A recent Gallup Poll revealed that nearly half of Americans believe in a fairly strict version of creationism, and that “theistic evolution” is apparently on the decline. Believers and nonbelievers alike often find it difficult to reconcile evolution with theism. Thus, there is a tendency to admit only one or the other.
Not being a scientist, I can only timorously comment on anything pertaining to science. Theology and philosophy are, however, somewhat more familiar, so I offer the following reflection.
A more sound notion of Providence holds that God guides all things suaviter et fortiter, suavely yet firmly, sweetly yet strongly. Christians needn’t fear that conceding some evolutionary process is the camel’s nose in the tent, leading inexorably to atheism. (Similarly, nonbelievers should realize that evolution is, rationally, not a “disproof” of God’s existence).
This principle (let’s call it “the suavity of God’s providence”) has a wider application than the generation of the material world. On reflection, it provides great relief to those anxious to discover God’s will in any sphere–an anxiety, when one scratches beneath the surface, that is usually due to the unfortunate view that God’s action or causality is in competition with human action or causality. Nothing, however insignificant or complex, falls outside of the scope of God’s loving plan. God, more interior to us than we are to ourselves (and by extension, to all of creation), moves even free agents to act without violating their freedom. Univocal agents (on the same plane of being) only act on one another exteriorly (or, so to speak, “violently”). God, from whom our being and our ability to act is derived, wills that his ordered plan for the good of the universe unfold through the contingent (free and dependent) activity of creation.
Fatalistic determinism and deistic “autonomism” are the ditches on either side of the road. God’s interaction with creation does not remove human responsibility or freedom. Neither did the Creator simply set the ball in motion and then recline to watch with amusement as history unfolds.
There’s much more that could be said, of course. But in a word, He’s got the whole world in His hands.
June 6th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
People need to understand that evolution and creation are entirely different things. The notion that evolution is “unguided” is an unscientific prior assumption. Chance can be used in a guided manner, otherwise there would be no casinos in Las Vegas.
June 6th, 2012 | 2:36 pm
I have an engineering degree and am familiar with the science regarding evolution. I have abandoned the ‘party line’ not because I treat Genesis like a science text but because of the many scientific objections that can be brought against the theory. It’s not that I believe the creationist theories, it’s just the current orthodoxy seems so contrived. The unpleasant treatment of any competent scientist who questions anything in the theory also makes me wonder; is this really the science that produces computers and Hadron machines. The global warming fiasco is also enlightening. Perhaps more problematic for me as a Christian is the theological implications. I haven’t seen any argument that reconciles Gods goodness with the use of death as the central engine of His creative action in an originally sinless world.
June 6th, 2012 | 2:50 pm
We seem to like with us or against us scenarios in the US, especially in arguments that get emotional. Consider our politics.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the more complex, nuanced idea of theistic evolution, combining facets of each “side” in the creation debate is loosing popularity.
June 6th, 2012 | 5:22 pm
“A recent Gallup Poll revealed that nearly half of Americans believe in a fairly strict version of creationism…”
This is not at all a good thing.
June 6th, 2012 | 6:26 pm
There is something troubling in the idea of evolution through natural selection. It implies that not all life is meant to flourish. For a species to evolve, those members (including presumably humans) with unfit characteristics, need to be removed from the gene pool. If the species is to improve its collective fitness, then as Olaf says not everyone can be fruitful and multiply. It seems hard to reconcile this with the idea of a God who not only accepts the weak and humble but appears to especially love them. Even if natural selection were “guided” in some way this problem would remain.
There are far more blatant contradictions in the Bible with the scientific understanding of the world than Darwin’s theory of evolution (for example, Genesis describes a flat earth) but as far as I know these have never been controversial in the way that the theory of evolution has been. It seems to me that the real problem posed by natural selection for Christians is not that it conflicts with the account in Genesis, it’s that it conflicts with the Christian understanding of man’s nature and divine providence.
June 6th, 2012 | 10:01 pm
Can you help me, Peter? Where does Genesis define the Earth as flat? I seem to have missed that.
June 6th, 2012 | 11:22 pm
Sebastian has it right. We need to be clear about the order of causality we’re talking about. There are truths that theology and philosophy can address, and natural science is overstepping its bounds if it claims to disprove providence, for example. But there is a parallel error in taking theological concepts and using them as yardsticks for assessing explanations of phenomena in the natural order. You don’t even need to go as far, or as abstract, as evolution to find things in nature that don’t seem to fit with God’s providence. Believing in an all loving and gentle God should not cause us to doubt what we see with our eyes in nature, which is full of things that we find utterly nasty and vicious. Killer whales bite the lips off of minke whales and leave the poor things to bleed to death while they bite the lips off the next one. I find this rather shocking, but it’s just another data point on how nature works. As a Christian I believe that it’s all part of God’s creation, and as a scientist I look at the empirical facts. Those facts stack up to a very old earth, where the only living things for a billion years were single celled organisms, followed by the more familiar fossil record from the Cambrian (about 500 million years ago) onwards. Our record of these things is in preserved outlines of corpses. God’s canvass is a field strewn with death.
Reality is reality and God owns all of it, but seeking to understand natural phenomena like the messy, bloody history of life on earth requires different methods than reflecting on Christ’s teaching and how we should live in light of it. We shouldn’t take methods and conclusions that are proper to theology and apply them to biology, or vice versa.
June 6th, 2012 | 11:56 pm
Then God said: Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other. God made the dome,* and it separated the water below the dome from the water above the dome. And so it happened. God called the dome “sky.”
The language of “dome” “above”, “below” etc only makes sense (to me at least) if the land and water was flat – which is certainly how the ancient Hebrews would have thought. There is some more commentary along these lines here, as well as how theologians resolved the apparent conflict with modern geology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament
June 7th, 2012 | 2:55 am
The statistics indicating that more americans are disinclined to believe in theistic evolution, should be a cause of alarm for all educated people. The empirical evidence for evolution, is highly persuasive, and cannot be dismissed, unless one doesn’t understand it. But it’s equally untenable for people to conclude that evolution is “unguided”, and therefore ther supernatural does not exist.
Theistic evolution makes sense of the plethora of evidence in favor of evolution, and the plethora of evidence for God’s existence. Unfortunately, the ID and creationist folks, as well meaning as they are, as well as the atheistic scientists, such as Oxford Biologist Richard Dawkins, as well meaning as he and his fellow believers are, are not helping us see the truth, which is that evolution and belief in God, not only are wholly compatible, but the only way to make sense of biological reality.
June 7th, 2012 | 8:22 am
True, but if evolution can proceed by natural selection, that undermines one class of arguments for belief in god(s).
June 7th, 2012 | 9:00 am
Joe writes:
———-
“A recent Gallup Poll revealed that nearly half of Americans believe in a fairly strict version of creationism…”
This is not at all a good thing.
———-
Maybe that’s because too many on the other side believe that evolution proves there is no God. And claiming to be scientists, such a belief is not a good thing either. A little humility might help their case.
The evidence we have says evolution is the best explanation we currently have for what we see in the world of biology. That same evidence has nothing directly to say about the existence of God. God is far more capable than we can possibly imagine, or he would not be much of a god.
Somehow I doubt many people believe the bible says the world is flat as if the words were a program implementing the universe rather than a description suitable for human capabilities. Though there probably are some.
June 7th, 2012 | 9:26 am
Ray
if evolution can proceed by natural selection, that undermines one class of arguments for belief in god(s).
If music proceeds by the physics of vibrating strings and the laws of chord progression, that undermines one class of arguments for belief in pianists.
+ + +
Joe
“A recent Gallup Poll revealed that nearly half of Americans believe in a fairly strict version of creationism…”
Actually, a very loosey-goosey 19th century notion of “creation” that envisions species sort of “poofing” into existence from nowhere. This was not the strict version of creation in classical theology.
+ + +
Mike
Maybe that’s because too many on the other side believe that evolution proves there is no God.
Bingo. That is because some folks, like Snidely Whiplash, have pulled poor innocent science in front of them to use her as a shield. Keep it up and people start confusing Science with the motives of the villain holding her hostage. “How dare you criticize eugenics! Are you an anti-science Darwin-denier?”
June 7th, 2012 | 10:06 am
Very good article by Fr. White. Says what needs to be said. Bravo.
June 7th, 2012 | 10:24 am
YOS –
If someone’s points are misunderstood, that undermines any analogy another might make in reply. :)
June 7th, 2012 | 11:14 am
The language of dome, above, and below make sense because that is how they look, Peter, and anyway, if you are going to be that particular you should remove “above” “below” and possibly “dome” from the English language.
June 7th, 2012 | 12:02 pm
My favorite quote from St. Augustine is pertinent:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics…If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7] ”
-St. Augustine “On the Literal Meaning of Genesis”
June 7th, 2012 | 1:55 pm
True, but if evolution can proceed by natural selection, that undermines one class of arguments for belief in god(s).
Learning something about what we know about self organizing behavior ruined my ability to believe that it’s all just a massive coincidence.
The atheist/materialist argument relies on cognitive dissonance. It relies on playing games with the question of when, whether, how, and why something can arise from nothing. Ultimately, the atheist/materialist handles the unanswerable question by simply refusing to see them as questions: it just is, and don’t ask how or why.
June 7th, 2012 | 1:58 pm
The language of dome, above, and below make sense because that is how they look, Peter, and anyway, if you are going to be that particular you should remove “above” “below” and possibly “dome” from the English language.
One of the greatest obstacles to faith IMO is the metaphor problem – things that can only be partially described through imperfect metaphors.
Is God a man (only not)? Or is He electricity (only not)? Ultimately you can only say, “no, He is God” – it’s not very precise, linguistically.
June 7th, 2012 | 2:25 pm
Blake:
“The atheist/materialist argument relies on cognitive dissonance. It relies on playing games with the question of when, whether, how, and why something can arise from nothing.”
The only cognitive dissonace here yours: thinking that the possibility of abiogenesis is a cosmological question or is related to the possibility of creation ex nihilo (for wich theists have no real answer too, anyways).
June 7th, 2012 | 3:39 pm
Blake – I very specifically said “one class of arguments” (apparently needed emphasis added). The Argument from First Cause is not the same as the Argument from Design in Biology. Evolution by natural selection addresses the latter, but not the former.
(Not that there aren’t responses to the former, too. But my point is that’s a side issue to what White is saying above.)
June 7th, 2012 | 5:54 pm
I don’t seem to have made my point very well, which was that by and large, scientific advances in understanding don’t pose a problem for Christians. The implications of evolution through natural selection do appear to pose a challenge though.
Maybe it can simply be understood as one aspect of the problem of evil. The existence of guinea worms and malaria parasites don’t prevent Christians understanding God as a loving creator who suffers along with His creation; in the same way an evolutionary process of which evil is apparently a necessary part may not be such a big challenge after all.
June 7th, 2012 | 7:20 pm
Apologies, Br. Sebastian White! Seeing just a new name, I failed to notice your initials and rather brazenly referred to you by just your first name.
June 7th, 2012 | 8:53 pm
Mr. Mendez,
I’m confused by this sentence:
The only cognitive dissonace here yours: thinking that the possibility of abiogenesis is a cosmological question or is related to the possibility of creation ex nihilo (for wich theists have no real answer too, anyways).
What is that you claim theists have no answer for: abiogenesis or the possibility of creation ex nihilo? I can’t imagine a theist that doesn’t think that theism has rather competent answers for both.
———————
Mr. Ingles:
Evolution by natural selection only undermines the Argument from Design if one fails to accept that God can use secondary causes and chance to achieve His purposes. I believe Professor Barr wrote about this rather extensively in 2005 in First Things (both print and online) in response to Cardinal Schoenborn’s NY Times piece, and also in his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
Have a nice weekend,
JGB
June 8th, 2012 | 12:15 am
@ George: Thank you for the quote. I find it useful, and I am now motivated to read the original text by Augustine. It seems to me religion runs up against natural laws over and over again, and at some point, I wonder where you draw the line. After all, if dead bodies come to life, if healing of all sorts occurs by a laying on of hands, if we subscribe to eternal life when the law of entropy otherwise applies, we are easy targets for ridicule when we also claim human beings were created instantly, whole and complete, separate from all genetic connection to other species. [Although interestingly we share most of our genetic code with other mammals]. Any study of the popular assertions of Darwinism reveal that Darwinists are religious in their nearly blind assertion that evolution is “proven” by the scientific evidence. To the contrary, there are overwhelming and embarrassing gaps in that evidence. Evolution for that reason remains a theory. My feeling is that both the Darwinists and the creationists have a very small idea of God, and are probably in angst at the mystery of just what He is up to.
June 8th, 2012 | 2:31 am
I think that when it comes to creation, we have to let God, be God, as it were. What I mean is, God obviously transcends mere human understanding, and he can choose to create, in ways that may baffle our profoundly limited capacity to understand. When we humans think of creation, we have a limited set of mental models that we rely on, derived from experience, to compare any new experience that we infer is a result of creation. And, therefore if we come across something that we initially deem to be an act of creation, but subsequently conclude is better explained in a different way, we assume it must not be created. But that only assumes that creation works in ways that conform with our empirical experiences.
God transcends all empirical, and conceptual, and indeed all reality seperate from Himself. How he chooses to create, is His business, if he wants to do it by what we call “natural selection”, that’s his business.
He will do things in way that clearly baffle, confuse, and intrigue us mere humans, confined as we are to sense experience, and interpretation of that experience by our brains. Even our capacity to reason apart from experience, (e.g., mathematics) is still feable, to say the least, compared with God’s.
Let’s not turn God into some “superhuman” who creates via “Intelligent Design”, let’s let Him be, what He is, God. Let’s let God be God.
June 8th, 2012 | 10:14 am
Frank Pray –
What’s the best evidence you’re aware of for, say, common descent?
In science, “theory” doesn’t mean ‘hunch’ or ‘guess’. That’s why there’s also the “theory of gravity” and “theory of Relativity” and “germ theory of disease” and “atomic theory” and even “number theory”.
June 8th, 2012 | 10:17 am
Jerry Beckett –
At which point, though, it becomes more of a “you can’t prove it isn’t!” thing. Pretty much anything is consistent with such a model.
June 8th, 2012 | 11:27 am
Blake – I very specifically said “one class of arguments”
I understand that.
June 8th, 2012 | 11:33 am
In science, “theory” doesn’t mean ‘hunch’ or ‘guess’. That’s why there’s also the “theory of gravity” and “theory of Relativity” and “germ theory of disease” and “atomic theory” and even “number theory”.
I think the point you are missing is that we continue to use the word “theory” and not “fact”.
However well-founded you imagine a “theory” to be, ultimately it’s still conditional: if your assumptions are correct.
Science is based on assumptions. Just because you take – on faith – that these assumptions are reliable, that doesn’t mean they have been demonstrated; they are no more demonstrable than the existence of God. So, yes, it is true that evolution is a “theory” and something from nothing “is not a metaphysical problem” – if you accept on faith the assumptions.
If science were capable of proving things without faith, then you wouldn’t need the word “theory”; you could simply call what you’d proven a “fact”.
June 8th, 2012 | 12:44 pm
Blake –
Perhaps you understand it now, but it sure doesn’t look like you understood it then.
Are you quite sure that there’s no principled way to distinguish between assumptions?
June 8th, 2012 | 3:40 pm
Blake –
I understand that.
Perhaps you understand it now, but it sure doesn’t look like you understood it then.
You are listening to what you thought I said, instead of what I intended to say.
If that is because I speak poorly, my apologies. I do in fact frequently say things that do not sound the way I intend them to mean.
June 8th, 2012 | 4:03 pm
Perhaps you understand it now, but it sure doesn’t look like you understood it then.
Science is based on assumptions. Just because you take – on faith – that these assumptions are reliable, that doesn’t mean they have been demonstrated; they are no more demonstrable than the existence of God.
Are you quite sure that there’s no principled way to distinguish between assumptions?
What has that got to do with what I said?
Is it or is it not true that you are berating someone as foolish because they are treating a theory as “only” a theory, instead of treating a theory as fact?
It is quite clear to me that evolution operates in this world. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who disputes this – I’m sure that somewhere out there are people who don’t realize that drug-resistant germs evolved from germs that were not drug resistant, but I’ve never actually met such a person, to my knowledge.
But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily follows that every claim made for evolution is true. There is a boundary where what is demonstrable becomes what is speculative.
Which is of course where the theory vs fact question becomes important.
The more you rely on your assumptions – however excellent you suppose them to be – the less you are relying on what is demonstrable and factual.
You might think your assumptions are excellent, but my point is that they’re still assumptions, so you’re the one who isn’t “getting it” – you are confusing what is demonstrable with what is not.
Which is, perhaps, why you keep assuming science is somehow capable of solving metaphysical problems.
June 9th, 2012 | 9:47 am
Blake –
Please quote the definition of “theory” as used in science. (Note: it is not equivalent to “hypothesis”.)
Of course, that boundary may not be where you think it is. Hence, my simple and straightforward question to Frank Pray: “What’s the best evidence you’re aware of for, say, common descent?”
(Feel free to answer that yourself, btw.)
Y’know, when I note things you’ve said or claimed, I always point out examples. Could you do me that courtesy and point out an example of me doing that?
June 9th, 2012 | 2:42 pm
As a Christian, do I have to believe in a literal Adam and Eve? Was there a literal Fall? Was anything new brought about in the physical world by the Fall? Might suffering and death be part of Heaven?
June 11th, 2012 | 3:19 pm
The Catechism says (1008) “Death is a consequence of sin. The Church’s Magisterium, as authentic interpreter of the affirmations of Scripture and Tradition, teaches that death entered the world on account of man’s sin.” It seems impossible to accept this in the face of evolutionary data. Individuals and entire species died before the first humans came to be. What are we to make of this?
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