Deconstructing ID

Yesterday’s online Christianity Today had an article Deconstructing Dawkins, supposedly a review of Alister McGrath’s book ‘The Dawkins Delusion.’ The review, however, wasn’t much more than a way for the writer, Logan Paul Gage of the Discovery Institute, to raise an all too common protest about taking evolution seriously. After criticizing McGrath for not attacking Darwinism because McGrath “views it as equally compatible with both theism and atheism,” Gage writes,

To see why Darwinism and theism are incompatible, consider random mutations and natural selection—the two elements of modern Darwinian theory. Random mutations are, well, random. By definition, random mutations are unguided…… While theists can have a variety of legitimate views on life's evolution, surely they must maintain that the process involves intelligence. So the question is: Can an intelligent being use random mutations and natural selection to create? No. This is not a theological problem; it is a logical one. The words random and natural are meant to exclude intelligence. If God guides which mutations happen, the mutations are not random; if God chooses which organisms survive so as to guide life's evolution, the selection is intelligent rather than natural.

This is a very common argument for Intelligent Design proponents like Gauge to make: that since the heart of evolution is random mutation, there can be no guiding, intelligent creator behind it. Therefore, Darwinian evolution and a Creator God are incompatible. Unfortunately for ID proponents, the argument is a hollow one. For while it is true that random mutation cannot be said to be purposeful or intelligent, this is not true for the process of evolution as a whole. The progression of evolutionary processes over time is clearly not random and clearly does have a direction. That direction is toward complexity.

Evolution results in more complex organisms coming into being simply because more complex organisms, for a variety of possible reasons, tend to have a better chance at survival than their predecessors. Thus, though evolution results in branches of life shooting off in many different directions, at least some of those directions will always be toward more complex species. The inevitable end result is a species so complex that it has the ability to overcome the constraints of evolution itself by being able to fully manipulate its environment and therefore guarantee its survival. In other words, the inevitable end result is us (or at least a species that is like us in important ways).

It is hard not to see this drive toward complexity as purposeful, yet it does not require any guiding intelligence to be directly involved in evolutionary processes. Evolution really can be blind and unintelligent and yet still directed and purposeful.

The Fall and the Cross

A regular reader and commenter raises an excellent issue with regard to the series of posts I've just concluded. Robert writes:

I'm having trouble fitting the central thesis of what you want to propose as the origin of natural evil, that is, intelligent, evil being working to pervert God's creation for a very long time, inside my salvation history narrative.

If one accepts this idea as an origin of natural evil, if asked the question, when was God's good creation, well, very good, then the goodness of creation gets pushed back into a time predating organisms of any complexity, perhaps predating life at all.

Robert is right to see this implication. Accepting the reality of an ancient, evolving creation as well as the idea that evil cosmic forces have always been present influences the evolutionary process necessarily entails and Satan and his crew were around influencing creation history long before the first human came into being. This means that the fall of mankind which Genesis 1 speaks of must have taken place long after the fall of creation (if indeed creation can be said to "fall," see below). This shouldn't bother us too much, I think, since it is clear from the Genesis stories that Satan was around before Eve took the first bite of the forbidden fruit (and was in fact the one who influenced her to bite it!). What might bother us a little more is that the narrative I'm discussing here completely robs Genesis 1 of even a mythic historical truth: God's creation was never perfect in reality, but only in God's mind. The fall was not a historic fall. I hope to deal with this implication in a future post.

But what is really bothering this commenter is who exactly has dominion over the world and how the work on the cross fits into this narrative. Genesis 1:28 is clear that God gives mankind dominion over the earth; but how can this be consistent with the idea that Satan was already ruling over it? If we say that God was giving mankind authority over Satan in Genesis 1:28, then does this diminish the work of the cross? Does this mean that the cross wasn't absolutely necessary? As Robert puts it:

Yet if God gives Adam world-rulership, when Satan seems to have been already exercising it for some time (though Adam through sin forfeits it again), there is an arbitrariness about it that comes close to mocking Christ's salvation-labor. If God has already once arbitrarily given world-rulership to man, why must man perfected suffer death to attain it? The cross seems no longer quite so necessary, if the precedent for an arbitrary revolution in the system of the world has been already set.

I think Robert is right about the implications of the view developed here, but I disagree that it diminishes the work of the Cross. Here is the narrative I have in mind here. Imagine that God creates the world, but rules it in a representative way giving dominion over certain aspects of nature to various created beings (each with their own free will). One being in particular (Satan), is given the most important job of all - to have dominion over matter itself, the prince of the "power of the air." Now imagine that billions of years ago, before life even began on earth, a rebellion takes place. This prince of an angel and a third of his brethen decide to rebel against God. These still maintain their various responsibilities, but now they work to push their principalities toward chaos and violence rather than harmonic peaceful order. They work against God's will rather than for it.

On earth, life eventually begins and these demonic forces take interest in that as well. While God's forces push evolutionary development toward cooperation and tolerance, demonic forces push it toward competition and suffering. Finally, after billions of years, the first humans evolve and they are unlike any other creature on the earth. In particular, they are the first creatures that have the ability to comprehend and ponder the rest of creation and in doing so they are the first creatures on earth that can take responsibility for it. Suddenly Satan's eyes are opened and he sees what God's plan was all along - to give responsibility for creation to these creatures. He sees humans for what they are: a challenge to the authority he has enjoyed for a long, long time. But he also knows that the same evolved characteristics that makes humans capable of reigning over creation with love and acceptance also makes them capable of hatred and deception. After all, it is partially through his activities influencing evolutionary development that mankind even came to exist. He appeals to their pride. He gets them to buy the lie that they have no authority. He subverts their authority and so maintains his own.

Where does the work of the cross fit in here? At the Cross, Christ defeats Satan by exposing Satan's lie. In killing Christ, Satan exercised his authority over something of which he had no legitimate claim. Christ is therefore the victor and by following Christ and living by principles of self-sacrificial love, we too have this victory. By refusing to live by Satan's rules and choosing to live by Christ's, Satan has no claim upon us. In that state, we can exercise our inherent authority over Creation and influence it according to God's will.

In this narrative, the work of the cross does indeed have the flavor of being God's "back-up plan," but I do not think this diminishes it's importance or its necessity given the fact of humanity's subversion under Satan. The cross is still necessary, but it is necessary because of man's failing. It was not a part of God's original plan for creation.

A Conclusion and a Prelude

In the four-part discussion below, I attempted to find a place where evolution might at least partially answer a theological question. We found that in the serious (and seriously under-discussed) problem of natural evil and suffering that we find in creation, especially those aspects of it which seem to have nothing to do with human responsibility. We saw that the Bible seems to teach that the fact that the world is not as it should be does not just apply to humans, but to the whole of creation. On the Biblical assumption that God is the only Creator, we found ourselves in need of an explanation for how nature could have strayed so far from God's original design for it - so far, in fact, that the very forms of many organisms actually are designed to inflict violent suffering on other creatures of God. The only possible explanation, we suggested, is that there is some mechanism by which the forms of creatures change over time, a mechanism that can be influenced by nefarious cosmic influences to push creation toward the design for suffering that is so easy to observe. Evolution is this mechanism; it is thus a necessary part of the explanation for natural evil and suffering. In at least this one area, theology needs evolution.

But I don't want to stop this discussion here. Having found a theological door that evolution seems to unlock, we now have a foundation for a broader theological discussion of evolution. As Paul says in Romans 1:20, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made...." Given that evolution is a part of God's creation, we can (and should) ask how evolution reflects God's 'invisible qualities - eternal power and divine nature.' That is, what does evolution tell us about who God is?

Sounds like a good starting point for another series of posts.

A Theological Foundation for Evolution, Part IV

Well, it seems I have gotten into a habit of posting one of these about once a month – far too infrequent for a “real” blog, but I do want to finish what I’ve started here. To recap, in part I we defined the problem – that we would like to find interesting theological questions for which evolution is a plausible answer. In part II, we saw that most versions of creationism share a common assumption – the assumption that nature as we see it and experience it in our world is in a sense perfect, as God created it. But there are serious, typically unraised questions about this assumption. For one thing, nature would seem to be full of death, destruction, and violence, and we can legitimately ask whether this is how God really intended it. In part III, we saw that the Bible answers this question rather definitively – the Bible speaks of God’s original creation as well as his intention for the restored creation as being free from death and violence, even in the natural world.*

Where does all of this leave us? In a very awkward place, I’m afraid. On the one hand, we have a creator God who, it seems, had every intention of creating a perfect, non-violent nature. But on the other, we have an existing nature that is not perfect and non-violent, but is in fact dominated by violence. Stronger still, we can even say that in many (most?) cases, nature seems designed for violence. Again, just look at the shark - its speed, its stealth, and especially its teeth – it seems like an almost perfectly designed underwater killing machine. Or remember our friend Trypanasoma? All it does it kill and destroy. That’s what it seems to be meant to do. We really cannot imagine it doing anything else.

So how do we get out of this? In fact, one of the traditional answers to the problem evil can be of great help here. It is common to hear evil explained as a necessary result of human free will. God gives us free will, the story goes, and with that gift we can choose to do good or choose to do evil. We can cure polio or we can carry out genocide. Much of the evil in the world, then, need not be blamed on God, but can be blamed on the free-will acts of humans. Of course, this precise solution doesn’t work for the problem of natural evil (since no human has control over whether tornadoes wipe out a town or whether a tiger eats a water buffalo alive), but a very similar solution is possible. After all, God and humans are not the only beings with free will described by the Bible. There are also angelic beings, creations of God who exist in the spiritual realm and interact with our own. And while the Bible doesn’t give us detailed descriptions of these beings and all their inner workings, it is clear about a few things. For one thing, these beings have free will. We know they have free will because the Bible describes many of them as having rebelled against God and ‘fallen,’ including Satan himself. A second thing we know about them is that they are often described as having dominion or power over particular aspects of existence. For example, Satan is called the ‘prince of the power of the air’ (Ephesians 2:2); in Daniel chapter 10, an evil angelic being is referred to as the ‘prince of Persia,’ suggesting he had dominion over that kingdom. While the Bible isn’t always explicit about these assigned responsibilities of angels, this was the common understanding of pre-Christian Jews and the early Christians and highly articulated understandings of angelic hierarchies and responsibilities have evolved within Christianity and Judaism.

With this in mind, we may propose that the problem of natural evil might be solved the same way the problem of human evil is solved: by blaming evil not on God, but on the freely chosen actions of beings with free will.** In the case of nature, this must be the angelic beings who have jurisdiction over particular aspects of the natural realm. In this view, when a tsunami strikes or a new virus decimates the prairie dog population, we needn’t suppose that they have occurred as a part of God’s will. Rather, we can see such events as actually opposed to God’s will, as the works of Satan and his followers who seek to thwart it.

But we have to be a bit careful about how much power we attribute to such beings, even in the natural realm. In particular, while the Bible speaks of these beings having dominion over aspects of reality and having free will, nowhere does it speak of them have original, creative power. That power seems to belong to God alone. Satan does not create; he only perverts what God has already created. This is fundamental to the Christian understanding of Satan – the notion that though God has given us gifts of life to be used for good, Satan tempts us to use them for evil.

Coming back to biology, then, we don’t want to say that Satan or other evil beings have created sharks to be killing machines, but rather they have perverted them to be so. We can say something similar about Trypanosoma. Note, however, that these conclusions are only possible if there is something that makes such perversion possible. That is, there must be a way to pervert God’s creation such that the inherently violent, unintended properties of sharks and viruses come into existence. Crucially, that way cannot be created by Satan (since Satan doesn’t create, period). It must already be in existence, created by God. Let’s make what I hope now is an obvious logical leap and claim that this way is evolution, the process by which organisms change and develop over time. We can now understand the problem of natural evil in a new light: natural evil in the biological world exists and is inherent in the nature we experience because of the perverting influence of evil cosmic forces that have sought to thwart God’s will for creation by intervening in the process of evolution.

To get a little more specific, evolution, you’ll recall, has two crucial components. One is the origination of variation due to mutations or other DNA-altering processes. The other is the filtering mechanism of natural selection – whether a particular variation improves an individual’s chance of survival and procreation relative to its environment. We can imagine demonic influence at both levels – perverting the process of DNA copying at the level of variation, and/or organizing the right conditions at the environmental level so that violent, unintended traits will be favored by natural selection. In this way, demonic influences, acting on their own free will, can, over time, bring into existence violent, destructive biological traits (like a shark's killer jaws) or even completely new organisms whose only purpose is death and destruction (like Trypanosoma).

So, we’ve done it. While I’m the first to admit there are a whole host of questions that arise here unanswered (concerning, among other things, God’s original intention for evolution as well as questions about the historicity of the fall), we have at the very least found a place for evolution in theological thinking, a place where supposing evolution solves an otherwise difficult problem. In the next and final post (coming very shortly, I promise), I’ll summarize the arguments I’ve made here and note more of their implications.

*As in my last post, I owe a great deal of understanding of the arguments in this post to their 'warfare theodicy' articulation by Greg Boyd in his books 'God at War' and 'Satan and the Problem of Evil.'

**Though God must be indirectly blamed for creating being with free will in the first place. There are good questions (and answers, I think) about why God would do this, but that would go beyond the purposes of these posts.