter’s main thesis is that Darwin’s intent was not to undermine belief in the existence of God, but to afford a defense of God’s moral nature. The viciousness of nature caused Darwin and some of his contemporaries to desire to disconnect God’s role in creation from this viciousness in nature, and the blind process of natural selection is the vehicle for disassociating God from the vulgarities of nature. In essence, then, Hunter’s argument is that Darwin’s theory was a form of theodicy – sheltering God’s goodness against the accusation that He is the author of the evil in nature.

Hunter’s thesis sounds hauntingly similar to that of the early Gnostics, who sought to insulate God from the evil material world. They therefore proposed intermediary aeons, archetypes, or a demiurge to isolate the purity of God from the evil of nature. The Darwinian account sharply differs from the biblical account in at least three crucial ways:

• The Darwinian account removes God from being directly involved in much of creation by utilizing natural processes instead, while the biblical account presents God as directly involved in the details of creation, both in the beginning and throughout history through his providential care.
• The Darwinian account blurs the distinction between humans and other animals, while in Scripture humans are a distinctive and special creation.
• The Darwinian account presents God as apathetic and disinterested in the moral status of animals, while the scriptural account presents God (though giving primary focus to humans) as vitally interested in the moral status of animals, and indeed for the redemption of the entire created world.

Another problem with Hunter’s thesis is that whatever Darwin’s original motivation might have been, the novelty of Hunter’s thesis underscores the fact that this is not how Darwin’s ideas predominantly have been used and understood. No one (including contemporary evolutionary biologists) seriously believes Darwin’s ideas as he presented them. Darwin’s ideas about evolution have themselves evolved. ( see Falk, Part 2) So even if Hunter’s thesis were correct about Darwin’s original motivation for the problem of natural selection, this has little relevance to contemporary evolutionary biology.

Any such Darwinian evolutionary biology also undermines classical defenses for God’s goodness. For example, the Christian group BioLogos has presented the perspective that God created all living organisms, including humans, through a gradual process that includes natural selection, group selection, genetic drift or other such physical processes, with God possibly intervening at some undefined points. While this BioLogos approach (which might be labeled a variety of “gradualism” with regard to creation) includes a role for God in creation (as opposed to pure Darwinian evolution), some of the same problems involved with the problem of evil pertain to the BioLogos view as well. In fact, the specific role that God plays in evolution remains somewhat vague and ill-defined. (see Falk, Part 1) Without BioLogos providing a clearer and more precise differentiation between itself and Darwinian evolution – and thus building a clear “Chinese wall” between their view and that of Darwinian evolution -- these views appear to be very close, and the problems that pertain to one view pertain to the other view (at least in part) as well. The following problems arise with regard to the problem of evil in relation to forms of creation by gradualism.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

First of all, it is incumbent upon a good God to produce an optimally good world. We could not necessarily expect an evil or morally mixed God to produce a good world, but we have every reason to expect a good and beneficent God (Matt. 5:48; 1 John 1:5, 4:7-8) to produce the “best of all possible worlds” (given human freewill). In the biblical account, therefore, the evil and suffering we witness in nature and in human experience is not accountable to God because of a defective process in creation, but rather it is a result of the moral Fall of the first humans and subsequent sin by their descendents. However, gradualism has no such vehicle to defend God against the accusation of being responsible for natural and physical evil and suffering. (see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2).

Human Distinctiveness

Second, if God created all living species, including humans, through a gradual evolutionary process that includes common descent from nonhuman primates, there is no clear line to draw a moral or spiritual distinction between humans and other living beings. (see Falk, Part 2).. Yet fundamental to any view of a moral universe is the belief that humans are created in the image of God in a way that is uniquely above all other sensate species (Ps. 8:4-8), and included in this image is our soul and our moral capacity. It is difficult to imagine how humans could receive the image of God through some sort of physical process. Instead, the Bible describes God as being directly and personally involved in creating the human soul by breathing it into mankind (Gen. 2:7). (see O’Connor, Part 1). In the specific language of the biblical account (if not to be discounted, allegorized, or completely ignored), God created human souls directly, not indirectly through some impersonal process. Gradualism offers no clear answer as to how a human soul reflecting the image of God could come about; in fact, such a unique thing in all of creation is everything but gradual or natural. (see Bishop, Part 2).

Whence Cometh Freedom?

Thirdly, even if God intervened at various points in theistic evolution to create new forms from which other species evolve, this does not afford a satisfactory account of human freewill. If humans are not a unique and distinct creation (as the biblical account makes quite clear), but are with other apes the product of a single ancestor, from whence did freewill arise? How can we account for some mutations having freewill and others not having it?

Some quasi-materialists propose some form of epiphenomenalism in which the mind emerges somewhat magically from material cells. This proposal is devoid of any convincing scientific evidence, but it is the only alternative left for materialists to espouse in order to account for some of the most basic human intuitions – that our minds are more than merely a physical organ, that our choices are genuine expressions of freewill, and that we are free moral agents who are responsible for our actions.

Evolutionary biology has no scientific evidence to respond to these basic human intuitions other than to assert that “there is no ghost in the machine” and that any apparent choices are actually mechanical outworking of hard determinism predetermined by prior physical causes. (see O’Connor, Part 2). Therefore, if human choices are merely illusions, humans cannot be held morally accountable, all blame and responsibility reverts back to the God who created this world.

The Problem of Pain

Fourth, gradualism has no moral explanation for animal pain. If humans are the product of an earlier ancestor, it may have taken thousands or millions of years for life to evolve to that point, or for humans to evolve from an earlier primate ancestor. How can the pain of these creatures (some of them quasi-human or proto-human) be justified? (see Schloss, Part 2) This is specifically the issue that worries many Christian ethicists about cloning. Each experiment in animal cloning has produced hundreds of “monsters” before the clone is successful. What if we were cloning humans? What would be the moral implications of creating hundreds of “monsters” just to develop one clone?

The unanimous view is that this would be morally unjustifiable, but this is uncannily similar to the notion of creating animals who suffer for millions of years before evolution finally produced humans. (see Schloss, Part 3) In the biblical creation accounts, pain and suffering comes into the world after the Fall and as a result of the Fall of the earliest humans, and thus God is absolved of direct responsibility for this pain. In this gradualist account, pain and suffering precede the Fall. Millions of generations of sensate beings would have suffered and died before the Garden of Eden. Why would God allow this suffering of innocents for millions of years? (see Schloss, Part 3)

Ironically, Hunter’s Darwinian explanation in Darwin’s God doesn’t work for the BioLogos perspective at this point, because God is somewhat more directly involved at several steps in creation than in the purely Darwinian perspective, so it is God who must shoulder the blame for this undeserved pain. (see Schloss, Part 2)

Another attempt to affirm a gradualist view of creation in which pain preceded the creation of humans was by William Dembski, who in his book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World² proposed that the animal world existed in pain for millennia before the creation of humans, and thus the pain of these animals was applied retroactively from the later Fall (pp. 9-10). This proposal was not well received by many in the evangelical world because it depicts God causing pain to sensate beings even before the cause of the pain took place, and Dembski ultimately felt compelled to post a clarification of his views.³ So, the reality of animal pain before the Fall in the gradualist account of creation heightens the problem of evil rather than resolving it.

Death and the Nature of God

Fifth, in orthodox Christian theology, death is seen as the ultimate punishment for the Fall of Adam and Eve. There was a time of created goodness from when humankind has fallen. All human suffering, animal suffering, natural disasters, and death was ultimately the result of the God’s punishment for human sin, the curse after the Fall as described in Genesis 3. (see Schloss, Part 1)

However, in the gradualist evolutionary account, there is no Fall.(see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2). If anything, there is a “rise,” as human beings “come of age” and become morally responsible at some point in the process of evolution from prehuman primates. There are multiple problems with this proposal from a theological perspective:

• It is one thing to apply symbolic interpretations to the first three chapters of Genesis; it is another to eliminate the historical reality of the Fall altogether.(see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2). .
• In the biblical view of creation, God creates humans in a paradisical Eden, and humans are ejected from Eden after their sin. In the gradualist view,(see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2). there never was an Eden, and humans never enjoyed the kind of original created goodness described in Scripture.
• In the biblical view of creation, separation from God and death are the punishments for human sin. In the gradualist view, there never was an Edenic paradise, and persons were created to die. Sin has no real causal connection with physical death. (see Schloss, Part 1)

As Jeff Schloss reminds us in Part 1 of his paper, "Although commentators differ over whether the Pauline description of death in Romans 5 refers to spiritual and/or physical death, the passage clearly focuses on humans. It identifies humanity as the subject of infection, instigated and promulgated by initial and ongoing human sin: “in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12)."

• In the biblical view of creation, humans were created “a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5). In the gradualist view, humans emerged from previously created nonhuman primates. This is a profound re-envisioning and diminishment of the Christian anthropology found in the Bible. (see Falk, Part 2)

Darrel Falk put it this way: ”Christians recognize that our material ordinariness is radically transformed by the presence and promises of God. Exactly as with the people of Israel among the nations, so humans among the animals: our special identity rests in the free choice of the Creator to give us his himself and his name. If we recognize that human specialness rests on God’s fellowship with and call upon us, and that we—alone of all creatures—are enabled by God to bear his image in the world, then anything Darwin said about the physical continuity between humans and animals is irrelevant."

We think this last significant issue raised by Dr. Lemke shows just how important this Southern Baptist Voices Series has been, because it highlights the fact that many of the theological concerns raised here do not emerge from the scientific data about life's origins or the discipline of evolutionary biology. There are surely theologians who look at creation this way, but to the extent they do so, their views emerge from their own theological considerations; they are not obligatory extrapolations which emerge from the science itself.

• The Bible describes God creating a beautiful paradisicial Eden with sinless humans, which was lost only because of human rebellion and sin. The gradualist account posits God creating a substandard world that had to evolve to reach even the sad levels of contemporary life. This imperfect creation reflects on the nature of God. Why would a perfectly good God create such an imperfect world? Why or how could a moral God create humans to be already fallen? Orthodox Christian theology affirms that God is already perfect in all His attributes, and does not evolve or change in His essence. The theology more apposite to the gradualist account is Process Theology, in which evolution in creation mirrors evolution within God himself, as he moves from a powerful but imperfect being toward a more perfect being. In fact, Process Theology was designed with a view to harmonizing Christian theology with evolutionary presuppositions. But Process Theology is not held to be orthodox by most evangelical Christians, particularly with regard the nature and perfection of God.

At the core of the Christian worldview is the biblical metanarrative of creation, fall, and redemption. The evolutionary gradualist perspective radically rewrites this standard Christian account by essentially merging the creation and fall into a single event. Humans were created as finite and fallen, not placed in a paradise with created righteousness. This gradualist approach squares well with an evolutionary account, but it does not square well with the biblical creation accounts in Scripture.

Notes

1. Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Waco: Brazos Press, 2001).
2. William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009).
3. Tom Nettles, review of The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World, by William Dembski, in Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13.4 (2009): 80–85. A partial defense and Dembski’s clarification are found in David Allen, “A Reply to Tom Nettles’ Review of William A. Dembski’s The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World,” a white paper at the Center for Theological Research (February 2010), available online (PDF).

A fundamental theological commitment of those advocating a young-earth position is that all death, pain, and suffering were a direct consequence of the Fall, and were absent from the originally good creation. For example, theologian John C. Whitcomb, who co-authored the book The Genesis Flood with Henry Morris, argues that “there could have been no death in the animal kingdom before the Fall and the curse” because all physical death is a consequence of Adam’s rebellion. Furthermore, he envisions the kingdom of God that is to be established by Christ at the second coming as a restoration of the pre-Fall earth. Whitcomb states,

During the Kingdom age, which our Lord taught us to pray for (Matthew 6:10), “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb ... and the lion shall eat straw like the ox ... and they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain (=kingdom; cf., Isaiah 2:2): for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-9) ... These characteristics of the coming thousand-year Kingdom of Christ (cf., Revelation 20:2-7) show us clearly what the animal kingdom was like in the pre-Fall world.¹

In this view, an original creation devoid of pain and death would have had to be radically transformed, even remade, as a consequence of human disobedience at the time of the Fall. This position is a difficult one to support from Scripture. Firstly, the consequences of the Fall described in the second chapter of Genesis involve the corruption and distortion of humans’ relationship with God, each other, and the rest of creation. Where once there was a relationship of caring stewardship and loving lordship, now there was an adversarial one of selfish exploitation and forceful subjugation. No mention is made in Genesis of any ill effects of the Fall directly to creation itself.

Secondly, Scripture declares that creation as it is now, not a pre-Fall paradise, gives glory and praise to the Creator.² The creation described in Scripture is our own familiar world, with lions, eagles, crocodiles, and jackals. Even more significantly, God is described as caring for and feeding the lion and its cubs, and the birds of prey (see Job 38–41). A “fallen” creation undermines this scriptural understanding of God’s continuing creative and sustaining action in nature.

What is the place of natural revelation in the context of such a “fallen” creation? Since all of nature would have been so completely transformed from its original state of “perfection,” the natural world could no longer be a source of praise to God or a revelation of God’s character. It would imply that we should be repulsed by the “fallen-ness” of creation, rather than moved to worship the Creator. Yet the spirits of the prophets and psalmists were moved to wonder and praise.

Creation itself provides overwhelming testimony against a pre-Fall creation without death or pain. Death and pain are more than part of creation; they are woven into its very fabric. Reproduction, the care and protection of offspring, defense, escape from predators, and the pursuit of prey are defining forces that shape the biology and behavior of animal species. Furthermore, the long history of life on Earth clearly demonstrates the existence of death and pain before the advent of humanity. The fossil record documents that the same ecological relationships and organism interactions (e.g., carnivory, parasitism, scavenging, decomposition, disease) we observe today were fundamental aspects of biologic communities throughout Earth history. Hundreds of millions of years of Earth history saw not only the death of individuals, but also the extinction of species and whole taxonomic groups. The view that death and pain in the human creation began with the Fall simply cannot be reconciled with the preserved record of life on Earth.

Beyond its severe theological and scientific flaws, the attribution of all death and pain to the curse resulting from the Fall fails to address, in any way, the problem as set forth by Lewis. This view makes God the direct cause of animal suffering while providing no answer to the question, “Why?”

Creation Corrupted by an Angelic Fall

If natural evil did not first enter the universe with the disobedience of humanity, then the objections raised by the geological and biological records are largely avoided. A number of authors have thus concluded that creation was corrupted by an angelic fall before humans appeared. Supporters of this perspective call upon the existence of fallen angelic beings before even the material universe was brought into being. These evil forces, intent on opposing God’s will, are understood to have been at work twisting God’s creative activity from the very beginning. This preserves the view that pain and suffering were introduced into the creation through the disobedience of free moral beings while recognizing the existence of pain and suffering before Adam’s Fall.

Such a position was advocated by C. S. Lewis. After arguing for the plausibility of an angelic fall, he states,

It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him.³

Similarly, the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, when reflecting on the devastation produced by the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, invoked free spiritual forces acting in defiance of God’s will.⁴ Michael Lloyd has further argued for the theological necessity of a cosmic angelic fall that was responsible for the corruption of the originally good creation that God intended. According to Lloyd, if the present creation is as God intended, then there would be no need for a salvation that encompasses all of creation.⁵

However, as pointed out by Robert Wennberg, the attribution of suffering and death in creation to an angelic fall does not in itself provide a solution to the problem of “natural evil.” Rather, it is primarily an attempt to distance God from being its direct author—to move God’s role from directly willing animal pain to permitting it in the interests of some greater good. Wennberg states,

To trace the existence of physical evil back to the destructive operations of rebellious Satanic forces is not, however, to provide anything approaching a justification of physical evil; it is only to provide a causal account, not an apologetical one. “Satan did it,” we are told, but the question that must be answered is “why did God allow Satan to do it?”⁶

While the argument for an angelic fall is not inconsistent with the Bible, finding direct scriptural support is difficult at best. Attributing animal suffering and pain to the actions of such fallen powers is more difficult still. In fact, it runs into many of the same theological problems as the tracing of natural evil to the consequences of human disobedience. A satanic corruption and distortion of God’s creative activity is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the goodness of creation proclaimed in Scripture. What does the repeated pronouncement of “And God saw that it was good” over creation mean, if that same creation also bore the corrupting imprint of rebellious spiritual powers? Such a creation could not fully represent God’s good and perfect will—so how could it be declared good, in fact, “very good”? In what way could that distorted creation give praise and glory to God?

A serious theological problem is also raised by effectively attributing all manifestations of death and pain in the natural world to the forces of evil. Satan would be given a power over creation that Scripture places exclusively in God’s providential hands. All natural processes and events are undergirded by the creative and sustaining power of God. Rain or drought, plague or harvest, storm and earth- quake are all part of God’s providential action (see Amos 4:6 ff.).⁷ More than this, God is understood in Scripture as intimately and actively involved in the continual cycle of death and new life we observe in the natural world.

These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time.

When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
 When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.

When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. (Psalm 104:27–30, NIV)

If God is thus involved in the death as well as the life of his creatures, how can this death at the same time be attributed to the spiritual forces of evil? Scripture does not seek to distance God from the ongoing death and pain present in the creation, and neither should we.

The Fall Impacts All Time—Past and Future

There are approaches that seek to preserve the view that human disobedience was the cause of natural evil, while recognizing that death, pain, and suffering in the natural world preceded the appearance of humans on the earth. One way is to argue that the consequences of the Fall extended both forward and backward in time.

One recent proponent of this position is William Dembski. Dembski takes as a beginning for his theodicy that all evil in the world (personal moral evil as well as physical death, human suffering, and natural disasters) traces back to human sin. This is seen as a nonnegotiable claim rooted in “traditional theology.” Dembski seems not to distinguish theologically between natural and moral evil in developing his response to the problem of evil. He states that “... sin propagates through nature and brings about natural evil, so that the disordered state of nature mirrors the disordered state of our souls.”⁸

Although Dembski’s view of the consequences of human sin is similar to those holding a young-earth view, he accepts the overwhelming scientific evidence for an ancient universe and earth, and a long biological history with its concomitant suffering and death. He then asks, “Without a young earth, how can such natural evils be traced back to human sin?” His response is that the answer lies in God’s foreknowledge and omnipotence. “An omniscient and omnipotent God who is able to act preemptively to anticipate human actions will certainly do so to anticipate so momentous a human action as the Fall.”⁹ God thus preemptively acted in creation to form a world appropriate for a fallen humanity. But why must that world contain natural evil?

For redemption to effectively deliver humanity from evil therefore requires humanity to be clear as to precisely what it has consented to in rebelling against God and embracing evil. To achieve this clarity humanity must experience the full brunt of the evil that it has set in motion, and this requires that the creation itself fully manifest the consequences of humanity’s rebellion against God.¹⁰

He thus argues that God preemptively brought about natural evils in creation for the purpose of making us realize the gravity of our sin. However, no argument is given as to why natural evil is necessary, or even effective, for this task. Are not the evident multifarious consequences of moral evil sufficient?

In this theodicy, God’s activity in creation is focused exclusively on providing a home for fallen humanity. Nowhere does it address the problem of natural evil from the perspective of the nonhuman creation. What benefit arises (either individually or corporately) to the innocent creatures suffering pain and death over hundreds of millions of years before the appearance of humanity? There is nothing here to answer the original challenge made by C. S. Lewis.

In Part 3, Miller considers alternative explanations for the presence of natural evil in a world created by God.

Notes

1. This is from an essay by John C. Whitcomb published by the Institute for Creation Research on June 1, 2003 and entitled “Progressive Creationism.” It is available at the ICR website at www.icr.org/article/121 (last accessed March 17, 2011).
2. See chapter 8 of Henri Blocher, In the Beginning (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1984). I have also discussed these points in K. B. Miller, “Theological Implications of an Evolving Creation,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 45, no. 3 (1993): 150–60.
3. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 134–5.

4. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005). He states, “it is clearly the case that there is a kind of 'provisional' cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other.” (Pp. 62–3)
5. Michael Lloyd, “Are Animals Fallen?” in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 147–60.
6. Wennberg, “Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil,” 134.
7. I discuss “natural hazards” as part of God’s renewal of the earth and life in K. B. Miller, “Natural Hazards: Challenges to the Creation Mandate of Dominion?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 53, no. 3 (2001): 184–7.
8. From the online essay by William Dembski, “Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science,” (2006): 3–5. Published on the website of “Uncommon Descent” and now available at http://standfirmfortruth.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/2006.05.christian_theodicy.pdf. Dembski has expanded the arguments in this essay in his book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (New York: Broadman and Holman Academic, 2009).
9. Dembski, “Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science,” 22, 23.
10. Ibid., 19, 29.
 ]]> Sat, 24 Nov 12 06:00:30 -0800 Keith Miller http://biologos.org/blog/science-and-the-bible-theistic-evolution-part-3?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/science-and-the-bible-theistic-evolution-part-3?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication As I stressed in my column about the YEC view, creationism is ultimately about theodicy—it’s not only about theodicy, to be sure, but the belief that animals must not have suffered and died before Adam and Eve committed the first sin is crucial to the “young” in Young Earth Creationism. To a significant degree, Theistic Evolution is also about theodicy. Last time, I presented three implications and conclusions concerning Theistic Evolution. There is much more to say about this, so we continue the same thread—and we will pick it up yet again in two weeks, coming back once more for an historical look in about a month.

Some implications and conclusions of Theistic Evolution--continued

(4) Several leading TEs have advanced a strongly Christocentric theology of creation—stressing the idea (from the prologue of John’s gospel) that the Maker of heaven and earth is the crucified and resurrected second person of the Trinity. Especially when theodicy is the topic, they like to speak about “the crucified God,” or “the theology of the cross,” or “divine kenosis.”

On first glance, some readers might be a bit perplexed: isn’t this column supposed to be about evolution, not the crucifixion? What could those topics possibly have in common? The answer lies in theodicy, or the problem of evil and suffering in the world. As I stressed in my column about the YEC view, creationism is ultimately about theodicy—it’s not only about theodicy, to be sure, but the belief that animals must not have suffered and died before Adam and Eve committed the first sin is crucial to the “young” in Young Earth Creationism. To a significant degree, Theistic Evolution is also about theodicy. In one of the best books on science and religion that I could name, Catholic theologian John Haught explains the atheist’s view of theodicy (which he does not share) as follows:

“Evolution is incompatible with any and all religious interpretations of the cosmos, not just with Christian fundamentalism. The prevalence of chance variations, which today are called genetic ‘mutations,’ definitively refutes the idea of any ordering deity. The fact of struggle and waste in evolution decisively demonstrates that the cosmos is not cared for by a loving God. And the fact of natural selection is a clear signal of the loveless impersonality of the universe.” (Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation, p. 52)

Proponents of TE have responded to the issues raised in the latter two sentences in a variety of ways. I agree with Christopher Southgate’s analysis of the overall situation. Like several of the writers I mention this week, Southgate is a theologian with a doctorate in science; he’s also an accomplished poet. The text he wrote with many others, God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A Textbook in Science and Religion, is really much more than a textbook. I recommend it for anyone seeking a wide-ranging introduction to the principal issues.

Southgate and his collaborators see just two “possible theologies of divine action in respect of evolution,” considering that “the problems of theodicy are severe.” Option ONE: “to posit God merely as the passive, suffering companion of every creature, a view self-consistent but dubiously faithful to the Christian tradition.” Option TWO: “to mount a defence of teleological creation using a combination of [certain] theological resources,” namely these three—

• “we must adopt a very high doctrine of humanity and suppose that indeed humans are of very particular concern to God.” This is linked with the Incarnation.
• “we must take very seriously the cross as costly to God, as part of God’s hugely costly way of taking responsibility for the creative process.”
• “we must give some account of the redemption of the non-human creation …” This is linked with the Trinity. (p. 279 in first edition, 1999)

Given limited space, I’ll focus almost exclusively on the second idea, though we may want to discuss all of them below.

The Crucified God

View of the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz (May 1945). The gate bears the motto, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Source).

We start with something that arose in a context entirely unrelated to evolution, Jürgen Moltmann’s (read more here and here) notion of The Crucified God. The theological point and the emotional impact of Moltmann’s conception is aptly captured in this stark passage, written in response to Elie Wiesel’s dark story of a child who was publicly hanged at Auschwitz: “like the cross of Christ, even Auschwitz is in God himself. Even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son and the power of the Spirit.” (p. 278) A recent sermon by Matt Bates, pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Richmond, fleshes this out for us in a very accessible way; please read the whole sermon before going any further.

Repeat: please read the sermon. It’s a vital part of what I’m trying to say.

Now that you see more clearly what the “Crucified God” is about, let’s see what John Polkinghorne says about it:

“This profound and difficult thought meets the problem of suffering at [the] level which its deep challenge demands. The insight of the Crucified God lies at the very heart of my own Christian belief, indeed of the possibility of such belief in the face of the way the world is. But this can only really be so if God is indeed truly present in that twisted figure on the tree of Calvary. Only an ontological Christology is adequate to the defence of God in the face of human suffering. God must really be there in that darkness.” (Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 44)

Be sure to notice two things in this passage. First, Polkinghorne confesses that his own Christian faith depends on such a conception of God, but there are only two very brief references to evolution in the entire eloquent chapter from which I’ve quoted. There’s plenty of science there, but almost all of it is modern physics, not biology. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to “students” to get a copy of this excellent little book and fill in the blanks.) In other words, evolution doesn’t shape Polkinghorne’s theology nearly as much as his theology shapes his view of evolution.

The second thing to notice is that in the last three sentences Polkinghorne is doing something subtle, but extremely important—something that I don’t want anyone to miss. Contrary to some of the most influential voices in the science and religion “dialogue” (some examples would be Haught, Ian Barbour, and the late Arthur Peacocke), Polkinghorne affirms the full divinity and humanity of Christ, in a classical Chalcedonian sense. Read those sentences again a couple of times, and you should see what I’m driving at. As he says a bit later on, “Unless there really is a God who really was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19), then the cross is no answer to the bitter problem of the suffering of the world.” (p. 45) In other words, one can only take this approach to theodicy unless one actually believes in the reality of the Incarnation; only an orthodox Christian can speak meaningfully of the “Crucified God.” In the final part of this column, when I’ll present Polkinghorne as a contemporary exemplar of a theologically “orthodox” TE, it’s partly this aspect of his thought that I will have in mind.

Lucas Cranach the Elder

Finally, I should note that the term “crucified God” is not actually modern. Although Moltmann wrote an influential book about it, the language comes from Martin Luther. Another physicist-theologian, George Murphy, writes in a highly Lutheran way about The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross, advancing the view that a “theology of the cross” in which God sets aside power to become a participant in the universe, even to the point of death, takes priority over a “theology of glory,” in which we seek God first in the power behind nature, not in the powerlessness of the cross. For a short version of Murphy’s ideas, go here.

Once again, we need to stop mid-stream. These ideas are deep and perhaps too new for many readers, and it’s best to reflect on them before we go further and even deeper.

In his thoughtful, gracious, and fair-minded essay, Professor John Laing focuses on what many believers and non-believers alike recognize as perhaps the most significant challenge to faith in an all-good, -knowing, and -powerful Creator God: the problem of natural evil, and in particular, the acrid sting of death. While the issue is an ancient one, Laing—and many other contemporary commentators who range from sympathetic to antagonistic toward biblical theism—view evolution as exacerbating the problem to the point that one must choose between the good God of scripture and the truth of evolution. Although the general issue of “evolution and evil” is manifold and beyond the scope of a single essay, John (if I may), zeros in on two ways in which evolution seems to aggravate the particular theological challenge of death. First, in the view of scripture, death is “an invader, disturber of the peace, and a force of evil”; therefore its primordial (as opposed to post hoc) place in the world described by evolution seems incommensurate with an originally good creation. Second, it is not just the primordial place but also the functional role of death that appears to constitute a problem: evolution by natural selection is widely viewed as being driven by death, and more generally by fierce competition, in a way that seems hard to reconcile as a mode of creation that a wise and good God would employ.

I agree with John that these are serious issues. Little is accomplished either by glibly dismissing their prima facie legitimacy or by responding with theological concessions that relinquish core claims of the gospel. In his words: “a fundamental aspect of the good news in the Gospel is the defeat of death – this negative, destroying force – in the resurrection of Christ.” Amen! In what follows I hope to engage sequentially both issues he raises in a way that takes them seriously while avoiding compromised hope.

The Primordial Place of Death

I need to start by acknowledging that these are not just arid intellectual issues but also profoundly personal ones. I have just returned from keeping vigil at the deathbed of my father, and the sting of death is especially acute. The fact that every son sees his father die (or worse, that a parent may see a child die) –that in some sense, universal human death is part of the current “natural order” we all experience – offers no solace for the tearful remonstration of what an awful violation it is. It is a violation not just of our deepest desires, but also of what we construe to be God’s purposes, for the God of scripture is not a mere field of energy or prime mover or initial organizing principle, but is wondrously and clearly portrayed as “the living God” whose explicit purpose is that we “have life, and have it in abundance.” Indeed, in the most extensive section of his essay John cites over 40 scripture passages that affirm life as God’s intention for humanity and death as an intrusive, subverting consequence of sin. I could not be in stronger concord.

Although all Christians have traditionally affirmed resurrection (for both the redeemed and unredeemed), there have been longstanding debates about whether the life that is redemptively restored in Christ and the death that is brought about by sin is “spiritual” (involving the vitality or disruption of communion with God) or “physical” (involving the viability or dissolution of biotic function). Of course these are not mutually exclusive, and perhaps they are not even ultimately distinguishable. But however one understands death to be an incursion upon human telos, it does not answer or even clearly bear upon the evolution-related question of whether other living beings beyond and before humans were created to be immortal. “Violence” in western thought has often been understood as a disruption of natural ends: but do we assume that all creatures share the same “natural end”? For instance, is the nature or telos of worms immortality? Is death a violation of all creaturely natures that was therefore absent from earth prior to initial human intimacy with and subsequent estrangement from God? Significantly, not a single one of the scriptures John cites explicitly refers or even vaguely alludes to the general place of death in the natural order: virtually every one emphatically focuses on death as a consequence of sin for uniquely human moral agents, and—correspondingly—on eternal life as God’s special purpose for supernaturally redeemed humanity.¹ Indeed, I am at a loss to find in the entire Bible a scripture that clearly teaches death across the entire biotic realm postdates and is a consequence of human sin.² Neither is this point affirmed or even mentioned in the most prominent historic creeds of Christian orthodoxy.

Davis Young & Ralph Stearley’s The Bible, Rocks, and Time (2008, Inter Varsity Press) provides an expansive historical survey.

Yet none of this means that there is not an issue here. The view that death in all creation is not endemic but followed from a recent human fall was—with the exception of Aquinas and a few others—the dominant perspective of the church fathers, key reformers, and most Christians through the 17th Century (see sidebar). However, by the same token, so was geocentrism and so was the doctrine of human exceptionalism. Virtually all Christians have relinquished geocentrism in light of utterly compelling scientific evidence along with the recognition—in part motivated but not dictated by findings of science—that no clear and persistent scriptural teaching or core theological doctrine is compromised by this view.³ On the other hand, the claim of exceptionalism continues to be affirmed by many Christians – including myself – in light of important theological commitments and ongoing scientific discussion.

So is the primordial nature of death more like geocentrism, or more like human exceptionalism? Scientifically, there is little question that it is more akin to geocentrism. Over the last three centuries the empirical evidence for and the explanatory fruitfulness of the view that earth’s biota and death’s existence vastly predate the origin of humans have increased explosively—arguably to an extent beyond any other finding of science. Amongst tens of thousands of natural scientists, there is virtually unanimous agreement on this point.⁴ I should be clear that this is not an ad hominem argument: to say the evidential and demographic situation is similar to geocentrism is not in itself to claim that the “recent death” position is wrong. Nor is it an ad populum argument: neither John nor I have space to assess scientific evidence for this claim, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of Christian and non-Christian scientists have for several centuries shared the “primordial death” view does not make it true. But it does mean that if that view is to be rejected for the kinds of theological reasons that John raises, it seems there should be unambiguous scriptural warrant for that rejection. Failing that, then there needs to be a compelling theological rationale and a decided lack of plausible alternatives posited by fellow orthodox Christians.

I have already agreed with John that the Bible persistently presents death as an enemy of God’s purposes for humanity. But I have suggested (perhaps altogether wrongly!) that he does not provide clear scriptural evidence for death being a comparable enemy to and intrusion upon God’s purposes for all creatures. A faithful reading of the Bible does not seem to be incompatible with seeing death as part of the magisterial history of life as depicted by evolution and other natural sciences.

With these considerations of the biblical text as background, tomorrow I’ll describe why I do not believe that John or those with kindred perspectives provide a compelling theological mandate for this view of death, either.

Notes

1. There are a few scriptures not cited by John, which deal with the absence of carnivory (though not death itself) in images of idyllic creation. Genesis 1:30 portrays a world in which every creature with the breath of life had plants for food. And the images of the new earth in Isaiah 11 and 65 paint a renewal of this order in redeemed creation. Interestingly however, they do not portray an elimination of death for animals, or even for humanity. According to Is 65, the passage which presents the beautiful image of the lion and lamb: “ ‘Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people… The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,’ says the LORD.” This and other eschatological passages in scripture have a history of widely varying interpretations, but taken most literally, it describes a world with prolonged life in which there is still death (he who dies a centenarian will be like a child, and most people will live as long as trees), and in which death, however, is not inflicted by one creature upon another.
2. Although commentators differ over whether the Pauline description of death in Romans 5 refers to spiritual and/or physical death, the passage clearly focuses on humans. It identifies humanity as the subject of infection, instigated and promulgated by initial and ongoing human sin: “in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
3. Not all Christians have relinquished geocentrism. For example, a well-known public advocate is Dr. Gerardus Bouw, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy and until recently taught at Baldwin-Wallace Christian College. He founded the Association for Biblical Astronomy and authored an apologetic monograph for a stationary earth: Geocentricity (1992, Association for Biblical Astronomy). A crucial commitment of Dr. Bouw is that he “assumes that whenever the two [the Bible and astronomy] are at variance, it is always astronomy—that is, our ‘reading’ of the ‘Book of Nature,’ not our reading of the Holy Bible—that is wrong.” (http://www.geocentricity.com/ accessed 8/1/2012). Note that this epistemic framework asserts not just that the Bible is a more perfect witness to theological truth than nature, but that human understanding – “our reading” – of the Bible is somehow more immune to error than our reading of nature. The Bible itself does not clearly teach that humans, in our frailty, are less vulnerable to misunderstanding special than general revelation. The difference between faith in the scriptures and faith in our understanding of the scriptures is important though not always recognized, and underlies much tension in faith-science issues.
4. To his credit, even the most prominent critic of primordial death cited by John acknowledges this evidential and demographic claim. In a moving autobiographical essay, Kurt Wise acknowledges “I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.” Although he believes in the viability of searching for a scientific rationale, he affirms “I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.” [Kurt Wise, in John F. Ashton (ed)., In Just Six Days. 2001. Master Books. Page 355.]

When scientists investigate God’s creation, they find that humans appear very late in the history of life. The fossil record shows that many creatures died long before humans appeared. In fact, many entire species went extinct millions of years ago (the dinosaurs are the most famous example), long before humans lived or sinned.

See “What does the Fossil Record Show?” and “How are the ages of the Earth and universe calculated?”

Yet God’s revelation in scripture paints a different picture. Several key scripture passages teach that death is a consequence of sin, including Genesis 2:16-17, Genesis 3:19,22, Romans 5:12-21, and 1 Corinthians 15. How should we think about these passages in light of the scientific evidence? Could animals have died before human sin? Does “death” in these passages refer to physical death, or spiritual death, or sometimes one and sometimes the other? To ponder these questions, we need to consider God’s revelation in scripture and God’s revelation in nature. The scientific evidence is discussed in other Questions, as are the topics of the fall and sin (see sidebars). Here we consider what scripture says about death and how the two revelations might be reconciled.

See “How does original sin fit with evolutionary history?”

Animal Death

The Bible passages that teach about sin and death are clearly referring to the death of humans. Do these passages also refer to animals? Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) didn’t think so. He believed that God’s original creation included animals that killed each other, writing that “the nature of animals was not changed by man’s sin.”¹ Pastor Daniel Harrell makes a logical argument for animal death, writing that “there had to be death in the Garden, otherwise Adam would have been overrun by bugs and bacteria long before he took that forbidden bite of fruit.”² Animal death is also necessary to maintain population levels in a balanced ecosystem (see below for more). Some Bible passages portray predatory animals as part of God’s original plan for creation (Job 38:39-41, 39:29-30, Psalm 104:21,29). Other passages speak of the “lion laying down with the lamb” instead of killing the lamb (Isaiah 11:6-7, Isaiah 65:25), but these verses refer to the future kingdom of God, not the original creation. While animal death and suffering raises other theological questions (see Sidebar), it does not contradict Biblical teaching about death as a consequence of sin.

See “How does the evil and suffering in the world align with the idea of a loving God?”

Human death: physical or spiritual?

One traditional interpretation of Genesis 2-3 is that sin results in physical death. Humans would have been immortal without sin. In Genesis 2:17, God warns Adam and Eve, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat you shall die.” In Genesis 3:19, God carries out this punishment, cursing Adam with labor and death, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul contrasts and compares Christ and Adam, highlighting Adam’s fall as the cause of physical death for the whole human race.

John Calvin, however, suggested that Adam’s sin caused the abrupt painful death that we experience today, a wrenching apart of the physical and spiritual aspects of humans. Calvin seems to have thought that if Adam had not sinned, a more gentle kind of physical death or “passing” from life into life would have occurred: “Truly the first man would have passed to a better life, had he remained upright; but there would have been no separation of the soul from the body, no corruption, no kind of destruction, and, in short, no violent change.”³ In this view, humans were created mortal, but intended for long healthy lives and graceful deaths, such as described in Isaiah 65:20-25. The Old Testament speaks of death at the end of a long life in purely positive terms, such as 1 Chronicles 29:28 where King David “died at a god old age, having enjoyed long life, wealth, and honor.”

Another interpretation of these passages is that the consequence of sin is spiritual death, not physical death. If Adam had not sinned, humans would still have died like we do today, but without “the sense of loss, uncertainty about an afterlife, … and regret for unfinished work” that comes with spiritual death.⁴ Agemir de Carvalho Dias, Presbyterian pastor and teacher of the Evangelical College of Parana, Brazil, writes that “the death that entered the world with Adam is understood as something that takes man apart from God, a spiritual death, in the sense that the access to God is now closed and can be restored only through faith.”⁵ Of course some sins still bring about physical death, such as Abel’s death at Cain’s hand, and the death of King David’s infant son after the king’s adultery (2 Samuel 12:13-14).

The text of Genesis 2-3 can support an interpretation of the curse as spiritual death. In the curse of Genesis 3:19, God tells Adam “for dust you are and to dust you will return,” implying that Adam was created mortal from the dust. God warned Adam and Eve that they would die in the day they ate from the tree, and yet Adam lived to the age of 930 (Genesis 5:5). What did happen on the day they ate from the tree? Adam and Eve felt shame and were expelled from the Garden, breaking their fellowship with God – spiritual death.

Weren’t Adam and Eve immortal, created as perfect ideal human beings? This is a popular idea, but not clear in the Biblical text. The first humans are described as “very good” and pleasing to God (Genesis 1:30-31), but not as perfect or with superhuman abilities. Also, consider the Tree of Life. God planted this tree in the garden before the fall (Genesis 2:9) and it gives immortality to the one who eats it (Genesis 3:22). If God created humans as immortal, what was the purpose of the Tree of Life? It would only be needed if humans were mortal to begin with.⁶

Pastor Stephen Rodeheaver reflects on the two trees of Genesis 2-3 and the implications for us today (blog series)

In the New Testament, Paul writes much on the relationship between sin and death. Sometimes Paul was clearly referring to spiritual death (Romans 6:1-14, 7:11), and other times clearly to physical death (1 Corinthians 15:35-42). Yet even in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes of the eternal life in Christ as something much more than the mere earthly life we experience now, implying that “death” also refers to much more than mere physical death. This is more explicit in Romans 5:12-21 where death is contrasted with the gifts of grace, justification, and righteousness, i.e. the new spiritual life provided by Jesus’ victory.

See “Were Adam and Eve Historical Figures?” which discusses the issue of death and the identity of Adam and Eve

For more, be sure to read the full FAQ "Did death occur before the Fall?" in our Questions section!

Notes

1. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 93, Article 1 (web article)
2. Daniel Harrell. “Death’s Resurrection”, BioLogos Forum, December 18, 2009 (blog)
3. John Calvin. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, called Genesis, trans. by John King. ch3 v19 (p. 97).
4. George Murphy “Human Evolution in Theological Context” BioLogos scholarly essay which includes a discussion of human and animal death (PDF), p. 6
5. Quoted by Marcio Antonio Campos in “Did peace and love reign in the world before the original sin?” BioLogos Forum, March 7, 2011 (blog)
6. See Deborah and Loren Haarsma, “Three interpretations of the Tree of Life”, supplemental material to Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive Christian Resources) 2011 (PDF)
]]> Wed, 08 Aug 12 05:00:49 -0700 http://biologos.org/blog/series/asa-gray-and-charles-darwin-discuss-evolution-and-design?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/asa-gray-and-charles-darwin-discuss-evolution-and-design?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Many Christians believe that they face a painful choice-- either life was designed by God or it is an evolutionary product of natural selection. Charles Darwin himself believed in this dichotomy, and people ever since have felt the need to "choose sides". However, looking back at history, we find that one of Darwin's chief scientific colleagues, Asa Gray, did not share this perspective. In this three-part essay, part 1 charts the relationship of Asa Gray and Charles Darwin. Part 2 describes Darwin's struggle with the problem of natural evil and design in nature, and part 3 explores how Asa Gray was able to embrace evolution without rejecting the idea of design.

Evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century were generally not biblical literalists, nor did they believe in a young earth. In other words, the religious opposition to Darwin did not arise from perceived problems between Darwin's theory and a literal reading of Genesis. Rather, following the publication of Origin of Species, it centered on what seemed to be the randomness of natural selection, the appearance of new organisms by chance, and therefore the exclusion of divine purpose or design in Nature.⁷ It was the teleological question that Gray addressed in his review and about which he and Darwin corresponded over many years.

Darwin responds to Gray's review of Origin of Species

Darwin's response to Gray's review, a copy of which he received prior to its publication, was very positive. Darwin even hoped that it could become a preface in a second American edition of On the Origin of Species on which Gray worked. In a letter later in the year to James Dwight Dana, Darwin said: "No one person understands my views & has defended them so well as A. Gray;--though he does not by any means go all the way with me."⁸ The "all the way" included teleology, and Darwin wrote this to Gray concerning his attempt to retain design:

It has always seemed to me that for an Omnipotent & Omniscient Creator to foresee is the same as to preordain; but then when I come to think over this I get into an uncomfortable puzzle something analogous with "necessity & Free-will" or the "Origin of evil," or other subject quite beyond the scope of the human intellect.⁹

Three months later he picked up the discussion with these comments:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.--I am bewildered.--I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me .... But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.¹⁰


"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." - Charles Darwin

Darwin invokes William Paley

Shortly after this letter to Gray, Darwin wrote Charles Lyell on the same subject and said:

I have said that natural selection is to the structure of organised beings, what the human architect is to a building. The very existence of the human architect shows the existence of more general laws; but no one in giving credit for a building to the human architect, thinks it necessary to refer to the laws by which man has appeared. No astronomer in showing how movements of Planets are due to gravity, thinks it necessary to say that the law of gravity was designed that the planets should pursue the courses which they pursue.--I cannot believe that there is a bit more interference by the Creator in the construction of each species, than in the course of the planets.--It is only owing to Paley & Co, as I believe, that this more special interference is thought necessary with living bodies.¹¹

In mentioning "Paley & Co," Darwin was referring to William Paley and other natural theologians, who had argued that nature--through the organization and adaptations of living organisms--demonstrated the existence of an intelligent creator. Darwin had studied Paley while in university, and Gray had also been influenced by the work of Paley, whose eighteenth-century opus Natural Theology was an important component of nineteenth-century American philosophy and was still used as a text at Harvard when Gray began teaching there in 1842.


William Paley

Paley's Argument from Design ultimately boiled down to this:

Premise 1: God's will is for us to be happy in this life and the next.

Premise 2: We can discover God's will either by consulting Scripture or by consulting "the light of nature." Both ways will lead to the same conclusion.

Premise 3: The will of God with regard to any action can be found by inquiring into its "tendency to promote or diminish the general happiness."

Conclusion 1: God creates to promote the general happiness of all creatures.

Conclusion 2: Organisms are perfectly adapted to their environment by the Creator.

The corollary of this last conclusion was that perfect design, from the structure and functioning of an organ to the structure of the universe, is evidence for God.

Confronting the reality of suffering and death in nature

For Paley, Nature provided the evidence for the existence of God, but Darwin had difficulty with this argument. His difficulty centered on what might best be referred to as issues surrounding theodicy, i.e., are natural selection and its results consistent with design by a benevolent God or do they imply that, if designed, God is capable of malevolent intent. In a July 3, 1860, letter to Gray, Darwin explicitly raises the issue. He writes:

One word more on "designed laws" & "undesigned results." I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.--An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can't & don't.--If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.--If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.¹²

What Darwin wanted was Design without suffering, teleology without agony, purpose without pain.

Darwin and Gray discuss Design

This issue becomes the focus of discussion following the third article of a series that Gray published in The Atlantic Monthly in July, August, and October of 1860. When these articles were reprinted as a chapter in Gray's Darwiniana, the chapter was titled "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology." The passage that focused the discussion for Darwin was this: "We should advise Mr. Darwin to assume, in the philosophy of his hypothesis, that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines."¹³

After stating that the article was "admirable," Darwin responded to Gray in these words:

But I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design .... [Y]ou lead me to infer that you believe "that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines."--I cannot believe this; & I think you would have to believe, that the tail of the fan-tail was led to vary in the number & direction of its feathers in order to gratify the caprice of a few men.¹⁴

In September, Darwin responded to a question from Gray and informed him of his correspondence with Lyell on the subject of Design. In a lengthy passage, he wrote:

Your question of what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life & mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable forces, I should be convinced.... I have lately been corresponding with Lyell, who, I think, adopts your idea of the stream of variation having been led or designed. I have asked him (& he says he will hereafter reflect & answer me) whether he believes that the shape of my nose was designed. If he does, I have nothing more to say. If not, seeing what Fanciers have done by selecting individual differences in the nasal bones of Pigeons, I must think that it is illogical to suppose that the variations, which Nat. Selection preserves for the good of any being, have been designed. But I know that I am in the same sort of muddle (as I have said before) as all the world seems to be in with respect to free will, yet with every supposed to have been foreseen or preordained.¹⁵

Finally, in December, Darwin sent up the white flag, conceding that "if anything is designed, certainly Man must be; one's 'inner consciousness' (though a false guide) tells one so; yet I cannot admit that man's rudimentary mammae ... & pug-nose were designed .... I am in thick mud;--the orthodox would say in fetid abominable mud."¹⁶ From this point on, the topic is not as central in their correspondence.

Following the publication of Darwin's book on orchids, however, he asked Gray to look at the last chapter, since Darwin believed that it bore on the design question. Gray's response was found in both his review of the book and in a letter to Darwin. In his review, he praised Darwin for having "brought back teleological considerations into botany." He concluded:

We faithfully believe that both natural science and natural theology will richly gain, and equally gain, whether we view each varied form as original, or whether we come to conclude, with Mr. Darwin, that they are derived:--the grand and most important inference of design in nature being drawn from the same data, subject to similar difficulties, and enforced by nearly the same considerations, in the one case as in the other.¹⁷

Gray may have believed that Darwin "brought back teleological considerations into botany," and Darwin may have swung that way in his book on orchids, but by 1867 Darwin had definitely swung back to the other side. In his concluding remarks for The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, he wrote:

However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief that "variation has been led along certain beneficial lines," like a stream "along definite and useful lines of irrigation." If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.¹⁸

In Part 3, the final post in this series, Dr. Miles will explore how Asa Gray was able to embrace evolution without rejecting the idea of design in nature.

Notes

7. Following the publication of Descent of Man, a second problem arose for evangelicals, centered on how humans could be moral beings, created in the Image of God, if they were continuous with the animal kingdom. I will not be addressing that issue in this paper.
8. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 303.
9. Ibid., 106.
10. Ibid., 224.
11. Ibid., 258.
12. Ibid., 275.
13. Asa Gray, "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 121-2.
14. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 496.
15. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 267-8.
16. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, 369.
17. Cited in Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, note 11, 430.
18. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 428.

]]> Sat, 04 Aug 12 07:21:11 -0700 Sara Joan Miles http://biologos.org/blog/beauty-from-the-bleak?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/beauty-from-the-bleak?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Physical death is a necessary and, perhaps, disconcerting element of the evolutionary process for many Christians. It is difficult to imagine a perfect and loving God designing such a universe where forces such as natural death and entropy operate.

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Michael Gungor, a musician, founder of the musical group Gungor, and a pastor at the Bloom Church in Denver, Colorado.

Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things” emphasizes the liberating truth that God has wonderfully made beautiful things “out of the dust,” just as God makes beautiful things out of a life fully surrendered to him and buried in his love.

Beautiful Things

All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

Physical death is a necessary and, perhaps, disconcerting element of the evolutionary process for many Christians. It is difficult to imagine a perfect and loving God designing such a universe where forces such as natural death and entropy operated. Michael Gungor of Bloom Church in Colorado addresses this idea and offers wisdom on such a complex issue.

He highlights the words of Jesus in John 12:24 (NIV): “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” In other words, death precedes true life. This statement appears self-contradictory, but there is evidence of this truth in the world around us. Gungor points to the death of cells in a human body. The death of worn-out cells makes room for new cells, keeping the body healthy. In fact, humans necessarily consume plants and animals in their diet to bring nourishment and support life. He also discusses the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. In accordance with this law, the sun continually burns itself out as it produces light and energy that supports life on earth. Thus, there is a place for natural death on this earth as it allows for the continuation of life.

In light of the New Testament and the testament of science, Gungor proposes that perhaps God is not as afraid of physical death as humans are. God is not fearful of death, knowing full well that it will not remain. It allows for growth in the present, but God has spoken of the day when all death will be destroyed forever. Revelation 21:4(NIV) affirms this truth: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Chapter eight of Romans also speaks about the time when all things will be brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God—that is all things will be made new. Ultimately, life will swallow up death forever, but the current “messiness” of the process of becoming is part of God’s plan too.

(To hear the entire sermon go to this link and scroll to the sermon —“What Can We Learn About Jesus from Science? Part 2”)

]]> Sat, 04 Feb 12 07:00:37 -0800 Michael Gungor http://biologos.org/blog/weekend-sermon-a-tales-of-two-cities?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/weekend-sermon-a-tales-of-two-cities?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication This sermon is a clear reminder that we each have a choice. We can work to build cities that celebrate God’s love for us (the lineage of Seth), or we can live in the destructive lineage of Cain. May the spirit of prayer, humility, and love characterize the world’s cities on this the tenth anniversary of America’s most stark example of “The Tale of Two Cities.”

The opening chapters in Genesis omit seemingly important details, leaving one with an incomplete understanding of the situation at hand. Dr. Keller explains that ancient Biblical writers sought to convey certain truths, and, therefore, would only include facts relevant to the point of the narrative. This is true of Cain’s exile in Genesis 4: 11-26. As he explores this story, he highlights the crucial insights that the passage means to offer.

Foremost, he exposes the cause of Cain’s ruin. When Cain murders Abel, God questions him saying “Where is Abel your brother?” and “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” God is not seeking information, but rather creating an opportunity for Cain to repent of his sin. Why is this so? Dr. Keller explains that sin results when one is self-focused, rather than God- focused. Repentance, however, goes to the root of this problem by turning one’s attention to God and others once again. It is the action of removing oneself from the center that heals the hardness and pride of the heart.

However, Cain does not repent. Instead, he complains to God that his “punishment is more than he can bear.” In other words, he is sorry for the consequences of his sin, not the sin itself. This leads to his exile from the presence of God, which is the ultimate downfall of Cain.

Next, there is evidence that Cain’s city is a “culture of death.” From the line of Cain comes a civilization marked by animal husbandry, technology, and music. In these “gardening” activities, the people indeed reflect God’s image as they creatively order the surrounding materials. However, rather than a Garden of Eden through love and service, it becomes a place marked by oppression and violence. For example, one descendant of Cain called Lamech is polygamous, having two wives. Furthermore, this man boasts saying, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me—If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.” Their culture is now about power and exploitation. In spite of the death cultivated in this city, Dr. Keller clarifies that cities are not the issue. It is human sin alone that corrupts the city.

Finally, the scriptures point to a coming city of grace. When Cain establishes his city, he names it after himself. Without God’s presence and love, his work becomes a means of making a name for himself. However, cities are supposed to be a place where people selflessly give to one another in response to the Lord. This text shows the beginning of one such city that comes through the line of Seth, Eve’s third son. The passage states that this city is filled with a people who “call on the name of the Lord.” Thus, it is a place where people lift high the name of God. Dr. Keller explains that the Body of Christ is called to be this city of grace within the city of death. Ultimately, this power comes through the Lord Jesus Christ alone, who has poured out endless love and forgiveness and grace upon all who believe in his name.

Exactly one decade ago today, the September Eleventh terrorist attacks shocked Americans beyond belief as they watched airplanes crash into the mighty Twin Towers and Pentagon. The hearts of the people filled with grief at the aftermath of the tragedy. The Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, thousands of dearly loved individuals died, and all were crushed with heartache. In the midst of this death arose a beautiful sight and sound: millions bowing their heads in prayer, speaking words of comfort, and coming to the aid of one another. In spite of the physical deaths, New York City and the U.S. as a whole were transformed from death to life as people joined hand in hand to mourn the loss and move forward into the healing process. The pain of the losses was raw and real, but so was the love and grace that swept through, causing our divided nation to unite in unbelievable strength.

This sermon is a clear reminder that we each have a choice. We can work to build cities that celebrate God’s love for us (the lineage of Seth), or we can live in the destructive lineage of Cain. May the spirit of prayer, humility, and love characterize the world’s cities on this the tenth anniversary of America’s most stark example of “The Tale of Two Cities.”

]]> Sun, 11 Sep 11 07:54:51 -0700 Tim Keller http://biologos.org/blog/science-and-faith-at-the-movies-creation-part-2?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/science-and-faith-at-the-movies-creation-part-2?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Darwin’s descent into agnosticism was fueled by a legitimate personal experience with the problem of evil, specifically in the suffering and death of his daughter. This is part two in the latest installment of filmmaker Brian Godawa's series "Science and Faith at the Movies." The full paper on Creation can be found here. Godawa, together with filmmaker, Michael Corwin produced the BioLogos video, "Are Science and Faith in Conflict?"

Creation and the Problem of Evil

Creation depicts the intrinsic opposition between God and evolution that 19th century scientists reflexively assumed, as well as the warfare metaphor that supported it. Huxley claims in the movie that if everything evolved over millions of years, then God didn’t create it all in 6 days, as if the literal interpretation of that text was the only option. Even Darwin himself is shown laboring under the presupposition that evolution cannot be guided or providentially ordained, that a system of life based upon massive amounts of death cannot be a part of God’s created “good” order. Perhaps it would be too much for the film to raise these questions in that original context. And perhaps that is where the weakness lies in an otherwise gripping and personal drama about the origins of The Origin.

The issues raised by this movie are of critical concern for evangelical Christians and their understanding of Darwinian evolution. It is far too simplistic for Christians to write off Darwin as an infidel bent on destroying the faith. The historical evidence seems to indicate that this movie’s suggestion is true: Darwin’s descent into agnosticism was fueled by a legitimate personal experience with the theological problem of evil both in the broader reality and more specifically in the suffering and death of his daughter. Whatever may be said of Darwin’s theological failings, his struggle with reconciling suffering with a good God is a journey for every person who has any shred of humanity or compassion in their soul. It is not just that there is death and suffering in the world that troubles him, but that death and suffering is a necessary part of the biological system to make it run.

Within his internal struggle, Darwin acknowledged the possibility of a theistic presence behind the laws of evolution. William E. Phipps points out in his book, Darwin’s Religious Odyssey, Darwin’s own words in a letter:

“With respect to the theological view of the question: this is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force… I can see no reason why a man, or other animals, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws, and that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event and consequence.¹"

This notion of a God behind the laws of evolution seems to be the last refuge for Darwin’s agnosticism. The God who created the universe and sustains it (Col 1:15-17) could easily have put into place exactly those laws that he could foresee would result in the evolutionary fruit of human beings created in His image. Another possibility is that God himself is directly behind the regularity of physical law, including the process of evolution. Whether through indirect allowance or direct mediation, whether through foreknowledge or foreordination, Darwin certainly acknowledged that God is using evolutionary change to accomplish His purposes. That would have to mean that death and suffering must be part of God’s loving plan. And Scripture seems to declare this all over the place.

The litany of God’s actions proclaimed to Job include both natural law and animal predation. God not only claims to be the active agent behind natural forces like snow (37:6), rain and lightning (37:11-12), and astronomical planetary forces (38:31), but God also claims to actively take a hand in the predation of wild animals (38:39-41), as well as predation of evil human nations upon others (Isa 10), and to raise up and destroy nations (Job 12:23). “He causes it to happen” (37:13). Even taking into consideration the primitive non-scientific Mesopotamian cosmology of the Bible, Scriptural theology still has no problem accepting God’s causal activity behind the destructive forces of nature (Psa 104) and of human evil. God does not merely “allow” evil to exist in the Hebrew worldview, He somehow actively ordains it.

I form light and create darkness,
I make well-being and create calamity,
I am the LORD, who does all these things.
Is. 45:7

Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?
Lam. 3:37-38

Let us not forget that God’s speaking forth is the common expression of his active creation as in Genesis One. God’s hand, a metaphor for his active causal participation, is even described in the New Testament as being involved in the the murder of God’s own Son.

For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. Acts 4:27-28

But this is not to make God evil or the Bible contradictory. For the Christian, this is first and foremost an exegetical issue. Regardless of what philosophical problems Christians may have with the notion of God’s sovereignty and evil, our first commitment is to discover what the Bible says about the issue, not to presuppose what can and cannot be proposed philosophically. Clearly, the Bible claims that God somehow ordains natural disasters and both good and evil in such a way that man’s responsibility is not diminished, nor is God himself engaged in evil. Just how this is so is not explained to us. But this is why Joseph can accept the evil actions of his brothers as having two causal agents behind them: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen 50:20 – one action, two actors – human freedom and God’s sovereignty). It is not that humans have no freedom and that God is a puppeteer, but rather that there is a mysterious consilience between the two, best expressed in the proposition that God foreordains the free acts of men.

And herein lies the fundamental flaw in assuming that death and suffering is contradictory to a loving God’s providential care of creation: it begs the question. Who says God cannot have a morally sufficient reason for why he uses death and suffering to accomplish his purposes?

]]> Mon, 04 Apr 11 08:00:52 -0700 Brian Godawa http://biologos.org/blog/a-pastors-perspective-on-death-and-evolution?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/a-pastors-perspective-on-death-and-evolution?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication If death did not exist before Adam and Eve, how could God have used evolution to create man? And what about predators and natural catastrophes such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs? In an essay for The BioLogos Forum, guest writer Marcio Antonio Campos looks at the apparent contradiction between death entering the world through the Fall and the role of death in the process of evolution. If death did not exist before Adam and Eve, how could God have used evolution to create man? And what about predators and natural catastrophes such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, which both imply the existence of physical death before the Fall?

For those who didn’t get a chance to read the three responses presented in Campos’ wonderful piece, we certainly encourage you to do so. Today, however, we’d like to look at two videos from Daniel Harrell, Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota.

In the first video Harrell addresses the way that we view death. As we see in Paul’s letters, there is a judicial idea that physical death is the punishment for sin. According to Harrell, however, this is not the whole story. Death has a redemptive aspect as well.

Biologically speaking, the pastor reminds us, you cannot have life without death. New life is always accompanied by death. In spite of our belief that death is in some sense a punishment for sin, there is also the reality that Christ died for our sins yet we continue to die. The reason for this is difficult to explain if death truly is nothing but a punishment. A question continues to linger in the air: “If Jesus died to save me from dying then why do I still die?”

Harrell suggests, however, that the reason we continue to die is that death is not altogether bad. In fact, according to our understanding of biology, Harrell says, Adam would have died even if he had never sinned at all. There are two sides to death. On one hand, the broken relationship that comes from sin is a kind of death. On the other hand, physical death is a necessary part of biological life. As living organisms we all have a lifespan. Had Adam never sinned, Harrell believes he would still have passed at some point from this life to the next just as we will one day do through our faith in Jesus Christ.

In the second video, Harrell engages us in a speculation over why God may have chosen to create life through the evolutionary process. Christians often struggle to accept that God created through evolution because it is a process that requires a great deal of death and waste. They doubt that God would have chosen to create in a way that was not linear and beautiful.

Harrell, however, proposes that as Christians we can accept the idea of evolution in spite of these difficulties. He comes to this conclusion by realizing that death is part of the character of God. God’s supreme expression of love, in fact, was an act of death; Christ gave himself fully for the ones he loves.

Evolution is, in a sense, an analogy to this act of love we see in Jesus’ death. The many organisms that have lived and died throughout the course of evolution are God’s gift to his beloved children. All of this was “spent by God for the sake of life”.

As human beings, we expect God to do things the way we would do them: in an efficient, linear, and tidy manner. In reality, Harrell reminds us, God functions in ways that don’t make sense to us at all. After all, who would expect the God of the universe to become human and die? Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to us that God would create a world that exists through dying. However, God’s actions are not constrained by whether they “make sense” to mankind, for his ways are above ours.

]]> Wed, 09 Mar 11 09:00:41 -0800 Daniel Harrell http://biologos.org/blog/coppermouth?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/coppermouth?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Snakes—especially the poisonous varieties—evoke a primordial dread in many people, a response sometimes even attributed to God’s curse of enmity between Eve and the serpent in the second chapter of Genesis. Snakes—especially the poisonous varieties—evoke a primordial dread in many people, a response sometimes even attributed to God’s curse of enmity between Eve and the serpent in the second chapter of Genesis. Yet as Pete Enns has written, the reputation of the serpent in Genesis and other near eastern texts is complex and mysterious rather than uniformly evil, as the snake seems to have represented aspects of both immortality and wisdom. In the Matthew 10:16 Jesus himself suggested that the “craftiness” of the serpent was not something necessarily to be feared or condemned, but claimed as wisdom when in combination with the “innocence of doves.” Snakes, then, are an interesting example of a natural and spiritual symbol that is equivocal and multifaceted, calling forth both fascination and unease in equal measures, all but requiring us to maintain such competing thoughts and feelings at the same time.

That mental balancing act is nearly the definition of irony described by poet and scholar Matt Boyleston in his recent essay “The Language of Paradox: Irony and Poetry”, in The City:

“Irony describes a poet’s recognition of incongruities and his controlled acceptance of them, or in [critic Northrup] Frye’s words, that irony ‘takes life exactly as it finds it.’ Irony, in this case, is the understanding that life is paradoxical and then dwelling fully in that paradoxical state.” (The City. Volume 3 Issue 2 (Fall 2010): p.19.)

Boyleston continues by saying that for Christians this sense of the irony is not a mere literary curiosity, but something central to our understanding of what it is to be human, the paradox of living both as created in the image of God and in rebellion against our Maker:

“One can only properly understand what it means to be human if one clearly places each of these states, Man’s creation in the image of God and Man’s fallen nature, in an ironic relationship in which one never affirms one state at the expense of the other. . . . If poetry is truly . . . the language of paradox, then to understand fully our paradoxical state as Christians is to dwell poetically. And still further, one must use the language of paradox to properly educate a student concerning this paradoxical, this ironical condition of man.” (p. 20)

Boyleston’s commitment to this sort of education is displayed not only in his classroom and essays but in his poetic work, too—including the piece featured below by which we may connect the discussion of snakes and irony with the regular theme of The BioLogos Forum, that Christian faith and evolutionary biology need not be understood as contradictory commitments.

No fan of the Enlightenment idea that something must be “true” (as in verifiable in a reductionistic sort of way) to be affirmed, Boyleston has said that his interests lie in things that have “resonance with cultural memories of origin and relations to community: What is liturgical, repetitive, cyclical?” Yet, as poets and scientists share an attentiveness to the natural world, Boyleston’s account of looking for creatures at the intersection of science and myth is book-ended by divergence and convergence, concepts that are key to understanding what we find in the biological world.

“Coppermouth” does not propose a solution or instruct on how faith and biology ought to intermingle, but calls us to the practice of searching, always summoned forward by the author of both the World and the Word. In both his analysis and his imagery, then, Boyleston helps us see that cyclical, ironic tensions are not things to be denied or merely mitigated, but are the essence of the human state, compelling us to come together in community in the name of the One who exemplified “dual natures.” In the paradox of the craftiness/wisdom of the biblical serpent, in the irony of faith and science coming together yet remaining apart, we can recognize the tension between what we know and do not yet know, between who we are and who we one day will be.

“Coppermouth”

by J. Matthew Boyleston

We trace divergence.

We are in an old van
on an old bridge
looking for signs:

a snake slip, a warm nest,
the traces of the thought
when we all were one.

The earth has Alzheimer’s.
It forgets all it ever knew
leaving bits and pieces of a shattered
personality flashing up
at us when we dig deep.

The evolutionary herpetologist
from the county zoo with thick waders
and a rusted S-hook
is down on his hands and knees
peering into a dark swamp

and we students fan out in all directions
searching for the Coppermouth,
extinct ancestor
of moccasin and pit-viper,
a slithering rumor
that someone somewhere had heard tell.

Our Gullah translator,
comes back with filtered stories
and the feral bodies
of two boa constrictors
let loose in the swamp.
But beneath the stories,
there is something here.
Wounds that don’t respond
to anti-venom
like a door that won’t open
with a key that fits,
the occasional sloughed skin
with patterns only vaguely
similar to ones we know,
even, perhaps two rotten fangs
tacked to the rafter of a hunter’s lodge.

If such a species were still alive,
we must find it, if only to show
us the process of our combination
and how different we’ve become.

If only to remind us of the God
who looks down on us saying:
come together all things
in my name.

©2009 J. Matthew Boyleston.

A native of South Carolina, James Matthew Boyleston received a BA in English and Philosophy from Furman University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Carolina, and his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He now serves in several teaching and administrative roles at Houston Baptist University, including Interim Associate Dean, College of Arts and Humanities, and 
Chair, Department of English. His scholarship and poetry have been published in more than two-dozen journals, with his research interests running a wide gamut of topics at the intersection of history, literature and theology: the English Renaissance, Reformation and Civil War; Calvinism, Reformed Theology and Anglo-Catholicism; the relationships between Irish and Southern literature; Modernist and contemporary poetry; and sacred music, liturgy and artistic worship. As he mentions in this video of a reading of “Coppermouth,” he also has “a disturbing and intimate knowledge of snakes.” Additional information may be found here.

]]> Sun, 06 Mar 11 07:00:46 -0800 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/genesis-creation-and-ancient-interpreters-a-crafty-serpent?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/genesis-creation-and-ancient-interpreters-a-crafty-serpent?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The earliest interpreters of the Bible—just like modern ones—where curious about the serpent mentioned in Genesis 3. The earliest interpreters of the Bible—just like modern ones—where curious about the serpent mentioned in Genesis 3. He is introduced as “more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made” (v. 1). He then proceeds to dupe Eve into eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge.

This episode raises a number of well-known questions. Is there more to this snake than just being “crafty?” After all, he can talk and he seems to have it out for the first couple.

Genesis 3:1 presents the serpent simply as an animal. But how to explain his ability to talk? Some interpreters suggested that at first all animals were able to talk. The second century BC book of Jubilees says that when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, “the mouth of all the beasts and cattle and birds and whatever walked or moved was stopped from speaking because all of them used to speak with one another with one speech and one language” (3:28). Philo said that, “in olden times…snake could speak with a man’s voice” (On Creation 156). The historian Josephus said, “at that time all living things spoke the same language” (Jewish Antiquities 1:41).

This explanation may strike modern readers as a bit fanciful, but perhaps not more fanciful than the presence of a talking snake in the first place. For these early interpreters a talking animal posed a problem that they felt they needed to solve.

Some also handled in the same way the serpent’s unusual punishment: condemned to crawl on his belly (Genesis 3:14). Don’t serpents do that anyway? But some early interpreters surmised that serpents originally had legs like other animals. Of all the animals on earth, they alone lost their legs because of what this one serpent did.

In either case, there was nothing supernatural about the serpent.

Other interpreters took a different approach, and one well known to Christian readers. The serpent’s craftiness and ability to talk are supernatural powers: the serpent was Satan, or perhaps an agent of Satan. This explanation had the advantage of making more sense of the promise of “enmity” between the woman’s seed and the serpent’s seed (3:15). If the serpent was just a regular animal, Genesis 3:15 would simply be talking about how people would view snakes. Admittedly, it is true that most people really do have a special fear of snakes, but such an explanation seemed terribly anti-climactic as a focus of this important story. Many interpreters concluded that there is something more going on here than a story about a snake.

The Old Testament itself nowhere makes the connection between the serpent in the Garden and Satan. In fact, after this episode, the serpent is not mentioned again in the Old Testament. In the New Testament he seems to make his appearance in Revelation 12:9. There he is referred to as “the great dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, who was cast out, he who deceives the whole world” (see also 20:2).

Not all scholars, however, think this is an allusion to the serpent in the Garden but to the ancient symbol of chaos known to us from other ancient literature. The serpent also appears in several biblical passages such as Isaiah 27:1, where he is referred to as Leviathan: “In that day, the LORD will punish with his sword—his fierce, great and powerful sword—Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.” Furthermore, the highly symbolic nature of the book of Revelation is reason to pause before jumping to conclusions.

Still, Revelation 12:9 refers to the serpent “deceiving” and this may be an allusion to the Garden episode. Other early interpreters read the Garden story similarly, identifying the serpent with Satan or one of his agents. For example, in 1 Enoch 69:6, the serpent is “the third [fallen] angel Gadreel.” In the Apocalypse of Moses 16:4 and 17:4, the serpent becomes the devil” “vessel” for speaking. According to one of the Targums (Pseudo-Jonathan), it was a wicked angel Sammael. With this understanding of the serpent, the promise of enmity was understood as the war between subsequent humans and the devil.

One interesting dimension that has been discovered anew in modern times is how snakes were viewed in other ancient religions. In the Gilgamesh epic, the magical plant that would have rejuvenated Gilgamesh was stolen by a snake. Most scholars see some parallel here with the loss of immortality in the biblical story.

Additionally, snakes were associated with wisdom in Egyptian religions, which may also parallel the biblical story. Gaining knowledge of good and evil is a goal of wisdom for the Israelites, but it has to be gained God’s way (hence the injunction in Proverbs that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom). The serpent in the Garden tempts Eve to seize wisdom in an illicit way—through disobeying God.

Many biblical scholars today see these themes at work in the Garden story in Genesis, and so see the serpent as an ancient and powerful symbol of the loss of immortality and wisdom.

The serpent is a central figure in the Garden story, but slithers in and out of the story somewhat mysteriously. He continues to attract the attention of biblical interpreters to this day.

]]> Tue, 18 Jan 11 06:59:51 -0800 Pete Enns http://biologos.org/blog/philip-yancey-on-his-new-book-what-good-is-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/philip-yancey-on-his-new-book-what-good-is-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this video “Conversation,” Philip Yancey explains that on the way home from a trip to Mumbai, India, during which terrorists attacked the city, he began to form a list of the challenging situations he has experienced.
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Philip Yancey is on the organizing committee of the Theology of Celebration series of BioLogos Workshops that have taken place in New York City the past three years. Yancey reflects briefly on his experience at one of the workshops here.

In this video “Conversation,” Philip Yancey, Christian journalist and author, discusses the inspiration behind his book What Good is God?

Yancey explains that his book arose from the many interesting circumstances he’s found himself in throughout his travels as a writer. On the way home from a trip to Mumbai, India, during which terrorists attacked the city, he began to form a list of the challenging situations he has experienced. This list morphed into the ten chapters of the book, each of which addresses an example of faith stretched to the extreme. Some of these situations involve suffering and trauma while others are simply difficult experiences like speaking to a crowd of prostitutes. Two themes, however, tie all of these different chapters together: the complexities of suffering and grace.

Many Christians respond to suffering in problematic ways. They either lecture the suffering individual or offer philosophical explanations for their pain. Yancey argues that the correct response to suffering is not found in these things but instead can be seen in the face of Jesus. Looking at Jesus’ life, says Yancey, it is obvious that he is on the side of suffering people. He always responds to people in pain with compassion and healing. While some questions about suffering, Yancey admits, can never be answered, the author starts with “his brightest glue being the face of Jesus who responds to people who are going through suffering and difficulties.”

Philip Yancey's book What Good is God? is available here

]]> Wed, 15 Dec 10 10:26:34 -0800 Philip Yancey http://biologos.org/blog/series/how-could-god-create-through-evolution-a-look-at-theodicy?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/how-could-god-create-through-evolution-a-look-at-theodicy?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication This series, written by Bethany Sollereder, seeks to address this question: “How could God create through a process that involves so much pain and death?” She first presents the two drastically opposite worldviews held by theologians and scientists. She also reflects theologically on how a world created through evolutionary means can be good, and concludes with some thoughts concerning the Fall, physical decay and spiritual death. “How could a good God create through a process that involves so much pain and death?” For many people, accepting evolution is less a scientific question than a theological one. After all, seeing evolution as God’s method of creation requires affirming that death, pain, and natural disasters are part of God’s creative toolbox instead of a result of the Fall. In this three-part blog series, I will first look at how theologians and scientists have seen the world in contrary ways, and then reflect theologically on how a world created through evolutionary means can be good.

First, let’s see how theologians have thought about our world. Theologians––academic and popular, contemporary and ancient––have almost universally affirmed the connection between sin and physical death. Drawing from passages such as Genesis 3 and Romans 5 & 8, they have argued that death came through sin. In regard to the natural world, this means invoking a Cosmic Fall scenario in which not only human death came through the Fall, but earthquakes, tornadoes, pain, predation, and disease as well.

Consider this quotation from John Calvin: “For it appears that all the evils of the present life, which experience proves to be innumerable, have proceeded from the same fountain. The inclemency of the air, frost, thunders, unseasonable rains, drought, hail, and whatever is disorderly in the world, are the fruits of sin. Nor is there any other primary cause of diseases.”¹ Pretty clear, right? God did not want these “evils” to be part of the world, and the only reason they exist is because of human sin.

What’s more, theologians see the redemption by Christ on the cross as the denunciation of these natural evils. For example, T. F. Torrance writes “The Cross of Christ tells us unmistakably that all physical evil, not only pain, suffering, disease, corruption, death, and of course cruelty and venom in animals as well as human behaviour, but also ‘natural’ calamities, devastations and monstrosities are an outrage against the love of God and a contradiction of good order in his creation.”²

Scientists, on the other hand, have looked at these same natural phenomena, and have come to the conclusion that realities like pain, earthquakes, and death are in fact necessary to good and flourishing lives. How do they do this? Let’s look at two examples: earthquakes and pain.

When discussing plate tectonics³, the media tends to focus on the negative effects of our planet’s mobile plates. We hear about volcanic activity that shuts down European flight zones, tsunamis that devastate whole populations, and of course earthquakes, which have caused major devastations and cost many people their lives in Haiti, China, and Chile. How can earthquakes be good? What else does the plate cycle do?

First, plate tectonics, through the rotation of the mantle below, contributes to the magnetic field which surrounds our planet, keeping the atmosphere in and warding off deadly cosmic rays from the sun, which would destroy life if they reached the planet. Second, plate tectonic movement involves the solid plates being forced down into the liquid mantle and melting in some places, while in other places the plates separate and allow hot magma to rise and solidify. This recycling uses up heat produced by the interior radiation of the earth. This process is so effective that it uses up almost 90% of the heat produced by the Earth. In comparison, on Venus, the lack of plate tectonics means that the same heat produced by the core does not get recycled, and the pressure and heat build up so high that the distinction between mantle and crust gets lost––the whole planet goes molten. The rest of the time, surface temperatures average around 500 degrees Celsius. There are many other advantages to plate tectonics, including stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide, maintaining temperatures for liquid surface water, renewing nutrients in the soil, and keeping a distinction between ocean and continent. Life, and certainly human life in this world, simply does not have a chance without plate tectonics. I do not want to understate the great human and animal cost associated with earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, but without plate tectonics, there would be no life at all. I would affirm that this world’s plate tectonics are part of God’s very good creation.

What about pain? If any of us were given the choice to live without pain, most of us would say an enthusiastic “yes please!” Until, that is, we saw what a life without pain really looks like. In our mind’s eye we would imagine striding untouched though hardship and peril, like a real-life Superman, able to conquer all the aches and pains that keep us from reaching our full potential. In reality, a painless life is a horror show. In reality, painlessness looks like leprosy.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s Disease, is a bacterial infection that invades the body’s pain nerves and ultimately destroys them, leaving the person with an inability to feel pain. That is, in fact, almost all that leprosy does. The subsequent damage that we associate with leprosy––fingers falling off, open wounds, and missing limbs––does not actually come from the bacteria themselves, but from the resulting painlessness. Patients burn themselves and do not pull back; they walk on broken limbs and do not notice. In the book The Gift of Pain, Paul Brand describes how in one African clinic, rats were coming in the night and feeding on patients fingers, and because they felt no pain, they slept on.⁴ Pain is a good thing, our ever-present protector, developed through an evolutionary process to help us live good lives. Now, this is not to say that pain never goes wild. It does, and with realities like chronic pain or torture, pain can become an enemy. But that does not undermine the fact that our ability to feel pain is a great gift; it just means that sometimes that gift becomes twisted in its expression. The solution is not to wish for a world with no pain, but for a world where pain is appropriately experienced.

Now let me insert one caveat here: in no way do I want to say that just because pain is “natural” that we have no responsibility to help relieve it. That is not what I am arguing. I would say that pain serves important purposes, which are needed for a good life. At the same time, we should look to the example of Jesus, who walked into pain-filled situations and brought healing, regardless of the cause of the suffering. It is our recognition of suffering in the other⁵ and our responsibility of stewardship to one another that must motivate our medical ethics.

There is a lot more that we could talk about here. We could speak of predation, which encourages biodiversity and drives evolutionary innovation. We could explore how physical death is a good and necessary part of a world that has limited resources, keeping organisms from becoming cancerous (cancer cells never die on their own and are thus “immortal”). These are important, but they roughly follow the same type of argumentation as above. In my next post, I will look at the values of a world developed through an evolutionary process, or, as it is sometimes asked, “Why didn’t God simply create heaven in the first place?”

Notes

1. John Calvin, Commentaries upon the First Book of Moses called Genesis (1554) in Calvin’s Bible Commentaries: Genesis, Part I, trans. J. King (Forgotten Books, 1847, 2007), 113.
2. T. F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), 117.
3. For more about plate tectonics, check out Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, (New York: Copernicus, 2004).
4. Paul Brand & Philip Yancey, The Gift of Pain: Why we hurt & what we can do about it (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993), 127.
5. Suffering, and not necessarily pain. Pain is the brain’s reception of the stimulation of pain nerves. Suffering is a psychological state, and can be caused by many things. Pain can be absent in those who suffer, as is the case with leprosy. We should be careful not to collapse these two distinct concepts into one and the same thing.

]]> Sat, 31 Jul 10 08:00:33 -0700 Bethany Sollereder http://biologos.org/blog/jerry-coynes-insufferable-argument?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/jerry-coynes-insufferable-argument?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The theodicy problem has been around forever and is rife with nuance and subtlety. Great philosophers and theologians have explored it at great length, as has every freshman philosophy major in their first course. Editor's Note: This is a corrected version of a blog that was posted on May 24. Mr. Giberson apologizes for the problems in the previous blog and thanks those readers that brought them to his attention.

In a recent blog post Jerry Coyne critiqued what he called a “surprising” paper by biologist John Avise in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper was unusual for the PNAS—even surprising—because it dealt with theology. Avise made a familiar argument that Ayala and others have made on this site, namely that evolution should be preferred over ID and creationism for theological as well as scientific reasons.

The theological reason has to do with the way evolution mitigates the problem of bad design and natural evil in the world. If the world is designed by God, then God is “on the hook” for all the collateral grief caused by the ubiquitous bad design created by natural selection. For humans this would include our constant back and knee problems, our propensity to overeat, and a host of other maladies from autism to sickle-cell anemia and Huntington’s disease. But if evolution “freely” produced these various problems without God’s help or approval then God can be “off the hook,” so to speak.

This argument addresses the complex theological problem of evil known as theodicy, which can be stated simply like this:

God is good
God is all-powerful
Bad things happen (there is evil in the world)

The theodicy “problem” arises when we recognize that all three of these things cannot be true at the same time. A good God would not let bad things happen, just like a good parent would not let their toddlers play on the freeway. The “solution” to this problem is typically to deny the truth of one of the claims. Perhaps God is not good or, more commonly, perhaps God does not exist at all. Many people who have abandoned their faith in God, from Charles Darwin to Michael Shermer—did so because they could not square the loving Christian God of their childhood with the world as they encountered it. To reject God altogether is the atheists’ solution to the problem.

The process theologians use to “solve” the problem is to assert that God is not all-powerful. God is limited to “helping” the world move in the right direction. A more conventional Christian response is to suggest that God “self-limited” his power to give the world some autonomy. Either way stuff happens that God cannot prevent.

And then there are some who suggest that there really is no such thing as genuine evil in the world. This is a sort of “default” that many Christians fall into without thinking too much about it. They want to turn every bad thing into an “instrument to produce a good thing.” The car accident that killed Mom was tragic but it got the rest of the family thinking about their faith so it was really a good thing in disguise.

None of these solutions work well for obvious reasons so the theodicy problem persists. The question usually comes down to this: “Which worldview deals with theodicy the most effectively?” Theologies that emphasize the sovereignty and omniscience of God—the “Reformed” and “Calvinist” traditions—have a greater problem than the Wesleyan and Anglican traditions that place more emphasis on God’s love. But neither “solves” the problem. As you can imagine, there are endless debates and bright people who would aggressively challenge even the claims I have made in this paragraph.

The theodicy problem has been around forever and is rife with nuance and subtlety. Great philosophers and theologians have explored it at great length, as has every freshman philosophy major in their first course. Liebniz wrestled with it and argued that despite appearances, we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire thought this was ridiculous and skewered Leibniz in Candide by putting his arguments in the mouth of the uninspired Dr. Pangloss. There is not much new to say about the problem of evil other than that it is still around.

Coyne, however, rushes in where angels fear to tread and recites all the familiar arguments in his review of the Avise paper in PNAS. Here is Coyne’s succinct statement of the problem:

There are of course many ways to "reconcile" faith and science, although in my opinion none have been very successful. One of the more popular ways is to see evolution as a big improvement in theodicy—the perennial attempt of the faithful to reconcile the existence of evil with that of a loving and powerful God. How could such a god permit the existence of suffering, particularly the suffering of innocent people, and particularly when those evils are inflicted not by other humans but by diseases like cancer or natural disasters like tsunamis? Evolution, so the answer goes, answers this because much of our suffering is simply inherent in the process of evolution, a process supposedly chosen by God to work his will.

Coyne has a variety of responses to Avise. He starts by suggesting that the paper is “surprising” because “[he hasn’t] before seen a paper in a high-class science journal that tries to show how science can be used to upgrade theology.” (Note the implication that the paper is inappropriate because the journal is “high-class.” Presumably, such a paper would be fine in a “low-class” publication.)

The argument Coyne is discussing is familiar and appeared not long after The Origins of Species was published. Here is Avise’s statement of it:

Evolution by natural causes in effect emancipates religion from the shackles of theodicy. No longer need we agonize about why a Creator God is the world’s leading abortionist and mass murderer… No longer need we be tempted to blaspheme an omnipotent Deity by charging Him directly responsible for human frailties and physical shortcomings … No longer need we blame a Creator God’s direct hand for any of these disturbing empirical facts. Instead, we can put the blame squarely on the agency of insentient natural evolutionary causation.

Coyne disagrees, however, that theology gets any sort of assist from evolution: “If evolution is to become a "welcome partner" to religion, the faithful will have to accept that evolution and natural selection were God's plan for creating life. And that just raises more theological difficulties: “Why would God choose such an inefficient and wasteful way to create life…If natural selection is anything, it's suffering, so the evolutionary process itself entails all the evils that theodicy must explain.”

This common assertion cannot be refuted, but it can be—and has been—dramatically mitigated. For starters, “inefficient” and “wasteful” are not terms that make sense in a vacuum. Does it make sense to call the sun “wasteful” because so little of its light actually gets used for anything? Is the hydrological cycle “inefficient” because rainfall could be distributed more sensibly? A larger theological context is required here to make sense of such claims.

The more serious problem is the claim that natural selection is “suffering.” This is surely exaggeration. No trees suffered in the long evolutionary process that produced the magnificent maples in my back yard. Neither did the barnacle or the cockroach. In fact, almost all the species had evolved and gone extinct before one emerged that could be said to experience suffering. And even for species that can “suffer,” selection does a lot of work without producing suffering. The poor peacock with the wimpy tail feathers might not be able to find a mate so his wimpy genes will not be selected but the only suffering he will experience will be humiliation.

The claim that natural selection is all about suffering comes from watching too many nature shows where the fast lion chases down the slow zebra and kills it. That is suffering to be sure, and no Christian should look at that and shrug: “Well, that is God’s creative process at work.” Such events—disturbingly common in nature—pose real theological challenges. But that same camera recording the bloody death of the zebra captures grasses and trees that evolve without suffering.

Coyne states that “God could have set up evolution so that it entailed less suffering.” This may very well be true—and I often find myself in agreement with Coyne on this point—but how can we know this? This might be true, but belief in God comes with a recognition that reality has layers we simply don’t understand. I have no idea, for example, how anything is created. God gave humans free will and Hitler abused the gift. On the other hand, Bill Gates is freely spending his considerable fortune to make the world a better place. Can we have free will that empowers Gates but not Hitler? Can God create free natural processes that can freely explore only good possibilities? Coyne is convinced that God “could have allowed only beneficial mutations to occur rather than ones that cause disease.” But this makes sense only if we have some model of how God interacts with nature. The world may be such that saying “God allows” is not an accurate description of the freedom that exists in nature. I allow my children to drive my car by themselves. If they run down a pedestrian, did I allow that? God allows gravity to function in a regular way. If a tree falls on my head, did God allow that?

Coyne concludes “evolution is not a "welcome partner" for theodicy, for it raises more problems than it solves.” “It's easier and more parsimonious,” he concludes, “to simply discard the notion of God...”

This bold conclusion has been considered and rejected by many thoughtful believers, for it is but one small part of the larger metaphysical affirmation that God exists and created the world. Coyne has not engaged the many arguments for the existence of God that have nothing to do with evolution (hardly possible in a blog, of course). Furthermore—and most importantly—Christianity has the suffering of Christ at its heart—not the creation of the world or life. Long before evolution was even in the air Christian theology wrestled with the problem of suffering and what it meant that God had become incarnate in Jesus to participate in that suffering.

]]> Mon, 24 May 10 10:45:14 -0700 Karl Giberson http://biologos.org/blog/the-end-of-christianity?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/the-end-of-christianity?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Many evangelicals find the challenge of modern science not only anti-biblical, but antithetical to the notion of a loving God who called His new creation “very good.” Introduction by Darrel Falk

Several months ago, I read two books recently put out by Senior Fellows at the Discovery Institute. I have already commented on the first, Signature in the Cell, by Stephen Meyer. Although I was disappointed with it, I found the second, The End of Christianity, by William Dembski, intriguing. My theological background is Wesleyan. Theological scholars in the Wesleyan tradition are rarely troubled by death before the Fall. It’s a non-issue for most Wesleyans, but it is an issue for many evangelicals. In fact, this one concept may be the most significant barrier blocking many evangelicals from accepting an old earth and coming to grips with the reality of evolution. Dembski, in this book, leaves the realm of math and biology. This time he dons his theological hat and lays out a view that ought to generate much conversation among those troubled by death before the Fall.

BioLogos exists to show that mainstream science and Christianity can exist in harmony. Bill Dembski has written a book that may help many theological conservatives see that the two need not occupy separate realms. Although theologically I resonate more with the sorts of things that N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and Peter Enns have said in previous BioLogos postings, we seek ways of fostering conversation. Bill Dembski’s book ought to foster conversation.

My friend and lay advisor, Steve Blake, has written two fine posts for Science and the Sacred that describe his journey to harmony between faith and science. Steve, a highly informed conservative layperson, explains why The End of Christianity stands to impact and generate substantive discussion among his fellow evangelicals.

Review by Stephen Blake

In The Consequences of Ideas, RC Sproul writes: "We need to reconstruct the classical synthesis by which natural theology bridges the special revelation of Scripture and the general revelation of nature. Such a reconstruction could end the war between science and theology." Though a dizzying number of syntheses have been proffered in recent years, William Dembski's The End of Christianity is a watershed in Christian theology, a robust, landmark contribution that bridges the faith-science divide with a refreshingly high regard for biblical integrity that, as an evangelical, I find all-too-rare. In this treatise on how the records of Scripture and nature harmonize, Dembski engages in a rigorous, deeply probative, exceptionally well-reasoned discourse of the kind we're used to encountering in the church fathers, and of the sort one might wish were more prevalent today.

To set up the issue: Evangelicals have long held the Bible as asserting that all evil in the world - not only moral evil (stemming from human misdeeds) but natural evil (stemming from impersonal acts of nature) - is the result of Adam's sin against God. In this view, the earth and its living populations, as initially created, were completely free of all suffering, death, and danger until the first man succumbed to temptation and defied the will of God, an act of rebellion that brought divine chastisement upon himself, his future progeny (i.e., all of mankind), and the world over which he had been appointed master and covenant head.

Vigorously challenging this view are modern scientists, who dismiss this chronology and assert, based on a myriad of corroborative evidences from various disciplines, that life-claiming natural disasters and diseases were already present on animal-occupied earth long before the first humans existed. Many evangelicals find this not only anti-biblical, but also antithetical to the notion of a loving God who called His new creation “very good.” Today, particularly in the United States, this clash of perspectives is playing out in epic proportions, and it is into this debate that Dembski, a theologian and professor of philosophy as well as mathematician and statistician, steps engagingly.

In its opening chapters, The End of Christianity (“End” as in “purpose” OR “aim”) affirms key traditional Christian doctrines involving the origin, quality, implications, and future of natural evil: Natural evil is indeed truly evil, not merely the inevitable result of God bestowing freedom upon atoms and tectonic plates; Man is fully culpable for the presence of natural evil on earth; Beyond mere punishment, God demonstrates a loving purposefulness towards man in bringing about severe natural consequences in response to Adam’s disobedience; Still, God does not abandon us in our suffering, but commiserates with us in the person of Christ; Through Christ’s triumphant Resurrection, God has effected the ultimate vanquishment of all suffering and all evil of every stripe.

Certainly, the average evangelical would be right at home with this theology. Yet Dembski then turns to examine the two most prevalent science-faith syntheses within evangelicalism, Young- and Old-Earth Creationism, and finally dismisses both as fatally flawed on theological grounds. If, then, man is culpable for all natural evil, yet natural evil preceded the appearance of man on earth, and if both Young- and Old-Earth Creationism fail, where does the solution lie?

Enter Dembski’s theodicy, which he calls “backward causation.” He begins by challenging our core instincts about the workings of cause and effect within time, specifically our assumption that human sin cannot have caused evil in the world unless it temporally preceded it. “Why, in the economy of a world whose Creator is omnipotent, omniscient, and transtemporal, should causes always [chronologically] precede effects? Clearly, such a Creator could act to anticipate events that have yet to happen. Moreover, those events could be the occasion (or "cause") of God's prior anticipatory action." Hence, all natural evil is indeed the direct consequence of Adam's sin (per traditional Christian theology), yet God brought these consequences to bear upon creation long before that pivotal event temporally occurred (a chronology demanded by science). He argues that we should understand the corrupting effects of the Fall retroactively: “In other words, the consequences of the Fall can also act backward into the past. Accordingly, the Fall could take place after the natural evils for which it is responsible."

Dembski points out that the Bible clearly depicts God as unbound by time, "declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done." In demonstrating the consistency of this line of thinking with Christian orthodoxy, he cites the long-held belief that "many an answered prayer requires that God have prepared the answer before the prayer was actually offered." He buttresses this point by discussing "the saving effects of the Cross, which are held to act not only forward in time but also backward. Christians have always attributed the salvation of Old Testament saints to Christ's sacrifice on the Cross at the hands of the Romans, even though Old Testament times predate Roman times by hundreds of years. In this way, an omnipotent God unbound by time makes a future event (Christ's sacrifice) the cause of an earlier event (the salvation of Old Testament saints). Likewise, an omnipotent God unbound by time can make natural evil predate the Fall and yet make the Fall the reason for natural evil." The chapters that follow compellingly flesh out this view from theological, philosophical, and scientific perspectives.

Dembski then revisits Genesis 1-3 and interprets these widely-debated chapters from the vantage point of God's eternal intentions and the non-chronologic time of His realm. What follows is an intriguing, well–reasoned examination of the need for God to relocate Adam from the fallen world-at-large to the pristine Garden of Eden ("a segregated area in which the effects of natural evil are not evident") and to then erase the effects and memory of the fallen world from his being and breathe into him the breath of life, so that when Adam later falls from grace into sin, it is from a state of true spiritual and experiential innocence and not the brokenness that the evil-filled world would have been inflicting upon him since birth (as it does us). As for who "Adam" actually was, Dembski stresses that "the theodicy developed in this book is certainly compatible with a literal Adam and Eve. But it does not require a literal Adam and Eve," after which he proceeds to explain the first humans in a macro-evolutionary context.

Solidly grounded in traditional theology and the obvious product of deep biblical reflection, The End of Christianity is, in my view, a must-read for theologians, pastors, elders, scientists who speak on faith-science issues, and laypersons alike. No other theodicy I have studied more uncompromisingly or with greater integrity reconciles Scripture with scientific discovery. In fact, it resonates with such fundamental simplicity and theological elegance that its emergence seems to ring with an air of inevitability. Indeed, the reasoning found here is not merely Christian but patristic in quality, scope, and intent. Still, on balance, in considering The End of Christianity one has the sense that its ideas are but a runway, a launch point for far more extensive explorations and discussion yet to be undertaken (and sure to follow). But it is a fantastic starting point.

]]> Fri, 14 May 10 09:00:51 -0700 Stephen Blake http://biologos.org/blog/deaths-resurrection?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/deaths-resurrection?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Death has occurred since the first breath of biological life (and some would say since the first “breath” of cosmological life), long before Adam inhaled. Ironically, therefore, death must be a part of God’s good creation. Moreover, human death due to sin must be something different than the physical death we all die. Much of the debate among Christians surrounding evolution and faith concerns human origins, but an even trickier theological problem is the death that evolution requires. Biologically speaking, evolution demands enormous amounts of organic death and decay for the sake of new life. Competition among species for limited resources (a.k.a. survival of the fittest)—one animal preying on another for food, decay as a means of enriching the soil for plant growth, less advantageous species giving way to more productive (and reproductive) species, and the inescapable, physical reality of entropy—all challenge the view that God highly values purpose, life and economy. The apostle Paul presents death as the consequence of Adam’s sin (Romans 5:16), and yet there had to be death in the Garden, otherwise Adam would have been overrun by bugs and bacteria long before he took that forbidden bite of fruit. Death has occurred since the first breath of biological life (and some would say since the first “breath” of cosmological life), long before Adam inhaled. Ironically, therefore, death must be a part of God’s good creation. Moreover, human death due to sin must be something different than the physical death we all die. Theologically speaking, death is alienation from God. It is death as the termination of relationship. It’s what Jesus describes as an ethereal chasm between the rich man and the beggar named Lazarus (Luke 16:19-26).

We experience death as the ultimate evil, but there is another side to it. Death may be the paycheck for sin (Romans 6:23), but death is also the utmost expression of love. Jesus said that the greatest love you can show is to lay down your life for another (John 15:13), which he then exhibited by laying down his own life for sinners (Romans 5:8). Christianity holds up the cross as the supreme demonstration of sacrificial love. What if instead of seeing biological death in the evolutionary epic as purposeless waste, we viewed natural selection as redeeming death for the sake of new life? Look at it this way and you’re able to see in evolution a preview of the way God will act to redeem the negativity of death due to sin. Jesus said, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24 NIV). More than stating the horticulturally obvious, Jesus is making a much larger point about the way all things are. Just as the death of an organism will allow for its flourishing reproduction and continued genetic life (not that the Bible would put it this way), so would the death of Jesus and the subsequent deaths of Jesus’ followers lead to a new flourishing and continuation of life in Christ. God redeems death for good.

Sacrificial giving is a part of God’s nature. Why should we be surprised to see it revealed in nature’s nature? If the earth reveals the handiwork of God (Psalm 102:25), we would expect to see the marks of God on the world as science observes it even if science doesn’t acknowledge it. God gives himself in creation and for creation, ultimately dying to redeem it toward new creation.

So then what about Paul’s description of death as the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26)? I’d argue that the enemy is not the cessation of physical life on earth, but rather the sinner’s eternal alienation from God. Having been reconciled to God in Christ, Paul delightfully declares not that death is gone (not yet at least), but that it has lost its sting, the sting that it assumed on that fateful day in the Garden (1 Corinthians 15:55-56). No longer is death viewed as the end of life, but as the gateway to new life and new creation.

Granted, the Bible does promise an eventual end to death (Revelation 21:4). If “no death” literally means no death (which it must mean if we’re talking eternity), then we should anticipate a new creation with a new sort of biology and physics---at least one where entropy no longer holds sway and death is no longer required. With no death there would be no evolution, since in heaven, presumably, everything achieves its perfection. And yet just as evolution previews Christ’s death and resurrection, so also do aspects of heaven already exist on earth. As people are made in God’s image, so creation is made in heaven’s image. Humans are not rescued out of the world; the entire created order participates in the redemption of humanity. Christians hold that the created and cursed is the very stuff that gets redeemed and glorified. Though all things die and return to dust, it is out of that same dust that resurrection happens.

(Photo courtesy of rfgatch34/Flickr)

]]> Fri, 18 Dec 09 08:00:11 -0800 Daniel Harrell http://biologos.org/blog/gods-sovereignty-and-natures-freedom?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/gods-sovereignty-and-natures-freedom?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication As Darrel Falk pointed out recently, "irreducibly complex" switches drive the proliferation of bacteria and viruses which kill millions of people each year. Christians must wrestle with a difficult question: is God responsible for designing these killing machines? Genetic switches that act during development to produce a newborn baby seem, like Michael Behe's mouse trap, irreducibly complex. As Darrel Falk pointed out recently, however, irreducibly complex switches also drive the proliferation of bacteria and viruses which kill millions of people each year. Christians must wrestle with a difficult question: is God responsible for designing these killing machines?

Falk says no--evil in the world is a by-product of the freedom God has given his creation. According to Christian theology, Satan is not a co-creator with God, so we cannot attribute to him the existence of harmful microorganisms. But to say that God hand-crafted each irreducibly complex structure in a virus would seem to make him the author of evil. Falk argues that God's creation has freedom built into it, such that natural selection produces both darling babies and deadly bugs.

Bill Dembski, a prominent figure in the Intelligent Design movement, responded to Falk's piece with a post of his own. He argues against trying to absolve God of specially creating bad designs: "for the Christian it does nothing to resolve the problem of evil by passing the buck to a naturalistic evolutionary process (a process, in that case, created by God)." In his eyes, whether God creates "directly by intervening or indirectly by evolution," God is responsible, just as a mugger is responsible whether he uses his own hands or a vicious dog to assault his victim.

This week Karl Giberson countered Dembski, contending that Christians have always shifted the responsibility away from God when it comes to the problem of evil. He reiterates the need to invoke human freedom by reminding us of the Holocaust: "The freedom God gave humans was exercised most effectively in the construction of gas chambers at Aushwitz and Dachau. But, because humans have freedom, we do not say that God created those gas chambers. God is, so to speak, off the hook for that evil."

The belief in a good and sovereign God seems to be at odds with the realities of death, disease, and evil we experience in this life. This apparent paradox exists at least in part because of our near-sighted view of God's purposes for suffering. Consider this familiar verse, Romans 8:28: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (emphasis added). God always works to bring good out of human suffering, whether that suffering is caused by people or by nature.

The story of Joseph in the Old Testament illustrates how human evil can be used for good. Years after Joseph's brothers beat him and sold him into slavery, he saves them from starvation during a famine. Upon realizing who Joseph is, they fall down before him in fear, but he reassures them, saying, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Genesis 50:20).

On multiple occasions, Jesus affirms that physical suffering is neither meaningless nor necessarily the result of sin, but an opportunity for God's glory to be revealed. In John 9, Jesus heals a man blind from birth. His disciples ask whose sin caused the man's blindness, and Jesus tells them, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned...but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life." In Luke 13, Jesus asserts that a terrible tragedy is not punishment for sin but a wakeup call: "...those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them--do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."

Surely the best example of God using evil for good can be seen in the death and resurrection of Christ. We don't like to think that God actively willed the murder of his own son, but from the earliest chapters of the Bible we see God's promise of redemption from sin (Genesis 3:15). Indeed, the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, considered primitive and bloody by our culture today, pointed forward to the atoning work of Christ. Thus our greatest blessing as Christians--the promise of salvation--came through a horrific act of violence.

In Isaiah 45:7 God says, "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things." It is alarming to realize that God is not as predictable as we might expect. He is completely and utterly sovereign; he does whatever he pleases (Psalm 115:3). This would be terrifying if God weren't also good. Even in his goodness, though, he does not prevent us from doing evil or experiencing suffering. That is why Falk and Giberson are right to emphasize man's and nature's freedom. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes:

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other...

God's sovereignty and nature's freedom will forever be in tension. But we can keep testing our assumptions and looking at the evidence on various topics like evolution. The conclusions we come to may be different, depending on our theological and philosophical positions and our differing levels of scientific knowledge. That's fine, as long as we keep seeking truth and acting in humility and love. Personally, I find the evidence for evolution of all living things by natural selection extremely compelling. Yet my understanding of nature would be grossly impoverished without the rich depths of truth found in Scripture. I am grateful for forums like this where both scientific and theological truths are sought after and celebrated.

]]> Tue, 06 Oct 09 16:09:29 -0700 Kathryn Applegate http://biologos.org/blog/word-games?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/word-games?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication "Why would the omnipotent Creator of the universe use such a wasteful (and cruel) process of survival of the fittest to bring about the higher forms of life? This view of 'theistic evolution' goes against God's very nature -- and logic itself." Have you ever noticed how easy it is to tell where people stand just based on the words they use? The op-ed writers in The New York Times, for example, seem unable to write about George W. Bush without saying something rude. Journalists on Fox News have the same problem when covering stories about Barack Obama.

Sometimes the rhetoric is just that: rhetoric. You can still get the real story behind the scenes. But other times rhetoric can actually mislead. Consider the rhetoric used to describe evolution by fundamentalist groups like Answers in Genesis, a group dedicated to convincing Christians that evolution is incompatible with their faith.

"Why would the omnipotent Creator of the universe use such a wasteful (and cruel) process of survival of the fittest (meaning that animals have been ripping each other up over millions of years) to bring about the higher forms of life? This view of 'theistic evolution' goes against God's very nature -- and logic itself." The Answers in Genesis Web site poses this question to Christians who accept evolution as God's method of creation.

This cleverly worded question has been a part of the creation-evolution controversy for more than a century. But note the rhetoric in the question: "wasteful," "cruel," "ripping each other up." In this case, Answers in Genesis depicts God presiding over the process of creation and looking on in approval as animals kill each other in cruel ways. The bloodied survivors of the carnage live on to produce offspring, and that is how human beings are created: survival of the fittest.

This all sounds rather dreadful, and thus it is easy to see why the argument is so effective. But let's look more closely at this description, which I consider a gross caricature of evolution.

For starters, there were no animals to rip each other up for almost all of evolutionary history. If you are picturing dinosaurs killing each other, that happened during the Mesozoic Era, which began 245 million years ago and ended about 65 million years ago. Life evolved on Earth for more than 3 billion years before there were even simple animals that could have been "ripping each other up." During the first few billion years, life was dominated by rather boring, single-celled life forms incapable of anything so interesting as ripping each other up.

Now consider the phrase "survival of the fittest." In the passage above, this process is defined as animals "ripping each other up." Presumably the ones that rip the best are the most fit. But this is not what evolution suggests at all. Books discussing evolution define the fitness of an organism by approximately its number of offspring. More fit organisms have more offspring and send more of their genes into the next generation. Having large families -- whether your offspring are oak trees, brook trout or humans -- is what drives evolution.

I have two children; the coauthor of my book, Species of Origins, has none. My relative fitness, as I like to remind him, is two while his fitness is zero -- the lowest possible value. The current human gene pool has more of my genes in it than his, but this did not happen because I ripped him up or competed with him in any way. Similarly, if carrot-loving rabbits have more babies than their cousins who prefer broccoli, the rabbit population will end up with a preference for carrots -- no ripping required.

Violence certainly occurs in nature, described by Alfred Lord Tennyson as, "Red in tooth and claw." All you have to do is watch a nature special on the Discovery Channel to witness, for example, a lion ripping up a zebra. But this violence is there whether evolution is true or not. If, as Answers in Genesis contends, God created everything in six days a few thousand years ago, and evolution is completely false, do the animals in the nature special suddenly stop ripping each other up?

In fact, if evolution is true, the small amount of actual cruelty and violence in nature is partially redeemed. When one animal kills another -- perhaps because it was slow or less intelligent -- it strengthens the gene pool of that species by preventing the weaker animal from passing on its genes. The loss of life, though tragic, contributes to the overall health of the group. There is certainly some cruelty in nature, but evolution can bring about benefits from that cruelty.

This is the BioLogos way of looking at evolution. We accept what science has established with careful observation and decades of hard work, but we see no reason to reject evolution as incompatible with a God who can work through any process. Answers in Genesis, however, disagrees. Their followers are praying that the BioLogos team will "repent of their compromise and return to biblical authority." In their rhetorically charged opinion, we are confused because "honor man's fallible ideas instead of God's infallible Word."

Word games.

]]> Mon, 06 Jul 09 17:01:51 -0700 Karl Giberson