St Mary's : Evolution and Creation

Evolution & creation

Paul Stockdale

In the Simpsons episode The Monkey Suit, just after (thanks to Ned Flanders) creationism begins to be taught alongside evolution in Springfield, Lisa's class get to watch a “helpful video [that] will evade all your questions”. The announcer introduces it: “'So you're calling God a liar? An Unbiased Comparison of Evolution and Creationism. Let’s say ‘Hi’ to two books. One – the bible was written by our Lord. The other, The Origin of Species was written by a cowardly drunk named Charles Darwin.”

Christians do sometimes get a reputation for believing strange things about creation. There is a “Creation Museum” in America – a theme park where animatronic children and baby dinosaurs play happily together, showing how the Earth is at most 10,000 years old and that God made it in 6 24-hour days.

If I don't agree with the Creation Museum people (and I don't) am I just ignoring some inconvenient bits of the Bible? Can you hold together a belief that God created the universe with scientific evidence and the theories (like evolution) that seem to fit it best? And approaching the question from a “scientific” standpoint, is it intellectually dishonest to do science without adopting an atheist worldview, to which some claim it necessarily points?

Background
The explosion of scientific enquiry in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was due in part to the Protestant Reformation which promoted individual reading and more of a “say what you see” approach to the Bible as opposed to the earlier allegorical interpretations that had been the monopoly of the church. Exploration of the natural world (the “book of God’s works” as opposed to the “book of his words”, the bible) took off.

Isaac Newton's developments in celestial mechanics (when he wasn't trying his hand at alchemy or writing an interminable commentary on the biblical book of Daniel) led him to view creation as autonomous, left alone by God once he had got things started, giving the occasional nudge of the planets with his divine arm where their motions weren't predicted by the equations.

This idea that God formed the universe and let it tick along like an absentee landlord is known as deism. The new scientific laws were authoritative, and where they failed to explain things satisfactorily God could be invoked – he became the “God of the gaps”. As the equations improved, the gaps (and the deist God) duly shrank to the point where Laplace could famously (and quite possibly apocryphally, but it's a good line) respond to Napoleon's question about where God fitted into his explanation of the universe: “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

William Paley, the Archdeacon of Carlisle, recycled what was already thought of as pretty ropey natural theology around the same time. Were you to find a stone on a hill, he reasoned, you'd think nothing of it, but if you found a watch you would be forced to conclude, on account of its complexity, that it had a watchmaker who had purposefully designed and made it. This “argument from design” for the existence of God drew an analogy between the watch and the complexity of the world around us. At the same time studies on the fossil record led some to doubt a literal reading of the early chapters of Genesis, particularly the idea of a one-off global flood.

Having given up on medicine, in 1830 Charles Darwin travelled on the Beagle as ship's naturalist on a 5-year round the world voyage. His observations convinced him that species are not necessarily fixed, but evolve (he thought) as a result of the blending of inherited characteristics followed by natural selection – or survival (and therefore more reproduction by) the fittest. Having presented his ideas to little initial response he published The Origin of Species and later The Descent of Man. Scientists and theologians alike were divided in their responses to the new theory. Some Christians were pleased to find out more about how God brought about human life. Others were uncomfortable with the idea of our evolution from primates.

The 20th century discovery of genes and their role in heredity provided a mechanism by which evolution might occur, with mutations in the genes and natural selection over many generations leading to different species. This is neoDarwinian evolution, espoused by scientists such as Richard Dawkins – there is a “watchmaker”, but it is blind chance operating over many generations.

Some theists argued (and still do) for a theory of “Intelligent Design” (ID), on the basis of the mindboggling complexity of some biological structures like the eye, and the so-called “anthropic principle” in cosmology (if the physical constants which underpin our universe were out by only a tiny amount, nothing could exist). Although mathematically argued, ID is not a million miles away from Paley's watch analogy, and several Christians in science have argued against it – the universe can tell us some things about God, but not prove his existence one way or the other.

Can Scientists be Christians?
Scientists like Dawkins have suggested (in his case with evangelical zeal) that we need to abandon the 'cop-out' that is faith in the light of scientific evidence. Like advocates of ID who argue there must be a God because things are so complex or finely tuned, Dawkins reasons that if there's a God, to have made everything we see he must be very very complex indeed, and therefore highly improbable, so improbable in fact that we should reject him as a possibility. He characterises Christian belief as blind faith “in spite of or sometimes in the teeth of the evidence.”

So, some scientists conclude: “[we are] no more than ingenious machines that have evolved as strange by-products in an odd corner of the universe” (Fred Hoyle), or that: “We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA ... That is exactly what we are here for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.” (Richard Dawkins)

This is in opposition to the bible's view of people as bearing, in some way, the image of God, of being “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139). “We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution.” (Pope Benedict XVI)

But Christians' argument with Dawkins isn't because of his choosing an atheist worldview, rather his very public insistence that scientific evidence requires it. In fact the evidence we get from scientific observation is consistent with there being a creator God, but is also reconcilable with the idea (if that's your idea) that there isn't a God. As (agnostic) palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said: “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism.”

Creation in the bible
Christians believe God made the universe. In that sense we are all “creationists”. But the creation account in Genesis chapter 1 (at the beginning of any bible) doesn't read like reportage – it's deliberately crafted artistic writing, with repetition of certain phrases, careful choosing of the numbers of words used and so on. Reading Genesis 1 as poetry rather than a science textbook isn't new. Origen, an early Christian leader writing as long ago as 225 AD said: “What man of intelligence, I ask, will consider as a reasonable statement that the first and the second and the third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars, while the first day was even without a heaven? I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions.”

Genesis 1 shares many details with similar accounts of creation from other middle eastern cultures, and also differs in some key ways (in the Genesis account, God does not have to fight with other gods or the forces of chaos in order to bring about creation).

Even though it's not that the bible is offering a modern “scientific” description of how creation happened, what it says is consistent with God having chosen to bring things into existence and indeed for human life to have developed using mechanisms like evolution. It's interesting, for example, that Genesis has God instructing the earth and seas to “bring forth” plants and animals, rather than him just making them himself (Genesis 1:11, 20, 24).

It's not hard to find people in the bible doing scientific things – Adam names the animals, Jacob does some selective breeding of sheep and goats to his advantage, King Solomon along with his proverbs and love poems is praised for his ornithology and botany, Luke (who wrote Luke and Acts) was a doctor.

Contrary to the deist view, in the bible, as well as actually bringing the universe into being (Genesis 1), God through Christ is said to hold it all together on an ongoing basis (Colossians 1:17), and the creation shows things about God's own otherwise invisible qualities (Romans 1:20).

Asked about God, the novelist Douglas Coupland said: “My biggest worry isn't whether he exists, but, rather, if he's particularly interested in people.” Pre-empting questions like that, when the writers of the bible (like the psalmist, or the apostle Paul) comment on creation they do so with awe and joy, and they move on to talk more about the creator God they have (somehow) come to know – “When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers … what is man that you are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8), “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth … [made] mankind to live on all the face of the earth … that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17).

Whether there's a creator god and how he/she did it are important questions. What God's like, if he is there, is surely more important.

Further reading
General level-headedness about Genesis from a Christian biochemist:
Can we believe Genesis Today? by Ernest Lucas

Christian book-length response to Richard Dawkins' ideas:
Dawkins' God – Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life by Alister McGrath

And the other side of the argument:
The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

Christians in Science have a useful resources page at www.cis.org.uk/resources.shtml (they are normal), including short pdfs on various subjects, and mp3s of talks (by Christians, admittedly) on the Bible and the emergence of modern science, and whether science has eliminated God.

Check out www.thirdway.org.uk/past. Click on interviews – there are ones with scientists Roger Penrose and Richard Dawkins as well as people like Tony Blair and Thom Yorke.