Creator God, Evolving World

Cynthia Crysdale, Neil Ormerod

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800698775
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426434
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod present a robust theology of God in light of supposed tensions between Christian belief and evolutionary science. Those who pit faith in an almighty and unchanging God over against a world in which chance is operative have it wrong on several accounts, they insist. Creator God, Evolving World clarifies a number of confused assumptions in an effort to redeem chance as an intelligible force interacting with stable patterns in nature.

A proper conception of probabilities and regularities in the world's unfolding reveals neither random chaos nor a predetermined blueprint but a view of the universe as the fruit of both chance and necessity. By clarifying terms often used imprecisely in both scientific and theological discourse, the authors make the case that the role of chance in evolution neither mitigates God's radical otherness from creation nor challenges the efficacy of God's providence in the world. This view of God and the evolving world yields implications for our understanding of human action. Moral agency, even God's work of redemption, unfolds according to an ethic of risk rather than by the quick fix of determinative control.

4

Evolving World: Purpose and Meaning

We began chapter 2 with a story about a learned gentleman who believed that the mountains and forests “could not all be an accident.” He assumed a contradiction between a world in which chance is operative and a world in which there is design and purpose. We subsequently clarified that chance and necessity, random events and ordered laws, do not cancel one another out. In fact, the world has emerged and continues to function as an interaction between classical laws and statistical laws. In chapter 3 we dealt with the question of God in relation to an emergent world. The key point there was that one need not subject God to chance or change just because one accepts the role of chance in evolution. We can retain the idea of a thoroughly transcendent God, a God not subject to change, while acknowledging real contingency of the world God created.

Throughout these chapters we have been adding nuance to polarities that are assumed in debates over creation and evolution, or religion and science in general. The goal of this chapter is to refine our notion of purpose in the universe. Embedded in the false opposition of chance and necessity is the presumption that a world in which chance is operative will necessarily be a world that is directionless, meaningless, and without purpose. Here we argue that the directionality that is thus discredited is tied to a mechanistic determinism, left over from the era of Newton and his influence. Emergence as an interaction of regularity and probability leaves room for an orientation built in to the world’s unfolding. We will explore the notion of “finality” as an upwardly but not determinately directed dynamism. In fact, a paradigm that includes a natural orientation toward complexity is gaining ground in recent empirical and theoretical scientific work.

Teleology and Darwinism

The world in which Darwin lived embodied a strong sense of teleology, the notion that everything has its assigned place in the world, and that each thing is ordered to its distinctive “end” or “telos.”^[1] Newton’s discoveries and his new methodological and mathematical way of exploring and explaining the world saturated all kinds of inquiry in the eighteenth century. Indeed, its influence spread to religious views of God and of creation. The eighteenth-century God of Deism, who created the planets and the laws of motion by which they turn, also had created each species in its assigned niche. William Paley (1743–1805) was a vicar and theologian whose defense of such a God dominated the nineteenth century. His 1802 publication Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. ^[2] influenced Darwin’s early education. It was against this view of the world with its deterministic teleology that Darwin’s theory of natural selection would butt heads.

Paley and those like him ascribed to a view of creation in which God had created each species to fit nicely in the corner of the world it inhabited. Paley used an analogy common in his day: if one were to go out for a walk and find a watch lying on the ground, one would presume that there was a watchmaker who had crafted this artifact. Thus one could conclude not only that there is a Creator but that each piece of the universe is like a crucial mechanical device, each playing its role so that the intended whole will operate according to design. This is generally understood as the theory of special creation.

Darwin, of course, was not the first to challenge such a worldview.^[3] The newly unfolding science of geology first opened the door to questioning the age of the earth and introduced the idea that even rocks might morph over time.^[4] Furthermore, others, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), had suggested that organisms develop from one generation to another, passing their biological improvements on to later generations. So even before Darwin the notion of a dynamic creation in which entities would shift their structures over time had already presented itself, challenging the idea that creation and biological species were the same forever and for always.

These challenges did not mean that a purpose-driven worldview was immediately eliminated. Rather, the nineteenth century saw a host of ways in which scholars attempted to reconcile a dynamically changing world with mechanisms driving such a world toward certain ends. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the tensions and alternatives as the orderly and stable world of Newtonian laws began to give way to an ever-changing creation, driven, at least in part, by chance events.

Initially, there were the traditionalists trying to hold on to the notion of a stable and orderly, unchanging world. This view is represented not only by William Paley as a theologian but by George Cuvier (1769–1832), one of the curators of the French Museum of Natural History in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century.^[5] In general, Cuvier, and then Richard Owen (1804–1892) in the next generation, accepted that there were a number of lineages in living organisms (embranchements in French). Nevertheless they insisted on the impassibility of such embranchements. They accepted a Platonic “typological essentialism.” Adaptation of organisms to their niches might take place within these established branches, but morphing from one branch to another was an unacceptable theorem.

As already mentioned, Lamarck, a co-worker of Cuvier’s at the French Museum of Natural History, took a very different view. He insisted that the embranchements of natural kinds could indeed be crossed.^[6] But this did not necessarily involve adopting a worldview in which meaningless chance events drive the unfolding of earthly life. Though a materialist and atheist who had strident anticlerical sentiments, Lamarck had a very strong notion of progress in the unfolding of life’s endeavors. Instead of design by an external Creator, Lamarck believed that there was an inherent tendency among living things to move toward higher and higher life forms, ending with human life.^[7] Thus the father of evolutionary theory held a strong sense of automatic progress among and between species over time.

As the debates and dramas over a growing understanding of a dynamic biological history unfolded in the nineteenth century, the notion of design or direction was not as much jettisoned as it was refined. By the mid-1800s the dynamism of the natural world was taken for granted, and the field of embryology was making great advances. One of the greatest embryologists, Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), subscribed to an epigenetic view of embryo development whereby embryos move from more generic processes to ever more differentiated states,^[8] driven by “vital forces.” Vitalism insisted that living organisms had forces at work that could not be reduced to material, physical processes. It supported arguments against the “transmutation” of species. The theory was that the true endpoint of organismic development occurs when an organism reaches reproductive maturity, at which point the vital forces would spin themselves out, leaving nothing to generate moves across the species barrier. The point is that the neoclassical biology of the nineteenth century could incorporate dynamism while clinging to a teleology of fixed species.

What about Charles Darwin? Where did his theory of natural selection fit within the panoply of worldviews available to him? In fact, Darwin shared with Owen and von Baer an epigenetic view of organismic development. But he rejected any typological essentialism that would fix species as unchanging. In this he would accept Lamarck’s claim about the possibility of the transmutation of species. But his views rejected both Lamarck’s optimism in the progress of species development and the vitalism of von Baer and Owen.

Darwin was driven to ask bigger questions about the effects of environments on species and, hence, on their legacy over time. On his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, Darwin realized that there was not a clear correspondence between habitats and species. He visited the Cape Verde Islands, off the west coast of Africa. He then visited the Galapagos Islands, off the west coast of South America. Both sets of islands were similar in longitude and latitude and environment. But Darwin discovered that the flora and fauna of the Galapagos were closer to species found on the mainland of South America than they were to those in the Cape Verde Islands. Apparently, environmental niches did not necessarily come with corresponding species. If special creation were true, had God make a mistake?

What was distinctive about Darwin’s revolutionary insight was that he sought an explanation of the connection between species and their environments, and between species themselves, in external forces.^[9]Rather than God creating fixed species for given habitats, or the march of progress, or some inner vital force, Darwin concluded that forces outside the organism could, over time, change species.

What Darwin needed was twofold: (1) a theory of inheritance by which traits are passed down from one generation to the next; and (2) an explanation of how environmental forces effect changes in populations over time. Being a good Newtonian, he expected the latter to be a classical law, like the law of gravity only operative in living organisms.^[10]

The first element, a mechanism for inheritance by which traits perdure over time, left Darwin in the realm of speculation. He posited that there are little “granules” or “gemmules” that carry reproductive information.^[11] The second piece, the discovery of a law by which organisms adapt to environments, became the centerpiece of Darwin’s innovations. It came to him via two sources. First there was the well-documented insight that Darwin had in reading Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) An Essay on the Principle of Population.^[12] Malthus had posed the question of why, when populations increase in geometrical proportions over time, the world does not become overpopulated in short order. His answer lay in the scarcity of resources. The limitation of available food, shelter, and habitat serve as a mechanism to rein in exponential growth. In every generation there are those who die off because they are unable to compete for limited assets. Darwin was captivated by this “struggle for existence.” He took it one step further in realizing that “under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species. Here I had at last got a theory by which to work.”^[13]

The second clue came to Darwin from his experience with animal breeders. Darwin noted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• God, Religion, and Science
• Evolving World: Regularity and Probability
• Creator God
• Evolving World: Purpose and Meaning
• Human Freedom and God's Providence
• Implications for Human Living
• Can a Transcendent God Be a Personal God?
• Bibliography