Ten on Darwin

Ben Myers on Darwin

If his theory of evolution by natural selection is the best theory in town that explains the evidence (palaeontological, morphological/taxonomical, molecular/genetic) – and it is – deal with it. Of course refute it on empirical grounds if you can, but don’t rubbish it because you don’t like its theological or moral implications, or because you have a political agenda. Fight science with science

Genesis is not science. Again I’ll stand on the side of ancient Near Eastern context and take Genesis for what it is – a creation account of God placing the functions and ordering of the universe. Not God manufacturing and telling us how – as if we could ever understand that in its entirety, theologically or scientifically.

But it is a good start to know exactly what Darwin did and didn’t say: he never claimed to account for the origins of life from inorganic matter, let alone ex nihilo; rather he argued that his theory explained how present-day species evolved from earlier ones. Even the later Darwin could speak of life being “breathed by the Creator”.

This is what we should be talking about when we say “Creator”. The originator of life, the “intender” of life. This is no way implies a deistic stance that God “made it and left it” either.

observes Diogenes Allen, “Darwin supplied what Hume lacked”: in contrast to the prevailing Aristotelian view of the fixity of species, “an account of present-day life forms arising by natural processes from earlier ones. The argument for a designer, which moves directly from present-day life forms to a designer, can no longer be employed because the only alternative to chance is not design.” Allen correctly continues: “the fundamental issue nature’s order poses is whether it is intended, not whether it is designed.”

The Genesis accounts do much less explanation of “how man came to be” than its contemporary literature. But it does indicate intention, and the good kind. Not the kind where man is the servant of the gods, to do their work. But rather as God’s very image.

Scientific theory and philosophical considerations, however, were relatively light loads in the cumulative burden that eventually flattened Darwin’s faith.

Despite what some use evolution for – an out to excuse their lack of faith – Darwin did not. He flatly denied that The Origin of Species was an atheistic book whatsoever.

Because the fact that “the causal heart of Darwinian theorizing is against the idea of progress” (Michael Ruse) clears an intellectual space for biblical eschatology: more precisely, for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the world’s apocalyptic counter-evolutionary moment in which the weakest kata sarka turn out to be the “fittest” kata pneuma. John Howard Yoder famously said that “those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe.” Strictly speaking, that should be: against the grain of “nature, red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson; cf. Romans 8:22), and with the grain of the new creation

Now that is a spectacular image of Christianity defined over and against the contemporary culture holding to a social Darwinism (however large or small). We shouldn’t be arguing whether or not nature works in such a way – but arguing that humanity should not!

John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, reflecting on how Darwin’s theory has influenced our understanding of the deity, suggest that “two images of God took a beating”: “the artisan or mechanic”, and “the magician” of special creation. Which perhaps invites us to re-imagine the Creator more as an improvising artist or musician. John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”, anyone?

I’ll leave that last one for you.