What If Ants Ruled the World

Some fun biological food for thought:

We might like to think of certain species like bees or ants as epitomizing cooperation and harmony (that’s why we call them ‘social’ insects). We might even think humans should imitate them a bit more in trying to work together. But according to E. O. Wilson, this is a mistake of judgment:

The spectacle of the weaver ants, their colonies locked in chronic border skirmishes like so many Italian city-states, exemplifies a condition found throughout the social insects. Ants in particular are arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered. The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

Holldobler and Wilson (1994): Journey to the ants: a story of scientific exploration.

Science and Faith in Opposition

Wow! It has been more than six months since I have posted on this blog. So sad. So sorry. The deadtime hasn't been because my interest in these issues has waned or that I have stopped pursuing them, just that blogging takes time and that is something I've been in short supply of lately! Lately, though I have stumbled upon what I think is a profound insight into this whole science vs. faith conversation and I wanted to share it.

Next month, I have been invited to give a lecture in this lecture series at the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, FL and have been thinking a lot about what I will say. My title is, 'What makes us human? Two perspectives from linguistics.' I am going to talk about how linguistics is uncovering what makes us human from a biological/cognitive perspective and also talk about how the current threat to linguistic diversity on our planet is not only a threat to languages, but a threat to what makes us human as well. I also plan to talk a little bit about the nature of science and faith a bit, and in thinking over these things, I realized something. Now it seems obvious to me, and perhaps it will be to you as well, but I think in all of my efforts to make science and faith compatible in so many ways, I missed it. The insight is this: science and faith really are in opposition. At the methodological level, they cannot be reconciled.

Here is why: science, at its core, is about taking power over something one did not previously have power over. When we study something new, scientists take that thing out of its natural environment and put it in an environment in which every factor that can be controlled is controlled. In fact, we even call them 'controls!' Science is about gaining understanding, a noble undertaking, but its method is essentially force and manipulation. Science is a form of violence.

But this is not how faith operates. Indeed, it cannot be how faith operates. Faith, at its core, is about giving up one's power over everything and giving one's self up to the mysterious flow of God's infinite being. When you have faith in something, you give yourself over to it. You let go. Faith also leads to gaining understanding, but through service, submission, and suffering.

The fundamental opposition here cannot be denied, nor can, I believe, the conclusion that science is fundamentally un-Christian. That statement sounds extreme, but all I mean by it is that the nature of the scientific method is inconsistent with the nature of being that Christianity teaches. This is not to say that doing science is evil (I'm a scientist myself, and one who doesn't plan to quit his job anytime soon) and I'll be the first to tell you about all the wonderful things science has given us. Science can be very good. But it can never be Christian.

All of this has been very helpful to me in understanding a lot of the conversation surrounding science and faith, realizing that much of the confusion in that conversation results from misunderstanding of the nature of science and faith. Atheist materialists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennet claim that modern science leaves no academic or cognitive space for faith, not realizing that in doing so they have themselves subscribed to a faith in science, submitting their wills and allowing themselves to be carried away by a method of gaining knowledge by force. Proponents of Intelligent Design and other versions of Creation Science claim that knowledge gained by science can provide evidence that an intelligent creator exists, but in doing so they too have put their faith in science and the God they discover is so small that one could not possibly have faith in him. They cannot seem to see that if science could discover God then science would have power over God since this is the only way science discovers anything. But God is all-powerful and all-victorious. He doesn't submit to anything, least of all the scientific method.

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.

Devotionals For Darwinists I

[Note: this is the first in what I hope will become a regular series that takes scientific findings as fertile ground for devotional contemplation.]

In the Beginning

In 1931, the Belgian Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître suggested that the fact that all other galaxies in the universe seemed to be moving away from the earth was due to the fact that the universe had begun as a simple ‘primeval atom’ that exploded and continued to expand even today. Developed and confirmed in various ways, Lemaître’s Big Bang theory is now a commonly accepted assumption. However, at the time it was being developed, the Big Bang was foundation-shaking. Until evidence for the theory was accumulated and later accepted, it was widely believed (even by Einstein) that the universe was static and unchanging, that it had always existed. Evidence for the Big Bang demonstrates that this isn’t true. The universe, it seems, has a beginning. Or as Lemaître put it, the universe began on ‘a day without yesterday.’

Perhaps not surprisingly, the theory of the big bang was hailed by many Christians as a win for Biblical truth. After all, the very first words of the Bible are ‘In the beginning…” entailing at least that creation has a beginning. More than being proof for Biblical literalism, however, the Big Bang is significant in a more general way. The Bible begins with ‘in the beginning…’ because the Bible is a story – God’s story – and stories have beginnings. Thanks to science we now know that the universe has a story as well. It has a beginning, a history, even an age (currently thought to be about 13.7 billion years). As for we humans, this means that we aren’t simply a blip on the eternal screen of an ever-lasting, unchanging cosmos. Rather, we are a part of the long, dynamic story that is the universe. What is the theme of the story? Is it a tragedy? A triumphant epic? Have we reached its conclusion or are we only completing the opening narrative? What part are we to play? Science cannot fully answer these questions, of course, and as Christians we look to the Bible and our faith for answers. But this much is clear: we do not live in a static reality. The universe is a constantly changing narrative, and as it continues to change and evolve, it reveals another small part of its story each day.

Lord, I marvel at the immensity and complexity of what you have done and are doing in the universe and in my life. Compared with the history of the universe, my own history seems so insignificant. Yet you say not a sparrow falls without your noticing. Lord, keep me aware of the history taking shape around me. Keep me conscious of the roles you have given me to play.

The Heart of the Matter

Not much time to post lately, and really not much time to read either as one semester wraps up and another is set to begin so soon. But I have been thinking a lot lately about this question: what is the root of the deep resistance most Christians have to accepting evolution? It is common to hear that the answer has to do with Biblical literalism, but I do not think that that is the case. A 2001 Gallup poll, for instance, found that 45% of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Biblical story of creation in Genesis – that mankind was created fully formed within the past 10,000 years or so. The same poll, however, showed that 68% of Americans believe evolution is compatible with belief in a divine creator. This likely means that at least 13% of Americans recognize theistic evolution as a valid belief choice, but choose to embrace young earth creationism instead. So, clearly a perceived conflict between Biblical interpretation and evolution is not the primary issue here. So what is?

In my opinion, embracing evolution not only challenges traditional Christian thought on the topic of Biblical interpretation, but also on larger issues concerning our perceptions of the nature of God and creation. Our traditional view of God is highly classical, heavily influenced by Plato and Aristotle who both saw nature as intrinsically and statically ordered. Both of these philosophers, brilliant though they were, would have had a very difficult time accepting evolution. For them, nature was immutable and any perceived changes were just that – perception alone. These views were imported into Christianity (and other philosophies as well) over the centuries through foundational Christian thinkers, in particular Augustine and later Thomas Aquinas, and has led to an immutable view of God. For most modern Christians, God is immovable and unchanging. He has been present from the beginning, created all that is, and it is his sustaining power that continues to hold the cosmos in order. God created the universe and he continues to uphold it from beneath and push it forward into the future by his will. This view of God has been especially well integrated in our narratives of creation and the fall; we commonly believe that God created the world perfectly in the beginning, that he designed it just so; but this design has been corrupted by human sin. God continues to uphold the world, but the world is in a constantly degenerative state, spiraling toward its ultimate end.

This seems to me a very common narrative in evangelical circles and far beyond. What I would suggest here is that taking evolution seriously demands rethinking all of these views and indeed rejecting most of them. For if evolution is true, then God does not prefer an immutable, unchanging reality. Rather, he is responsible for a reality that is excessively dynamic and even chaotic. Rather than being well-designed, it is in fact very poorly designed from many perspectives (evolutionary processes require a great deal of suffering and waste to achieve dynamic adaptation). These are significant challenges to any belief in God, let alone the classical Christian view. As any readers of this blog know, I personally think these challenges have to be met head on, but I think that when they are, our traditional views of God must shift. Rather than being a God who sustains reality and pushes from the past, I think we must accept a God that gives reality the grace to form and develop on its own and who pulls creation towards him from the future. Rather than believing in a God who orders every molecule of the cosmos, we must accept a God who allows indeterminate chaos to exist. Rather than examining nature to find God’s design, we must rather look to nature for God’s promise. And finally, rather than seeing creation in a fallen state from a past state of perfection, we must see it as a dynamic creation emerging from chaos, being drawn by God toward an intended perfection in the future.

Clearly this is a radical shift in thinking about God when compared to the classical Christian view, and of course it has innumerable theological and practical consequences (most of which are good, in my opinion, and actually lead us to a more Biblical view of God) that I haven’t the space to discuss here. But I think that this is the crux of the matter – the heart of the cognitive dissonance that most Christians (and especially evangelicals) experience when they consider the possibility of an evolving creation. There are several difficult leaps to make here, and without many more theologians and pastors willing to commit themselves to leading the masses through it, I fear the “conflicts” between Biblical creation and evolution will never be resolved.