Creation and Evolution

Lenn E. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415913805
• eBook ISBN: 9781135160067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Can religion survive Darwinism? Do scientists entering the lab or heading for the field have to bracket, or reject outright, all religious commitments and convictions? Trenchantly laying out the evidence for natural selection and carefully following and underscoring the themes and theses of Genesis, L. E. Goodman traces the historical and conceptual backgrounds of today's evolution controversies, revealing the deep complementarities of religion and the life sciences. Solidly researched and replete with scientific case studies, vignettes from intellectual history, and thoughtful argument, Creation and Evolution forthrightly exposes the strengths and weaknesses of today's polarized battle camps. Religious and scientific fundamentalisms, Goodman shows, obscure the real biblical message and distort the deepest insights and richest findings of Darwinian science.

1
Backgrounds

Battles over ideas can be as bitter as battles for land, and they last much longer. Frontline fighters may have long forgotten what led to the taking up of arms, or pens, or the cudgel of law. Many in today’s creation–evolution battles have a pretty clear notion of their own concerns but murky images of their foes. The terrain between pitched camps, heavily mined and shrouded in battle smoke, may be hard to make out, let alone traverse. But the aim of this book is irenic, not polemical. It seeks the broad ground that separates but also links today’s extremes. What are the chances for peace? What options are open, beyond mutual erasure or annoyance? A little history might help in mapping the terrain.

Creation vs. eternity

Creation has been in court before. In 529 Justinian shut down Plato’s Academy, then in its tenth century. He exiled its leaders and, when a treaty with the Shah allowed their return, forbade them to teach philosophy at Athens.¹ The neoplatonic defenders of ancient pagan piety had staked philosophy itself as they saw it on their assurance that the very idea of creation was absurd. Hadn’t Aristotle written, “From what is not, nothing can possibly come to be”?²

The Greeks lost that battle. Creation persists; pagan cosmology atrophied. But monotheists salvaged much that was precious and perennial in the old philosophy. Where some saw only enmity, they saw affinities between creation and emanation, the timeless flow of reality, truth, and goodness from an infinite Source. Without their work of synthesis, neoplatonism would have followed the fate of Stoic metaphysics, plowed into the soil of common parlance but forgotten philosophically. In philosophy, as in politics, accommodation matters.

Enlightened opinion had long opposed creation, and evolution with it. At the dawn of Western metaphysics, Parmenides argued that being could not have come to be: Nothingness had no reality to start it up.³ Parmenides, as Aristotle saw it, boldly freed philosophy from myth, seeking the nature of being without confusing that question with questions of origins.⁴ So Aristotle humors Parmenides for denying change altogether and treating any negation as an absolute negation. Parmenides may have denied time and multiplicity, but he had seen that non-being was impossible and thus ruled out a void, and creation.⁵

Absolute creation, Aristotle reasoned, would mean the becoming of becoming, initiating an infinite regress. Creation would mean effects without causes, a time with no antecedent time, a making with no matter to be made, an actuality sprung from no prior potency. Science barred creation. For science needs causes, time, matter, potentiality. Later generations, dazzled by Aristotle’s brilliance, often dismissed creation in favor of ceaseless change.⁶ Heaven and earth have always been as we find them, animal species neither arising, as Plato imagined, nor dying out, as Empedocles presumed. Unless the uncreated stars had always circled the earth in their indestructible spheres and species had always bred true, the fabric of the cosmos would be rent and nature’s constancy would prove inconstant.⁷ Well into modern times such thoughts passed for certainties. Even today there are sarcastic questions about what God was doing before creation, and demands to know who created God. As eminent an astronomer as Fred Hoyle fought the Big Bang for years, even positing the continuous, spontaneous appearance of new matter, lest the world admit of a beginning.

It was not Copernicus who sank the first deep rifts into Aristotle’s celestial spheres but John Philoponus, a Christian in Justinian’s empire, arguing that physical spheres cannot be the eternal motors Aristotle expected to mark the world’s time. Stars shine with varied colors, so they must differ in matter, Philoponus reasoned, like fires on earth that blaze in different colors when different substances are cast into them. Hadn’t Plato shown that every process has a beginning and an end? If so, the stars were not eternal, despite the fantasies that colored them divine. Nor were the heavens simple, indestructible, and uncreated. For stars must differ in substance from their settings in the transparent spheres. The cosmos was contingent. Like all things physical, it must have had an origin.⁸ With all his learning and zeal, Simplicius, one of the last members of Plato’s Academy, was hard pressed to answer the Christian’s probing common sense.⁹

The issue smouldered long after the Academy was closed. Science seemed to side with Aristotle: Time and change had no beginning. Many scriptural monotheists read the old creation stories as allegories of the world’s timeless dependence on God. Scripture could not mean that time and nature had begun, as if from nowhere. Wouldn’t an origin set arbitrary bounds to God’s creative act? Some did favor cosmic origins. Kindi, an Arab philosopher, added absolute creation ex nihilo, to the menu of changes Aristotle had allowed. The Muslim theologian Ghazali vigorously rebutted philosophical eternalists. The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, declining to rest creation on scriptural authority, still saw good grounds to affirm it, although acknowledging that neither eternity nor creation could be proved.¹⁰ Proposed proofs just trapped their makers in extreme positions: The necessity that creationists sought in proof seemed to spill over and make creation itself necessary, compromising God’s freedom. Thomas Aquinas, reviewing the arguments, judged creation not impossible but an article of faith.¹¹ Immanuel Kant declared the problem insoluble.¹² Using tactics borrowed from the ancient Skeptics, he balanced the rival arguments: Both sides looked reasonable, but both pushed pure reason too far. Since any natural fact can be mentally denied, the world easily looks contingent. But with any such fact, one can always ask what made it so. That makes all things look necessary.

Genesis nurtures the idea of contingency: The world need not have been. But Aristotle called science a search for explanations showing why things must be as they are. Neither perspective is dispensable. We assume that things might have been otherwise when we say that without their causes they would not be as they are. But we treat things as necessary when we start from their existence and search for their causes. Generalizing such necessities evokes the image of an eternal universe. It would be nice to be able to look at things in both ways at once, as if with binocular vision. That’s hard to do but not impossible, if we read necessities contextually, as givens within a causal framework, while recognizing that the entire fabric need not have existed. That approach would respect both naturalism and theism. But many demand a choice between the two. Kant did not. His brief was to restrain exalted pronouncements about ultimates. But for just that reason his modest, Solomonic ruling often goes unheeded. Exhausted adversaries battle on, little suspecting that for centuries evolution was allied with creation, against eternalism.

An historic alliance

To Ghazali, called the Proof of Islam, for his spirited arguments against the world’s eternity, it seemed clear that neoplatonic eternalists could not make good on their promises of a theistic naturalism. How could God’s creative act make a difference in an eternal universe? The philosophers were atheists despite themselves.¹³ As a counterweight to their rationalist intellectualism Ghazali set empiricism: It seemed arbitrary to exclude creation just because the idea looked odd. Who would expect something as small as a grain to devour a town and then consume itself? But fire can do that. Expectations can be deceiving; not every seeming necessity is real. If logic is the issue, as eternalists claimed, where were the connective middle terms to sew up the proof? If the world’s eternity was self-evident, why do so many disagree?

Maimonides did not brand neoplatonists atheists. He argued more mildly, that the emergence of a varied world from God’s unity is better conceived in terms of will than, say, implication. Besides, thinking of a God who made a difference allows us to reason from what we know of nature back to God’s creative work. If the world never lacked existence, how real was God’s role – or rule?¹⁴ Aristotle’s eternalist arguments were merely persuasive, not demonstrative in force, and he knew it. It was he, after all, who taught us the difference between proof and persuasion. Aristotle telegraphs his awareness that his case is weak by resorting to persuasive language and citing the concurrence of predecessors. He lists “whether the universe is eternal or no” among the “questions on which reasonings conflict … there being convincing arguments for both views.” On some matters, he writes, “we have no argument because they are so vast and we find it hard to give reasons.”¹⁵

Arguments for eternity, Maimonides explains, sound plausible because they presume our present understanding of nature. Time, as we know it, does always have a past; possibility is grounded in matter. But these are not absolute necessities. Maimonides invokes an evolutionist analogy: A bright man, ignorant of reproduction, might readily deduce the impossibility of his own birth: He breathes air, eats food, moves about, vents bodily wastes. How could he have spent nine months inside another human being? Evidently, there’s no inferring from the settled state of nature to conditions at the dawn of time.¹⁶

Galileo, like Ghazali and Maimonides, countered the rationalism of his adversaries with empiricism. He archly named his foil in the Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Simplicio, after Philoponus’ adversary.¹⁷ The challenge he faced came not from scripture but from eternalism. Like Philoponus, Galileo naturalized the heavens. The great weakness of Copernican cosmology was in explaining what held the planets in place. Until Kepler’s Laws were wedded to Newton’s mechanics, heliocentrists could not say why the stars and planets don’t just fall. So the eternal crystalline spheres looked too precious to discard. But Galileo boldly breached them. Sunspots and moon craters confirmed the compositeness and mutability of celestial bodies, much as star colors had for Philoponus.¹⁸ Copernicus’ elegant model must be true. Since bodies have no natural place, the planets must have been brought, like building materials, to their present positions, on a linear path that Aristotelians would have to assign a beginning. So Galileo hustled the heavens into place by way of a creationist cosmology.¹⁹

Galileo’s creationism, like Plato’s, was evolutionary. It touched biology by building on the ancient idea of adaptation. Living forms were long known to fit their environments. That thought was canonized in Aristotle’s linkage of form to function. The Stoics and Galen credited an immanent providence: Organs are divine gifts, complemented by the skills to use them. The Qur’an too treats adaptations as God’s gifts, and the Sincere Brethren of Basra celebrated God for equipping all creatures for the lives they lead.²⁰ Galileo’s suggestion that any life on the moon would differ greatly from terrestrial life presumes environmental adaptation. The hint was not lost on Descartes, whose “disguisedly heliocentric and discretly evolutionary” cosmology reckons that God might have framed the planetary system in stages. Our senses fit us for survival, Descartes notes, not for discerning the true nature of things.²¹

Science does not stop at Aristotle’s question about why things must be as they are. Intimately connected is the historian’s question, how things came to be. Filled with the pride of the industrial revolution and the burgeoning empire that reached out to master the world, intellectually and otherwise, Darwin saw history as opening a new dimension for science:

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship … when we regard every production of nature as one which has a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to its possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become.²²

Biology will not just fit phenomena into patterns. It will probe the origins of living forms, just as geology asks how the earth was formed – and astronomy, how stars are born and change. Turning away from the formalism of classical biology, Darwin put the history back into natural history: Species themselves have a history. They are not just instances of a general rule. Each species is unique, in many ways contingent. The role of narrative in biological explanation makes the theory of evolution a direct descendant of the idea of creation. Yet complementarities can breed rivalries. Eager heirs may wonder why grandpa still has the family silver or still keeps the old house where he’s lived so long and done so much to give the place its character.

What’s at stake?

Some find it strange, so long after the Scopes trial, that debates about evolution surge recurrently back to life. True, Scopes was convicted. The Tennessee statute barring evolution from the classroom stood on the books for decades. But in the public eye Clarence Darrow scored a bruising victory. William Jennings Bryan, with all his eloquence, failed to convince even himself that evolution held no kernel of truth. Creation took a beating in the press. But John Scopes got off on a technicality, so the case was never heard by the Supreme Court, as the American Civil Liberties Union had hoped. The chilling effect, while it lasted, was less on the teaching of evolution than on efforts to pass laws like the statutes that forbade it.

Some historians see in the timing of the trial signs of a cultural lag: The spectacle, staged long after debates about evolution had cooled in Europe, was a delayed reaction to the German menace confronted in the Great War, or fear of Bolshevism, in a witches’ brew with demagoguery and know-nothingism. Yet the controversy continues. New laws are tabled, school boards do battle, lawsuits are filed, textbooks tagged with warnings or filletted more closely than risqué DVDs or violent computer games. Is America still reacting to the Great War? Are there epicycles on the wheels of progress?

Some see only pigheadedness in creationism. How long, they wonder, will religious freedom, abetted by litigiousness and intellectual consumerism, bury the evidence under an impervious, imperious will to believe? Stirred by their own oratory, partisans of modernity, fighting for presumptively foregone conclusions, continue to misjudge their foes. Like their adversaries, they allay their frustration by preaching to the choir and pay little heed to the sources of resistance, except to stigmatize them. Yet to dismiss anti-evolutionists as primitives is not to understand what leads them to comb the Bible, or the science literature, for arguments to buttress what they hold sacred. The Kantian trinity of God, freedom, and immo...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Backgrounds
• 2 Leaving Eden
• 3 The case for evolution
• 4 Three lines of critique
• 5 “That has its seeds within it”
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index