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.