It was an odd blend of envy and gratitude. These two seemingly contradictory emotions were coming in waves, cresting and falling, one after the next. Sitting on tenth-grader Aaron’s patio, watching the pool glisten and shimmer, Jared wondered why he didn’t have a pool of his own. And yet he was hit with gratitude that Aaron’s parents, Christine and Chet, so happily hosted the Bible study. Speaking of the Bible study, Jared was thrilled to be doing it, grateful to be reading the Bible with young people again—it had been months since he had done a formal Bible study. But he also felt a few ticks past annoyed that this Bible study was mandated by the senior pastor. It was an initiative Tanisha dropped on the staff at their last meeting. She wanted to connect all generations of the congregation with her sermon series on Genesis.
Jared wasn’t sure why Tanisha had decided to do a sermon series on Genesis. Issues of origins weren’t her thing. Jared got all sorts of questions about evolution from young people, and parents sometimes asked him for advice. But outside these impromptu questions and concerns, it wasn’t a topic of discussion. There were no Hammites or ID raiders, like in Sarah’s church. Tanisha did explain that the point was to discuss the imago Dei (the image of God) and explore how sin entered a perfect creation.
Before Jared could get past his internal conflict, one more wave came. Jared was disappointed that after planning this Bible study, only three kids had showed. What would it be like to be at another church, where it wasn’t so damn hard to get kids to show? Yet, it also felt right and sacred that nevertheless here sat Aaron, Tegan, and Martin, eating pretzels and volleying sarcastic comments at each other. It wasn’t surprising that Martin had come. He came to everything, and Jared was sure that his sarcasm was a front for deep loneliness. Martin acted like he only cared about basketball and hip-hop, but Jared knew, particularly from discussions on the mission trip, that there was more going on under Martin’s front than he allowed most people to see.
To calm his inner turmoil, Jared decided to start with a direct but basic question: “So why did each of you come?”
Aaron responded quickly, “It’s at my house, so......”
“. . . you had to be here!” Jared finished his sentence with a chuckle.
“Pretty much. But no,” he continued, “I like this stuff too. I mean whatever this is.”
Tegan just shrugged her shoulders.
“And how about you, Martin, why are you here?” Jared asked
“Dinosaurs.” Martin responded with a cocksure attitude.
Both Tegan and Aaron cracked up.
“Really?” Jared responded with a tone of fatigue, “You’re here because of dinosaurs?”
“H-e-l-l, yeah,” Martin said. “Dinosaurs are the bomb. Of course, that’s why they’re all dead because a bomb called a huge meteorite hit the earth.”
The laugher erupted again from Tegan and Aaron. It was like rain on the parched earth of Martin’s confidence.
Tegan was now completely taken with Martin’s attitude, and Jared worried he was seeing a love connection before his eyes. A mutiny worse than any Fitzroy could imagine was about to take over Jared’s boat if he wasn’t careful. So he decided his only strategy was to enter into the lunacy. As he did, though, he discovered that it wasn’t lunacy at all, but echoed back to the deepest conversation Jared had had with Martin on the mission trip.
Martin, with that same cocksure attitude, said more directly, “I’m here because I want to know why Genesis doesn’t say anything about dinosaurs. Why? And why are they dead? If God created everything, then why is so much of the created stuff dead?”
Evolution seems to fit so well with the comprehensive social practice of “science,” taking on the sharp edges of neo-Darwinism because the limits of evolution’s findings can be re-dressed for ideological pursuits. As a natural scientific theory, evolution can say nothing about God and God’s action in suffering. From within the boundaries of biology, evolution says that suffering and death have no meaning, no “purpose,” other than ruling one adaptation more fit than another. Again from within the theory itself, evolution is indifferent to death. Dinosaurs are destroyed, becoming fossils, because they simply do—randomly (and apparently abruptly) their environment changed. And when environments change, things not equipped to survive perish. It is right here that the social practice of “science” sweeps in and takes these limited assertions as the conclusive truths of reality, emphasizing that those who are mature can face the fact that death and suffering have no meaning. And those that keep looking for meaning are immature babies.
But this search for meaning is exactly Martin’s search. It leads him to wonder if moving beyond the boundaries of evolution allows us see an epistemic overlap between evolution and the claims of faith. After all, Christian faith boldly asserts that suffering and death are not meaningless (proving an impersonal universe), but are profoundly filled with purpose and significance—so much so that God promises, in the perishing face of Jesus, to be forever present, ministering to us in and through death itself.[1]
Nevertheless, mass extinctions have been proven—again, by the rocks. These rocks have told us that not only is this planet billions of years old, but that eras of ice and oceans, lizards and fish have come and gone, leaving fossils of species that have thrived for a time, only to disappear. Much like Sasha, who considers the mass of space and wonders how the soteriological goal of faith could stand if aliens contacted us. Similarly Martin searches for how the soteriological telos of faith could be if evolution is right and nature is so red in tooth and claw that whole species—particularly these strange conscious ones called homo sapiens—could be drowned in their own blood. Like Sasha with aliens, Martin isn’t necessarily looking for a direct answer about mass extinction, but needs to know how evolution and the claims of Christian faith might intersect.
As we saw in the last chapter, Darwin’s two supposedly dangerous ideas are encompassed in his two books On the Origins of Species and The Descent of Man. It was actually Daniel Dennett who most famously coined the phrase “Darwin’s dangerous idea(s),” rebranding the beetle-hunting sickling into the leader of a motorcycle gang. Dennett boldly asserts that any belief in a personal order and a divine being is a stupid, childish thought. Darwin is awesomely dangerous, in Dennett’s mind, because he provides a way to finally bury the thought that there is anything outside nature itself, showing that it is only and finally natural mechanism (natural selection) that gets us this world, even these beings that think about thinking and will choose death for the sake of love.
Those on the opposite end, who put Darwin on trial, actually fall into Dennett’s trap and indeed make Darwin a supposed menace to society (something he historically was not). They too see Darwin’s ideas as dangerous, and, oddly, for almost completely the same reasons. The only difference between Dennett’s New Atheists and the ID raiders is that one group welcomes the dangerous ideas and the other fears them.[2]
Neither position can help Martin. His own experience, at least for now, won’t allow him to give in and admit that life and death have no meaning and purpose. He can’t help but ask, why did the dinosaurs die? What is the point of living things if they all go extinct? And if we, human beings, will eventually go extinct, because all we are is natural and material, then what are these nonmaterial realities we experience and claim as central to our being, like love, compassion, and friendship?
Martin also can’t deny evolution, however. It is a story that makes too much sense out of the rocks, variations, and diversity of the biosphere. Not to mention that genetic research done long after Darwin has proven the interconnected descent of living things. So Martin gets himself to the Bible study not wanting arguments for one position or the other, but a way to understand how the theory of evolution might connect (or co-exist) with the soteriological telos of faith. Martin essentially wants to know if faith has anything to say to Darwin’s dangerous ideas—and if in the end they are really dangerous at all.
Like Einstein who had the first antecedent to his 1905 breakthrough back when he was sixteen, dreaming about what it would be like to ride a light beam like a bull, so Darwin had the first inklings of natural selection back in 1838. Just two years after the Beagle docked back in England, Charles read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. In the essay, Malthus predicted (thankfully wrongly) that population would double every twenty-five years, quickly outstripping food production. Darwin saw a connection with his observations on the Beagle. A species would always overpopulate beyond available resources; therefore only those in the population with certain adaptations, predisposing them to win in the fight for resources, would survive. Surviving, they’d pass along these winning mutations to their offspring, giving them a fitness to survive. This would do it![3] It would execute Paley’s watchmaker, giving us a fully natural mechanism for the design of nature. The environments Darwin saw from the bow of the Beagle seemed anything but harmonious. “Violent” was a better word for them. Nature was a war, not a ticking timepiece.[4] And now Malthus’s essay seemed to affirm Darwin’s observations.
Just about three months after reading Malthus and putting together the first bricks of the theory of natural selection, Charles had lunch with a friend named Joseph Dalton Hooker. Hooker brought with him an American colleague named Asa Gray, a visiting botanist from Harvard. Charles and Asa hit it off, enjoying each other’s company. But circumstances would keep them from interacting much for the next decade and half, as well as keeping Charles from furthering his theory of natural selection. Charles was busy; he needed to publish books about the Beagle, to get married, to become deathly ill, and to have children. As we saw above, one of those lovely children, Anne, would be killed by the same stomach pains that Charles survived.
Anne’s loss never left Charles, but eventually he was able to get back to work. Needing some information on American flower species, Charles wrote Asa the first of what would become three hundred letters. In these letters Charles most directly worked out the theory of natural selection, even providing Asa with an early outline of On the Origin of Species in an 1857 correspondence. Asa was sure that when the book was released in 1858, it would be groundbreaking, so much so that it was Asa Gray who got the book onto American soil, becoming Darwin’s main interpreter and supporter in North America.
Convinced by Darwin, Asa too saw evolution by natural selection as the shape of nature. But what Asa could not see was why this eliminated divine action. He couldn’t quite see how Charles’s scientific findings removed a personal order. In a letter, Asa wrote, “God himself is the very last, irreducible causal factor, and, hence, the source of all evolutionary change.”[5] Asa saw evolution as the process of God’s action, and natural selection the human interpretation of divine cause. Asa, like James Clerk Maxwell (and T. F. Torrance), came from Scottish Presbyterians.[6] Nicene Christianity ran through his veins, and he was not shy about claiming it.[7] Asa saw no reason that a God revealed in the kenotic act of Jesus Christ, entering death so new life might be, could not use evolution as Darwin imagined. Darwin, I believe, was hung up on Paley’s rigged natural theology, believing that clear observable design was the only lens in which to see divine action.
With Anne’s death, Malthus’s theory, and Paley’s theology all mixing within Charles, his purview of death and struggle were narrowed. Paley’s theology of a watchmaker asserted that creation was made of intricately tooled gears, ticking in perfect harmony. But Anne had been caught in these gears, and the rocks had crushed more species into nonexistence than could be counted. Darwin couldn’t see how a personal God was acting in the world (though he wished he could). And he couldn’t because, even in his opposition to Paley, he ironically conceded his view of God to him. Darwin was right; if you started with a God who was a firm technical watchmaker (as opposed to a kenotic minister—which the Bible points to), then natural selection and divine action were in opposition.[8]
When Gray told Darwin that he saw the possibility of divine action in the theory of evolution by natural selection, Charles wrote him, telling Gray directly that he agreed that his theory was “not at all necessarily atheistical,” but Paley’s ghost and Anne’s screams were too haunting for Darwin. Charles responded, “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”[9]
While Asa agreed that such a subject was certainly infinitely deep, he was willing to claim that his mind, in some small way, had touched its possibility. It is speculation, but worth imagining, that Gray was willing to see the mind of God in the supposed chaos of evolution by natural selection because of his experience as a deacon. Gray was a devout deacon at First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Presbyterian and Congregational churches, deacons are ministers. They may be laypeople, but they are nevertheless called (even ordained) to the direct ministry of the congregation, blessing the sick, praying for the young, and reaching out to the shut-in.[10]
Gray may have seen something different in evolution by natural selection than Darwin, because Gray had participated in ministry, and he also saw reality through the logic of Nicaea. Charles was seeking to upend ideas in the theology of Paley, but Asa was experiencing the very action of God in ministry itself. Gray may have experienced how from death springs new life, how in death itself a personal force seemed to promise new possibility in and through perishing.[11] While Charles saw nature as red in tooth and claw, Asa saw a ministerial paradigm that from death comes life.
While this might be plausible but self-servingly speculative in relation to Asa Gray, it is exactly the experience of Francis Collins, which we’ll explore more fully below. It was from the experience of ministry that Collins (the leader of the Human Genome Project) not only found faith, but also saw how evolution and faith might overlap.[12] Collins and those that follow him stand in the legacy of Asa Gray, seeing evolution as possessing cause within itself.[13] But this cause is inextricable from the kenotic nature of God, who forms a distinct place, forged through ministry, to echo ministry across the universe.[14]
Through the lens of ministry we can see evolution by natural selection as the process God uses to shape those with minds for ministry, giving us, in turn, a world that yearns, even in its smallest particle, for ministry through its evolutionary interconnection. God uses evolution to create the hypostatic beings God wishes to share God’s image as ministers.[15] Evolution becomes a kind of species-bound school, a shared environment, which forges beings with minds for ministry.[16] It does this by hardwiring us with a sensitivity and openness to nothingness. For it is out of the death of nothingness that divine action brings forth new possibility, and it is when we walk into nothingness, embracing others as they grieve the loss of their job or spouse, or into the nothingness of nature, sitting with a bird as it dies on the sidewalk, that we encounter the mystery of God’s own being.[17]
Evolution implants a death-to-life paradigm within us that is haunting outside the ministerial action of God. But within it, this paradigm delivers beauty and promise through the frequency of ministry. Through ministry we experience that out of nothingness and death comes the new—not through the force of a watchmaker, but through the love of a self-giving minister.[18] It is through perishing that God brings new possibility, and evolution wires this not only into our own being, but into the being of all living things, pushing us to enter the nothingness of one another and the created realm, as the way into divine encounter.
After Darwin and Einstein, a good way to think about God is as the ultimate source of ordered novelty, as a disturbing lure that seeks to intensify the world’s beauty. . . . Such a God is not interested in perpetuating the status quo, but in making the universe become more than what it is now. It becomes more, however, especially by intensifying its beauty and the aesthetic capacity of beings to enjoy this beauty.[19]
As we said above, the universe itself operates as a person. And it does this because every part of it is covered in this death-to-life paradigm. All parts of existence are through contingency and connection, finding particularity and distinct novelty, through relational connection that forges what was nothing into something.[20]
Darwin couldn’t see this because of Paley’s brainworm. William Paley, no Nicene Trinitarian, saw everything hinging on design.[21] The face of the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, was vague in his theological imagination. Paley became infatuated with order and couldn’t see the death-to-life paradigm that Jesus’ very body represents. This made apologetics for design more important than novelty—the reality that nature unfolds into newness, bringing from death new possibilities.
Paley and Darwin faced off over how design occurred in nature. Paley claimed that there could only be design if there was a designer. Darwin showed otherwise. But what Asa Gray saw was how evolution begot newness. Evolution from natural selection, no doubt, provided a way to have design without a designer. But Gray also saw that it could witness to the continued creating action of God who takes what is dead and brings new (novel) life out of it. As Haught says, “The point . . . is that the place to look for God is not in the design but in the drama of life.”[22]
Darwin could only see evolution as a war because the infatuation with design drew his attention backward. Darwin tells a captivating story, but it is a drama that it is only retrospective, ignoring that there are actually persons telling this story. From the place of strict backward-looking design, the death of dinosaurs and other mass extinctions seem to show no personal mind moving in the world. But if we change perspective and peer into the advent of newness, we can see that from death comes new life, bringing new possibilities. The dinosaurs play their part in bringing forth novelty, in and through their death. Without their existence, life would not have spread. And without their death, and the end of the lizard era, mammals would have lacked an environment to grow and prosper. And what ultimately can’t be ignored is that this evolving newness eventually delivers conscious beings that possess the hypostatic capacity to minister. Like the Anthropic Principle we discussed in the last part, all our thinking about design must be done with a recognition that evolution led to us, uniquely novel beings who pray.
Whether evolution is examined through the lens of design or novelty often determines our metaphysics—whether we believe the world is bound in an impersonal or personal order.[23] Similar to cosmology and physics, when we see evolution as the story of how conscious (ministering) life came to be, we are freed from needing a watchmaker, and instead are given a minister, who, through every novel turn, is bringing new life out of death—even the death of dinosaurs.[24]