Calvinism and Science: Natural Enemies?

The more I meditate on God and science, the more I think it was no accident that not longer after I seriously started considering these issues I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with my Calvinistic leanings. Before that point, I was pretty convinced that a Reformed view was the only view that made sense intellectually. I thought it must be the case that God was in control of everything - the cosmos, life on planet earth, even my own will. Now I am convinced that view is theologically incoherent, for reasons I won't go into here. But what I didn't realize when my 'conversion' began was the strong role that my deeper understanding of science was playing in it.

One of the key ingredients in many aspects of the modern scientific understanding of reality is that true randomness plays a key role. In quantum mechanics, for instance, it is standardly thought that, even if all relevant factors are fully controlled for, absolute predictions about the behavior of quantum particles are still not possible. The best one can do is state how probable any possible outcome might be. A different kind of randomness is essential to evolutionary theory: genetic mutations (and perhaps even some aspects of selection) are essentially random. There is no way to predict what mutations will occur when.

Given this centrality of the concept of randomness - built into the very nature of reality and of the formation of new life forms - what are we to make of the extreme Calvinist conception of an omnicontrolling God? What are we to make of Calvinist author R.C. Sproul when he denies any chance in the cosmos, boldly stating that "a chance event would be totally outside the sovereign will of God...if there is one maverick molecule in the universe running around free of God's sovereignty, then there is no guarantee that any promise God has ever made will come to pass"? In order for Sproul to hold his position, he must deny any chance or randomness in the universe. He must not admit true randomness at the quantum level, denying the best science available to us. He also must not admit randomness in evolution (which he seems to deny more generally anyway).

My question is this: what makes Sproul and other Calvinists of his persuasion any different from Kens Ham and Hovind and their band of Youth Earth Creationists? Not much, I think. Both hold to a certain view of God that requires them to deny the best science in order to keep their beliefs in tact.

For these as well as many other reasons, I am becoming more and more convinced that taking science seriously as a Christian entails an open view of God. Science points us toward a God for whom randomness (or, to use a more philosophical term, contingency) is an essential ingredient in the process of creation.

Devotionals For Darwinists II

New Creation

The human understanding of the universe has changed radically over the past 2,000 years in a variety of ways. But perhaps the biggest shift in this understanding has come from science’s gradual revelation that the universe is not a very stable place. Not only do we now know that the universe has a beginning, but we know it continues to physically expand today, taking over more and more empty space. Similarly, whereas we used to think of forms of life on earth have always existed in more or less their present forms, we now know that life is dynamic, that species change over time, differentiating into new forms of life. A recent study even shows that in humans evolution has sped up over the past 10,000 years: groups of humans are more genetically differentiated now than ever before.*

For many, this unstable nature of reality, matter, and life itself can be frightening since it opens us to the vast stretches of past and future reality that are largely unknown. Some even find this understanding threatening to their ideas of God’s sovereignty and divine providence. But others have found that this modern scientific view of reality is actually highly reflective of the nature of God as talked about in the Bible. In the Bible, God is rightly described as the creator of the universe. But this creation does not only take place at the beginning of the world as described in Genesis. Rather, God is depicted as a Creator who continues to create the cosmos throughout history and into the future. God is continually bringing new things into being. Consider Isaiah 43:18-19: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you perceive it? Similarly, in Revelation 21:5, God is depicted as sitting on a throne, saying Behold, I make all things new. God is not just the Creator in the past sense, but in the present and future senses as well. Modern science has now told us that nature actually reflects this understanding directly. History has been an expanding of existing creation as well as an unfolding of new creation as new planets, stars, and forms of life have come into being.

As exciting as this may be, it gets more exciting still as God invites us to participate in his ongoing acts of creation, inviting us to become ‘new creations’ in Christ (II Corinthians 5:17). When we do that, we can not only stand in admiration of God’s continual creative nature, but we can take part in it as well.

Lord, show me what it means to be a new creation and a reflection of your continually creative power. Thank you that you turn the same power that continues to bring the whole universe into new being to bring me into new being as well.

*John Hawks, Eric Wang, Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, Robert Moyzis. Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (52), 20753-20758.

God After Darwin

One of the best books I read this year is John Haught’s God After Darwin. To me, Haught is one of the top thinkers on the intersection of faith and science working today (he’s at Georgetown). The entire book is highly insightful, but three points struck me more deeply than others.

1. Creation is incomplete, but full of God’s promise. Evolution on the cosmic and biological scale negates any idea of a past nirvanic Eden at the historical origin of creation. An ancient, evolving creation is one that is still coming into being, is not yet finished. This view is consistent with the Biblical narrative in which God is a God of promises – rather than asserting his will directly, God enters into covenants that he promises to bring to fruition over time. As Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth….eagerly waiting for our adoptions as sons.” (Romans 8:22-23). Creation is a promise – one not yet fully fulfilled.

2. A Creation fully controlled by God could not love God or be loved by God. Haught follows Tielhard de Chardin in arguing that the idea of an originally perfect creation is theologically incoherent, as is the notion of a God who controls every aspect of nature at all times. In both view, Creation would be no more than extension of God himself, perfect in every way. But if creation is merely an extension of God, if it is not something other than God, then creation will not be capable of love or of receiving love since love cannot be forced. Creation can be seen as a process of an ‘other’ coming into being, an ‘other’ whose purpose is to love and be loved by God. God himself resides in the future, at the Omega point, calling creation to himself through persuasive, self-emptying love.

3. Contingency in nature reflects God’s grace. While the idea that God is not in control of every aspect of the universe is unsettling to some, it is consistent with God’s nature as a grace-giver. The Christian God is a god who ‘lets things be’ to becoming on their own. This is reflected in the self-giving persuasive love of Jesus. A God who controls everything to reach his desired goals for nature would be inconsistent with the God Jesus reveals. Furthermore, modern science tells us that real contingency or randomness really does occur in nature, both in biological evolution as well as in quantum physics. A view of God as omni-controlling must deny the reality of this science. It seems that modern science requires an open view of God.

Of course what I love here is the synthesis of science with the Biblical narrative – how the former actually suggests the latter. But I’m afraid I cannot go all the way with Haught. For instance, Haught takes God’s removal of himself to the future to be absolute, as far as I can tell. In that case, we get a God who is nearly deistic – who does little but sit around and wait for creation to come to him. Relatedly, Haught also assumes that evil is merely a necessary consequence of the existence of true contingency in nature: if randomness exists, then the evil option will sometimes occur. That is sound reasoning, but it doesn’t go far enough: what we would actually predict with true randomness is that evil would occur just as often as good (assuming the same amount of good and evil options exist). But that doesn’t reflect the Christian experience or the facts of evolution in which evil seems to win out the vast majority of the time. There also seems to be no room here for a Satanic or demonic role in evil, something Jesus and the Biblical narrative in generally seem to take quite seriously.

Fortunately, I think it is possible to maintain Haught’s central arguments while incorporating aspects of the warfare theodicy I blogged about earlier (see the series of posts: A theological foundation for evolution, starting here.). We can imagine a God who plans to ‘let creation be,’ let it become on its own, but whose plans are interrupted by the angelic (and later human) rebellion. Recognizing creation will not progress as he planned, God sends his own angelic army from the future to do spiritual battle for the future of creation. One needn’t see this as a violation of God’s gracious nature, but rather as an effort to restore creation to its state of natural progress of becoming and being persuaded by God’s self-emptying love.