The foregoing still shot (chapter 3) of the way the world is now seen is only one aspect of the scientific vista on the world. The Prologue described the results of the time-oriented scientific exploration of the phases of the universe in process from its distant cosmic origins to the living world of the Earth. This is what some have called ‘the epic of evolution’. Whatever we call it, it is a thought framework sufficiently well established that it is now impossible for us to set ourselves back into the temporal framework that shaped Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious beliefs. The framework for these monotheistic faiths has, for two millennia, been the cosmology of the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, especially the early chapters of Genesis (together with parts of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature). Doctrines concerning human nature have depended strongly on the different mythical accounts of the Garden of Eden and of the Fall in Genesis 2–3, and so consequently have understandings in Christianity of the ‘work’ of Jesus the Christ – in particular, theories of atonement. And, of course, much more.
Since theology is, in principle, the relating of everything to God, it is not surprising that the establishment of this evolutionary perspective has often been perceived as a challenge – and even as a threat – to received monotheistic beliefs about God, nature and humanity. I hope to show that, far from being a threat, the scientific vista for the third millennium, or at least the twenty-first century, constitutes a stimulus to theology to become more encompassing and inclusive, but only if theology radically alters its widely assumed paradigms. We are now living through the most fundamental challenge of all to theistic belief – the fundamental transformation of our basic understanding of nature and humanity, and consequently also of God, which is being provoked by the scientific vision of the ‘epic of evolution’ depicted in the Prologue.
In 1999, the BBC radio morning news programme invited listeners to name the ‘most significant British figure of the second millennium’. You can imagine the list that emerged! Among the top three or four, Shakespeare was nearly always included and, very often, Churchill – but rarely scientists. Yet the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was transformed and dominated by the creative achievements of Newton. A fundamental transition occurred which is well documented and widely recognised. Needless to say, many scientists were shocked by this response of the great British public and the lack of attention to Darwin outraged Richard Dawkins (who has lectured on ‘Universal Darwinism’). I do not think he was wrong in choosing Darwin to head the list. Yet the impact of Darwin – and even more so of Darwinism – is regarded with suspicion by some Christian believers. But Darwin’s uniquely eminent place in the history of biology is totally assured, for he propounded a plausible mechanism for the transformation of species – that of natural selection (the increasing predominance of forms able to produce and rear more progeny as the environment changes). He brilliantly, doggedly, at great personal cost, showed that the operation of this mechanism was the best explanation, and made most sense of, widely disparate data concerning the form, habitats, distribution and behaviour of an immense variety of living organisms. His work is a paradigm case of that inference to the best explanation (IBE) of a wide range of observations and experiences which I am here espousing. His ideas were vindicated by the later discovery of the laws of heredity (to which Darwin did not have access), and by a number of developments in the twentieth century. These included: the statistics of the process; direct observation of natural selection in vivo; irrefutable evidence for the interconnectedness of all living forms in the universality of the genetic code (linking the sequence of units in DNA to that in proteins); and by the evidence of genealogical connections between widely diverse species, based on sequence relationships in genetic DNA and in particular proteins. No professional biologist can honestly work now on any other basis than on recognising the historical connectedness of all living forms and of the role of natural selection in their mutual transformation over four billion years. As Theodor Dobzhansky (an Orthodox Christian) affirmed, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’
Now, at the turn of the millennium, we also have a naturalistic, intelligible account from the cosmological and astronomical sciences, in association with the relevant chemistry and physics, of the development over the last twelve billion years of the observable universe from a primal concentration of mass–energy. The two stories join up to give us the contemporary epic of evolution – a perspective of a universe in process from an original fluctuating quantum field, or ‘quark soup’, to the astonishing complexity of the universe, as observed by the Hubble telescope, and to the fecund complexity of life on Earth. This vista compels us, more than ever before, to regard God as continuously creating, as the eternal Creator, for God continues to give existence to processes that are inherently creative and producing new forms.
Any theology – any attempt to relate God to all-that-is – will be moribund and doomed if it does not incorporate this perspective into its bloodstream. Yet much Christian theology appears to be simply tinkering apologetically with vulnerable chinks in its armour, trusting that it will survive into what it hopes will be less challenging times. That is a recipe for extinction, for it is on planet Earth, part of an evolving world, that the tragicomedy of human existence is working itself out. We are part of nature, part of an evolving cosmos – indeed we are stardust become persons.
Let us now look, in sequence, at stages in the processes leading to life and reflect on their significance for our understanding of nature, humanity and God – that is, their significance for theology, for our exploration towards God.
Extrapolation backwards in time on the basis of known physical relations and observations enables astronomers to trace the evolution of the universe back to when it was only a tiny fraction of a second old, in the form of a compressed fireball hotter than the centre of the Sun. However far astronomers and cosmologists go back, the universe was indisputably physical, consisting of matter–energy–space–time in its most basic forms (e.g. a fluctuating quantum field). From this all else has developed, hence it can at least be affirmed (and there will be much more to affirm) that all concrete particulars in the world, including human beings, are constituted of fundamental physical entities. This supports the monistic view we adopted earlier (see pp.49–50) in the sense that everything can be broken down into fundamental physical entities and that no extra entities are to be inserted at higher levels of complexity. It is entirely in accord with the biblical tradition that ‘the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground’1 and that Adam was told ‘you are dust and to dust you shall return’.2
Such a monistic view of the constitution of all entities in the universe, including living organisms and human beings, does not mean that in the long run all is to be explained by fundamental physics. For life is emergent (in the sense we have already defined; see p.49) from the physical and chemical, as is the psychological from the neurological, and personhood from the human-brain-in-the-human-body – all are non-reducible levels of reality.
There is a complex, and unresolved, debate concerning the way there came into existence the earliest entities that could be called living – that could replicate complex structures that are maintained by incorporating molecules from their environment. It is nearly thirty years now since the two Nobel laureates Ilya Prigogine and Manfred Eigen showed by two entirely different approaches that the transformation of certain, apparently inchoate, physico-chemical systems of very large molecules into complex, self-copying ones is likely to occur under appropriate conditions. So much so that Eigen affirmed that the evolution of life must, given appropriate environmental conditions which have existed on Earth, be considered physico-chemically to be an inevitable process – despite its indeterminate historical course.
The inability of scientists to discover the precise mechanism of the origin of life is not at all surprising, for it can be inferred only indirectly from current physical chemistry and biochemistry. This has led some to become sceptical about the possibility of life emerging on Earth without coming from some other external source (another planet perhaps – though this would only displace, not solve, the problem). Others, usually non-scientists, have even resorted to postulating divine intervention. However, the pioneer work I referred to shows this scepticism about the natural origin of life to be unwarranted. It has become increasingly established since those earlier studies that matter on planet Earth has the capacity to be self-organising on account of the very nature of the processes that its atomic and molecular constituents can and do undergo. Such self-organisation into spatial and temporal patterns has now been observed in hundreds of chemical, biochemical and biological systems.
In the last few years, arguments have been advanced3 that, for example, the complex biochemical cycles that enable all cells to utilise chemically stored energy have an ‘irreducible complexity’, as if they were like a mousetrap all of whose parts are simultaneously essential for its operation. This irreducible complexity is deemed and defined to be such that the cycles could come into existence only in toto and complete for, it is argued, any incomplete cycle could not function (just as a mousetrap lacking a part could not work). It is asserted that such irreducible complexity implies what is called ‘intelligent design’. The implication intended is that they must have been created all in a piece, presumably by God conceived of as the necessary Designer who not only conceives of but actually makes each cycle separately and individually all at once. This version of ‘special creation’, now postulated for the molecular level, has gained a certain amount of currency in some circles. However, it is based on the false supposition that molecular systems could not self-organise into such cycles and this contradicts the experimental and theoretical evidence already referred to. It also ignores the extensive redundancy displayed by all such systems in vivo (including complexes of genes in action) and their ability to function even when only part of the mechanism is present. This renders inapplicable the concept of irreducibility as applied to these complex cycles (so the mousetrap analogy is a false trail). Moreover, a naturalistic, evolutionary account also gives an intelligible explanation of what might, objectively, be called the notable imperfections of ‘design’ in the features of many living organisms – for example, human beings having too many teeth for their jaws’ size, and the relatively large size of the human head, which makes birth dangerous.
It is the view of those scientists studying the emergence of complexity – including, for example, the Nobel laureate C. de Duve (‘Chance does not exclude inevitability’4) – that the principle of Eigen has been established, namely the inevitability of the emergence by natural processes of life on some planet, some galaxy, some time in the universe, with the precise details of how and when left open. The emergence of living organisms from non-living matter can be regarded as a natural phenomenon requiring no ‘God of the gaps’ to intervene in any law-breaking manner (no deus ex machina) to ensure its occurrence. Indeed, God made things make themselves, as affirmed over a hundred years ago by a future Archbishop of Canterbury.5 For theists, the whole process is given its existence, with the potential capacity for the emergence of self-organising systems and of life, by God (who is therefore not ‘of the gaps’). It is amusing to note that, in spite of this, Richard Dawkins, in response to a claim made in the USA to having synthesised a living system using artificial genes, could assert: ‘Synthesising life in a test tube would be a blow to the religious view that there’s something special about life.’6 This is a misunderstanding of belief in God as Creator – for theology is not committed to an act of divine intervention as the explanation of the existence of life on Earth, or anywhere else.
Not long before delivering the 1978 Bampton Lectures,7 I had heard Brandon Carter giving an account in Cambridge of his perception of those ‘large number coincidences’, as he called them, that made carbon-based life possible in the universe. He called this the ‘anthropic principle’ (though ‘biotic principle’ would have been better). This phrase refers to the realisation that, if a wide variety of physical quantities8 that characterise our present universe had been only slightly different, then the development of galaxies, stars and planets would have been totally different, and the possibility of life developing on Earth might have been zero. The development of carbon-based life, and so of human life, turns out to be crucially and sensitively dependent on certain physical quantities having the values they actually do have. In those days, my first theological reflection on this so-called principle was to emphasise that it reinforced again the essential contingency of biological and human life, and that it demonstrated with new force how closely interlocked human existence is with the physical nature of the universe – we are stardust, for every carbon atom in our bodies, every iron atom in our blood’s haemoglobin was made in stars and scattered by supernovae explosions before the Earth existed as a planet.
Since then others have come to interpret this anthropic characteristic of our universe as undergirding a modern ‘argument from design’ for the existence of a God who intends to bring about human life – and so creates this universe with just these anthropic relations. I have always been wary of employing the anthropic principle for such apologetic purposes, since this is indeed the only kind of universe which we could be in and know. What can be said on the basis of the anthropic principle is that our emergence in this universe is at least consonant with the postulate of a Creator God who has the purpose of bringing into existence living and eventually self-conscious persons. I remain inclined not to think the anthropic principle affords a design-type proof for the existence of a Creator God.
Since, on the basis of various defensible physical theories, the existence of multiple universes (universes out of communication with each other, existing at times or in spaces beyond mutual accessibility to light wave signals) is a real possibility,9 some have argued that it is only by chance that our universe happens to display those anthropic features that allow carbon-based life. Other possible universes with different physical quantities may well exist and be void of life in any form. Hence, it is argued, no implications of divine creation are permissible, even of consonance between the anthropic principle and the existence of a Creator God. However, as we shall see (pp.75ff.), there are good grounds for thinking that it is through the interplay of chance within a lawlike framework that God must be regarded as creating in biological evolution by exploring the possibilities and bringing new forms into existence. Hence I would still argue (see note 7) that, if one accepts this, why cannot one similarly conceive of God also operating through random exploration of all possible kinds of universe within the framework of whatever meta-law governs the range of possibilities? God would then be allowing chance to bring into existence a universe capable of generating and sustaining life. In which case, the existence of multiple universes would still be consonant with them being given existence by a Creator God who has the intention – some time, some place, some galaxy, some universe – of bringing into existence living organisms capable of evolving into persons. But, given that we do exist, it cannot be argued from this that the initial state of the universe is divinely determined to ensure our existence, which is what arguments from design seem to involve.
The oldest rocks to contain fossils of living forms (prokaryotic cells – bacteria and cyanophytes; no nucleus) are 3.5 billion years old and, since these are already very complex, the origin of life must be located in the first half billion years of the Earth’s existence, of some four billion years. If the Earth was formed at midnight of the day before yesterday and each hour is equivalent to one hundred million years, then life first appeared during yesterday morning. Only at 6 p.m. today did calcareous (hard-shelled) fossils appear; at 6 to 7 p.m. on this second day, the seas filled with shelled creatures; at 8 p.m. fishes evolved; at 9 p.m. amphibia appeared on land; by 11.30 p.m. mammals and the first primates had spread across the globe; monkeys and apes evolved at 11.50 p.m; in the last few minutes of this second day hominids arose, and only on the last stroke of tonight’s midnight bell do we see tool-making Homo sapiens.
During the aeons before our emergence on Earth hundreds of millions (if not billions) of species have come and gone, the predecessors of the perhaps as many as 15 million species still extant – and rapidly being extinguished by human action. Theists, who believe that the ultimate ground of all existence is God as Creator, have to face new questions: is it permissible to regard these myriads of species other than Homo sapiens, most of them now extinct, as simply byproducts in a process aimed at producing human beings? Or do they have value to God as Creator in and for themselves? The process is so fecund and rich and the variety and intricate beauty of coordinated structures and functions so great, that surely we now have to escape from our anthropocentric myopia and affirm that God as Creator takes what we can only call delight in the rich variety and individuality of other organisms for their own sake. Certainly the Hebrew scriptures encourage such a view – Psalm 104, for example, depicts the ‘Lord’ as caring for living creatures and delighting in their enjoyment of their vitality; and the conclusion of the Priestly account of creation in Genesis is ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good’.10
We have here the basis for an eco-theology that grounds the value of all living creatures in their distinctive value to God for their own sake and not just as stages en route to humanity and as resources for human exploitation.
This is the proposition that species are derived from one another by natural selection of the best procreators. In the words of Darwin,
If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure ... if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of increase, a severe struggle for life ... then ... it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variations had ever occurred useful to each being’s own welfare ... But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest, I have called Natural Selection.11
In more recent language, we would say today that the original mutational events in the gene-carrying DNA are random with respect to the future of the biological organism, including its survival. The biological niche in which the organism exists then statistically favours in a lawlike way those changes in the DNA that enable the organisms possessing them to produce and rear more progeny. (We will refer again to the interplay of chance and law in this process.)
There are no professional biologists who doubt that natural selection is a factor operative in biological evolution – and most would say it is by far the most significant one. Some, such as Richard Dawkins, say it is all-sufficient. It can certainly be subtle in its operation and counter-intuitive with respect to the degree of change and the complexity of new structures and functions it can effect. However, other biologists are convinced that natural selection is not the whole story, and some even go so far as to say that it alone cannot account for the formation of distinctly new species. They claim a significant role for other factors, including: the ‘evolution of evolvability’; the constraints and selectivity effected by self-organisational principles; ‘genetic assimilation’; that how an organism might evolve is a consequence of its state at any given moment; the innovative behaviour of individual organisms in a particular environment; ‘top-down causation’ through a flow of information from environment to the organism; group selection (after all!); long-term changes resulting from ‘molecular drive’; effects of the context of adaptive changes or even stasis; and the recognition that much molecular evolutionary change is immune to natural selection. What is significant about all these other factors is that they too occur entirely within a naturalistic framework – an evolutionary process is assumed to be operating, albeit with differing degrees of speed and smoothness. Furthermore, the depiction of this process as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ is a caricature. For, as many biologists have pointed out, natural selection is not even in a figurative sense the outcome of struggle as such – in spite of the language of Herbert Spencer (‘the survival of the fittest’) which Darwin unwisely borrowed. Natural selection involves many factors such as better integration with the ecological environment, more efficient utilisation of available food, better care of the young, more cooperative social organisation and better capacity to survive such struggles as do occur – remembering that it is in the interest of any predator that their prey survive as a species.
It must be noted that death of individual members of a species is essential to survival of the species and to its ability to adapt to environmental changes and, if need be, to evolve into a new one. In evolution we witness new life through death of the old; believers that God creates through this process have to accept that the biological death of the individual is the means whereby God has been creating new species, including ourselves. Biological death was this creative means aeons before human beings appeared. Hence we can no longer take Paul’s ‘The wages of sin is death’12 to mean that our biological death can be attributed to human sin, as has often been assumed in so-called ‘theories of the atonement’. If we wish to rescue Paul’s phrase, we will have to reinterpret it to refer to some kind of spiritual ‘death’ as being the consequence of ‘sin’.
Furthermore, the believer in God as Creator has to view biological evolution through natural selection, and other operating processes, as simply the means whereby God has been, and is, creating. God does not make things, but makes things make themselves. Their existence is inherently transformative. There is no prima-facie case for and no need to postulate any special intervention by God in order to understand what has been going on. Some theologians postulate, I think mistakenly, a kind of special guidance – or ‘lure’, or pull, or ‘nisus’ – whereby God pushes or pulls evolution in a direction it would not otherwise have taken by its own natural processes and propensities (see pp.81ff.). There is no need for such hypotheses. God, it appears, has given and continues to give existence to entities that, given time under the appropriate conditions, have the inherent capacity to become alive and to evolve and (see p.70) eventually to manifest the qualities of self-conscious, thinking persons.
The interplay in biological evolution between chance, at the molecular level of DNA, and law or necessity, at the statistical level of the population of organisms, tempted Jacques Monod13 to elevate ‘chance’ to the level almost of a metaphysical principle by which the universe might be interpreted. He concluded that the ‘stupendous edifice of evolution’ is, in this sense, rooted in ‘pure chance’ and that therefore all inferences of direction or purpose in the development of the biological world, in particular, and of the universe, in general, must be false. In his view, it was the purest accident that any particular creature came into being, such as Homo sapiens, and one could never expect to discern any direction or purpose or meaning in biological evolution. A Creator God, for all practical purposes, might just as well not exist, since everything in evolution went on in an entirely uncontrolled and fortuitous manner.
The responses to this thesis and attack on theism came mainly from theologically interested scientists,14 and some philosophers, rather than from theologians. For there is no reason why the randomness of molecular events in relation to biological consequences has to be given the metaphysical significance that Monod attributed to it. The involvement of what we call ‘chance’ at the level of mutation in DNA does not, of itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trends and manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms, populations and ecosystems. To call the mutation of the DNA a ‘chance’ event serves simply to stress its randomness with respect to biological consequence. Instead of being daunted by the role of chance in genetic mutations as being the manifestation of irrationality in the universe, it would be more consistent with observation to assert that the full gamut of the potentialities of living matter could be explored only through the agency of the rapid and frequent randomisation that is possible at the molecular level of DNA.
This role of chance, or rather randomness (or ‘free experiment’) at the micro level is what one would expect if the universe were so constituted that all the potential forms of organisation of matter (both living and non-living) which it contains might be thoroughly explored. Indeed, since Monod first published his book in France in 1970, there have been key developments in theoretical and molecular biology and physical biochemistry from the Brussels and Göttingen schools. These demonstrated that it is the interplay of chance and law that is in fact creative within time, for it is the combination of the two which allows new forms to emerge and evolve, so that natural selection appears to be opportunistic. As in many games, the consequences of the fall of the dice depend very much on the rules of the game – and chance does not exclude inevitability. It has become increasingly apparent that chance operating within a lawlike framework is the basis of the inherent creativity of the natural order – its ability to generate new forms, patterns and organisations of matter and energy. If all were governed by rigid law, a repetitive and uncreative order would prevail; if chance alone ruled, no forms, patterns or organisations would persist long enough for them to have any identity or real existence and the universe could never be a cosmos and susceptible to rational inquiry. It is the combination of the two that makes possible an ordered universe capable of developing within itself new modes of existence. The rules are what they are because of the givenness of the properties of the physical environment and of the already evolved other living organisms with which the organism in question interacts.
This givenness, for a theist, must be regarded as one of the God-endowed features of the world. The way in which what we call ‘chance’ operates within this given framework to produce new entities, structures and processes can then properly be seen as an eliciting of the potentialities that the physical cosmos possessed from the beginning. Such potentialities a theist must regard as written into creation by the Creator’s purpose and as gradually being actualised by the operation of chance stimulating their coming into existence. One might say that the potential of the ‘being’ of the world is made manifest in the ‘becoming’ that the operation of chance makes actual. God is the ultimate ground and source of both law (necessity) and chance.
For a theist, God must now be seen as creating in the world through what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next. The Creator is unfolding the divinely endowed potentialities of the universe through a process in which its creative possibilities and propensities (see pp.81ff.) become actualised. This occurs within a created development in time shaped and determined by those selfsame God-given potentialities. In the words of Howard van Till, God has ‘gifted’ the universe, and goes on doing so, with a ‘formational economy’ – the set of all of the dynamic capabilities of matter and material, physical and biotic systems – that ‘is sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization of all inanimate structures and all life forms that have ever appeared in the course of time’.15 The creative relation of God to the evolving world is similar to the way in which a composer can begin with an arrangement of notes in an apparently simple tune and then elaborate and expand it into a fugue by a variety of devices. Thus might a J.S. Bach create a complex and interlocking harmonious fusion of his original material. The listener to such a fugue experiences, with the luxuriant and profuse growth that emanates from the original simple structure, whole new worlds of music that result from the interplay between an expectation based on the past (‘law’) and an openness to the new (‘chance’ in the sense that the listener cannot predict it). So might God as Creator be imagined to unfold the potentialities of the universe which God’s own self has given it – God is an Improvisor of unsurpassed ingenuity, involved in the creative exploration of making possibilities actual and continually giving existence to the processes that do this. These processes are themselves God’s actions which are unravelled and revealed by the sciences: they are not themselves God, as in pantheism, but are in themselves God’s creative activity.
The biological, palaeontological, archaeological and historical evidence is that human nature has emerged gradually by a continuous process from other forms of hominids and primates and that there are no sudden breaks of any substantial kind in the sequences noted by palaeontologists and anthropologists. This is not to say that the history of human culture is simply a smoothly rising curve. There must have been, for example, key turning points or periods in the development of speech and so of social cooperation, including rituals for burying the dead, with provision of food and implements, testifying to a belief in some form of life after death. These apparently occurred among the Neanderthals of the Middle Palaeolithic even before the emergence of Homo sapiens some 100,000 or so years ago, after which further striking developments occurred. However, there is no past period for which there is reason to affirm that human beings possessed moral perfection and existed in a paradisal situation from which there has been a subsequent decline. All the evidence points to a creature slowly emerging into awareness, with an increasing capacity for consciousness and sensitivity and the possibility of moral responsibility and, I would affirm, of response to God (especially after the ‘axial period’ around 500 BCE). So there is no sense in which we can talk of a Fall from a past perfection. There was no golden age, no perfect past, no individuals – Adam or Eve – from whom all human beings have descended and declined and who were perfect in their relationships and behaviour. We appear to be rising beasts rather than fallen angels – rising from an amoral (and in that sense) innocent state to the capability of moral and immoral action. (I hardly need to mention that, of course, the myths of Adam and Eve and of the Fall have long since been interpreted non-historically and existentially by theologians and biblical scholars.)
What is also true is that humanity manifests aspirations to a perfection not yet attained, a potentiality not yet actualised, but no ‘original righteousness’ in the sense of a past state. Sin as alienation from God, humanity and nature is only too real and appears as the consequence of our very possession of that self-consciousness which always places ourselves at the egotistical centre of the universe of our consciousness which has evolved biologically. Sin is primarily a theological concept and only secondarily about ethical behaviour. It is about our alienation from God, humanity and nature, about awareness of our falling short from what God would have us be and is part and parcel of our having evolved into self-consciousness, freedom, intellectual curiosity and the possession of values. The domination of Christian theologies of redemption, for example, by classical conceptions of the Fall as a past event urgently needs, it seems to me, to be rescinded and the notion of ‘redemption’ to be rethought if it is to make any sense to our contemporaries. Should not, for example, the effect of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ ( the ‘work of Christ’, in traditional terms) now be regarded not as the restoration of a lost, past state of perfection, but rather as the potential transformation of humanity into a new, previously unattainable, one?
We are all aware of the tragedy of our failure to fulfil our highest aspirations, of our failure to come to terms with finitude, death and suffering, of our failure to realise our potentialities and to steer our path through life. Freedom allows us to make the wrong choices, so that sin and alienation from God, from our fellow human beings and from nature are real features of our existence. So the questions of not only ‘Who are we?’ but even ‘What should we be becoming – where should we be going?’ remain acute for us.
Our understanding of human behaviour has been enriched by the new sciences of sociobiology and behaviour genetics. Sociobiology is the systematic study of the biological, especially genetic, basis of patterns of social behaviour in socially organised species and aspires to include even human behaviour and culture in its purview. Behaviour genetics aims to examine over a wide range the inheritance of many different behaviours in individual organisms, including humanity. These studies do not necessarily have to be pursued with excessively reductionist ambitions, though that has certainly been the stance of many of its practitioners, e.g. E.O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. These new sciences cannot but influence our general assessment of human nature and of the genetic constraints under which free will operates. Theologians should acknowledge that it is this kind of genetically based creature that God has actually created as a human being through the evolutionary process. The limits and scope and perhaps even the procedures of human thinking and action are clearly dependent on our genetic heritage. We are, more than we realise, under the leash of our genes. However, that heritage cannot in advance itself determine the content of our thinking, for example of our of moral reasoning – even if it is a prerequisite of our possessing these capacities. I think we must not, in this context, perpetrate the ‘genetic fallacy’ of reductively explaining human cultural development entirely in terms of its biological (or even cultural) origins. Just as science is not magic, so ethics, on the same grounds, is not genetics.
Even so, the theologian need not enter this debate with destructive ambitions. If God, as a scientifically sensitive theology affirms, is creating immanently through the evolutionary processes, it would not be inconsistent with such a theology for human moral awareness to have originated sociobiologically. This is not to preempt the maturation of moral sensitivity in self-aware, reasoning persons whose emergence in the created order God can properly be posited as intending (as I hope to make clear a little later). Furthermore, a distinctive role for the religious impulse of humanity can be discerned in this context. For committing oneself to living for a transcendent God’s purposes, not one’s own or those of one’s genetic kin, can be a commitment to optimise the social system rather than the individual. Some cross-cultural surveys indicate that belief in transcendent deities that are concerned with the morality of human behaviour towards other human beings occurs more frequently in more complex societies. Moreover, humanity could only have survived and flourished if it held social and personal values that transcended the urges of the individual, embodying ‘selfish’ genes – and these values are closely related to belief in a transcendent Ultimate Reality. The existence of such values points to the nature of that unsurpassable Ultimate Reality and this then enriches and stimulates our own sense of values.
I have argued that God must now be regarded as creating through processes involving the interplay of chance, in random events, and law, in structured situations manifesting regular properties. Nevertheless can God be said to be implementing any purpose in biological evolution? Or is the whole process so haphazard, such a matter of what Monod and Jacob called ‘tinkering’ (in French, bricolage), that no meaning, least of all a divinely intended one, can be discerned in the process? The realisation of possibilities, which may be random, depends on the total situation within which the possibilities are being actualised so that there exist weighted possibilities that are tendencies or propensities to become real which are properties of the whole situation.
Propensities are simply the effects of the context on the outcomes of random events. I suggest that the evolutionary process is characterised by such propensities, namely the emergence of certain features that, in appropriate circumstances, favour survival. They include: increased complexity, information processing and storage, consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness (a prerequisite for social development and the cultural transmission of knowledge down the generations). Some successive forms, along some evolutionary branch or twig, have a distinct probability of manifesting more and more of these characteristics. However, the physical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actualised is contingent on the history of the crossing of disparate chains of events, including survival of the mass extinctions that have occurred (ninety-six per cent of all species in the Permo-Triassic one).
In his Wonderful Life,16 Stephen J. Gould has interpreted the extraordinary fossils of very early (c. 530 million years ago) soft-bodied fauna found in the Burgess Shale of the Canadian Rockies to represent a maximum in the disparity of forms. After this, he claims, there was a dramatic decline in the range of types (phyla) of species – technically, in ‘disparity’. On this basis he then, notoriously, so emphasises the role of contingency in evolution that he can attribute no trends, let alone inevitability, towards the emergence of particular features in evolution. This interpretation of these fauna has now been strongly opposed by Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist, who has devoted his research life to study of the Burgess Shale and related formations. He shows, in The Crucible of Creation,17 that disparity has not in fact diminished since that point. Even more significantly he demonstrates, pace Gould, what is widely accepted by evolutionary biologists, namely the eminent role of convergence in evolution, whereby in independent lines and places similar solutions are found to the same kind of environmental challenges. Gould argues that if we were to rerun the ‘tape of life’ from the time of the rapid expansion in biological diversity in the Cambrian epoch (550 to 485 million years ago) we would unfold a totally different biological world. From this anything remotely like humans would be absent. Conway Morris argues that this argument is based on a basic confusion between the destiny of a given lineage and the likelihood that a particular biological property or feature will sooner or later manifest itself as part of the evolutionary process. Living organisms often come to resemble each other despite having evolved from different ancestors – convergence, is a ubiquitous feature of life. He cites as an example of convergence, the sabre-toothed cat of the Northern Hemisphere, a relative of the tiger and the panther, and the very similar South American sabre-toothed ‘cat,’ which is in fact a marsupial, related to the kangaroos and opossums. He concludes that the tape of life can be run as many times as we like and in principle brains and intelligence, for example, will surely emerge.
All of which gives support for the notion of propensities – that is, of inbuilt trends in biological evolution. Hence, given enough time, a complex organism with consciousness, self-consciousness and social and cultural organisation (the basis for the existence of ‘persons’) would be likely eventually to evolve on any planet amenable to the emergence of living organisms. It would not, of course, have to have the physical form of Homo sapiens. There can, it now appears (pace Gould), be overall direction and implementation of divine purpose through the interplay of chance and law without a deterministic plan fixing all the details of the structure(s) of any organism that emerges with personal qualities. Hence the emergence of self-conscious persons capable of relating personally to God can still be regarded as an intention of God continuously creating through the processes of that to which God has given an existence of this particular, contingent kind and not some other.
Again, I emphasise, there is no need to postulate any special action – any non-natural agent pushing, or pulling, or luring by, say, some divine manipulation of mutations at the quantum level – to ensure that persons emerge in the universe, and in particular on Earth. Not to coin a phrase, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.18
The whole epic of evolution in its biological phase has seemed to many sensitive scientists, beginning with Darwin himself, to involve too much pain and suffering, culminating in death, for it to be the creative work of any Being who could be called benevolent. The costliness of the whole process cannot be gainsaid and raises acute questions for all human beings, but especially for theists.
In this context we have to recognise that the ability to process and store information is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the emergence of consciousness. This sensitivity to the surroundings inevitably involves an increase in the ability to experience pain, which provides the necessary biological warning signals of danger and disease. Insulation from the surrounding world in the biological equivalent of three-inch nicked steel would be a sure recipe for preventing the development of consciousness. The pain associated with breakdown of health owing to general organic causes also appears to be simply a concomitant of being a complex organised system incorporating internal as well as external sensors. When pain is experienced by a conscious organism, the attribution of ‘suffering’ becomes appropriate and with self-consciousness empathy with the suffering of others emerges. The ubiquity of pain and suffering in the living world appears to be an inevitable consequence of creatures acquiring those information processing and storage systems (nerves and brains in the later stages of evolution) that are so advantageous in natural selection.
Complex living structures can have only a finite chance of coming into existence if they are not assembled de novo, from their basic subunits but emerge through a kind of modular process through the accumulation of changes in simpler forms. Having come on to the scene, they can then survive, because of the finitude of their lifespans, only by building preformed complex chemical structures into their fabric through imbibing the materials of other living organisms. It is impossible for the chemist and biochemist to conceive how complex material structures, especially those of the intricacy of living organisms, could be assembled in a finite time otherwise than from less complex ones, that is, by predation. So there is a kind of structural logic about the inevitability of living organisms preying on each other. We cannot conceive, in a lawful, non-magical universe, of any way by which the immense variety of developing, biological, structural complexity might appear in a finite time except by utilising structures already existing, either by modification of them (as in biological evolution) or by building them up by incorporating pre-made simpler structures (as in feeding). Plants feed on inorganic materials from the soil and air, animals on plants, and some animals on other animals. The structural logic is inescapable: new forms of matter arise only through incorporating the old.
Moreover, new patterns can only come into existence in a finite universe (‘finite’ in the sense of the conservation of matter–energy) if old patterns dissolve to make place for them. This is a condition of the creativity of the process, of its ability to produce the new, which at the biological level we observe as new forms of life arising from death of the old. For the death of individual organisms is essential to release food resources for new arrivals, and species die out by being ousted from biological niches by new ones better adapted to survive and reproduce in them. Hence biological death of the individual is prerequisite for the creativity of the biological order, the creativity that eventually led to the emergence of human beings. Furthermore, death not only of individuals but of whole species has occurred on the Earth during the periods of mass extinctions, often attributed to chance collisions of the planet with comet showers, asteroids or other bodies. These have destroyed some thousandfold more species than are at present extant. This adds a further element of sheer contingency to the history of life on the Earth. To summarise, we can say that new life through death of the old is inevitable in a finite world composed of common building blocks (atoms, molecules, macromolecules) having regular properties.
Any understanding today of God’s relation to the world cannot ignore these features of the way in which it now appears God has been and is creating the living world, including humanity. Some of the theological impact of this knowledge about the processes of creation has already been discussed. But now we must stand back and look at the whole panorama in relation to our understanding of God.
Certain new positive features in this perspective need first to be stressed. The caricature of biological evolution by natural selection as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ has often been taken up by agnostic biologists. It has to be recognised that Darwin was led into agnosticism both by this aspect of evolution and by the role of chance. However, as we have seen (p.74), caricature it is, for natural selection is not even in a figurative sense the outcome of struggle as such.
We must also note that the natural world is immensely variegated at any particular time in its hierarchies of entities, structures and processes and abundantly diversifies with cornucopian fecundity in its becoming in time. The branching bush of terrestrial biological evolution appears to be primarily opportunist in the direction it follows and, in so doing, it has produced the enormous variety of biological life on this planet. We can only conclude that, if there is a Creator, then that Creator intended this rich diversity – the whole tapestry of the created order in its warp and woof – and not simply as stages on the way to Homo sapiens. We can only make sense of this, using our limited resources of personal language, if we say that God may be said to have something akin to joy and delight in creation. We have a hint of this in the first chapter of Genesis: ‘And God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’19 This naturally leads to the idea of God’s ‘play’ in creation in relation to Hindu thought (lila) as well as to that of Judaism20 and of Christianity.
However, there is, as we have seen, a darker side – the ubiquity of pain, predation, suffering and death in the creative evolutionary process. The theist cannot avoid asking, ‘If the Creator intended the arrival in the cosmos of complex, reproducing structures that could think and be free – that, is self-conscious, free persons – was there not some other, less costly and painful way of bringing this about? Was that the only possible way?’ These are unanswerable metaphysical questions concerned to ‘justify the ways of God to man,21 to which our response has to be based partly on our understanding of the biological parameters (already described) discerned by science to be operating in evolution. These indicate that there are inherent constraints on how even an omnipotent Creator (recall our definition of ‘omnipotence’ on p.41) could bring about the existence of a lawlike creation that is to be a cosmos and not a chaos. If the theistic postulate is to be coherent, the world has to be an arena for the coming to be of the fecund variety of living organisms in whose existence the Creator delights, and for the emergence and free action of self-conscious, reproducing, complex entities. All of which is predicated on the attribution of the very existence of all-that-is to that self-existing Ultimate Reality, God, whose inherent nature is of such a kind as to give existence to other entities to enable them eventually to share in the ineffable, divine life of that Ultimate Reality. Such a Creator God must be conceived of now not only, as in pre-Darwinian days, as giving existence to everything and of sustaining all in existence, but as deeply involved in the evolutionary processes of creation. These processes are to be seen as the very action of God as Creator. But if that is so, then the ubiquity of pain, predation, suffering and death as the means of creation through biological evolution entails, for any concept of God to be morally acceptable and coherent, that we have to propose tentatively that God suffers in, with and under the creative processes of the world with their costly unfolding in time. In other words the processes of creation are immensely costly to God in a way dimly shadowed by and reflected in the ordinary experience of the costliness of creativity in multiple aspects of human existence – whether it be in giving birth, in artistic creation, or in creating and maintaining human social structures. We are then seen not to be the mere playthings of God, but as sharing as co-creating creatures in the suffering of the creating God engaged in the self-offering, costly process of bringing forth the new.
There has, in fact, been increasing assent in the Christian theology of recent decades to the idea that it is possible to speak consistently of a God who suffers above all others and yet is still God. God, we find ourselves having to conjecture, suffers the natural evils of the world along with ourselves because (we can only hint at this stage) God purposes to bring about a greater good thereby, namely, the kingdom of free-willing, loving persons in communion with God and with each other.
I have been speaking, analogically, of suffering in God, this suffering being an identification with and participation in the suffering of the world. We have already given (pp.57–8) and shall again later be giving (pp.38ff.) reasons for talking in panentheistic terms of God being ‘more than’ the world yet of the world as being ‘within God’, and also for using female metaphors for the creating by God of the world ‘in God’. Now the dimension of suffering which we are here incorporating into our understanding of the relation of God to the world gives an enhanced significance to this panentheistic model, especially when this is given a feminine connotation. Moreover, it gives a new and poignant pertinence to St Paul’s poetic vision of creation as being in the pangs of childbirth:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.22
In Christian theology, there has long been attributed self-limitation to God in the very notion of God creating something that is other than Godself and is given a degree of autonomy. For example, this has been depicted by the idea of God in creating making a ‘space’ for the created order. Now, as we reflect on the processes of creation through biological evolution, we can begin to understand that this self-limitation involved God’s costly, suffering involvement in them on behalf of their ultimate fruition in the divine purpose and in their ultimate consummation.
We can say that there is a self-emptying of God into and sharing in the suffering of God’s creatures, in the creative, evolutionary processes of the world. Such a perception now enriches the specifically Christian affirmation of God’s nature as best understood as inherently one of Love. God suffers the natural evils of the world along with ourselves because – we can but tentatively suggest at this stage – God purposes to bring about a greater good thereby, that is, the kaleidoscope of living creatures, delighting their Creator, and eventually free-willing, loving persons who also have the possibility of communion with God and with each other. Indeed the creation may be said to be through suffering, for suffering is widely recognised as having creative power when imbued with love. So God’s suffering must be construed as not merely passive but as active with creative intention, the activity that is manifest in the creative processes of the world. God brings about new creation through suffering. Christians can infer, in the light of the significance attributed to Jesus the Christ, that God thereby also overcomes the evil introduced into the creation by free human beings. For humanity is free to go against the grain of the creative processes, to reject God’s creative intentions, to mar God’s creation, and to bring into existence disharmonies uniquely its own – and has perennially done so. Hence humanity has the ability to cause God to suffer in a distinctive way.
Human pain and suffering are increased by our self-consciousness, our empathy with each other and by that emergent ability we have of questioning our actual relation to our Creator while enduring such experiences. When we do so question we are free to rebel against God and, more generally in our lives, to ignore the divine presence, thereby augmenting the suffering of God in the divine, creative process.
Creation was for God clearly a risky and costly enterprise. As we reflect on the nature of humanity we are bound to ask that any conclusions we draw be consistent with the intelligibility provided by the explanation of the world as created, that is, with affirming the existence of God as Creator. This intelligibility is in danger of collapsing because of the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of the human person so evolved. What does God think God is up to in evolving this ‘glory, jest and riddle of the world’,23 with its enormous potentiality both for creative good and for degradation and evil, destructive both of itself and of the rest of the created world? What is the meaning God is expressing in creating humanity?
The sequence from the inanimate to the conscious and then to the self-conscious is concomitant with increasing independence and freedom from the environment. This independence in humanity attains the critical point where it can attempt to be an independence of and freedom from the intentions of the Creator. This independence and freedom are an inevitable consequence of the very self-consciousness that has emerged naturalistically through the evolutionary processes in God’s regular way of effecting God’s creative intentions. We cannot help concluding that God intended that out of matter persons should evolve who had this freedom, and thereby allowed the possibility that they might depart from God’s intentions. To be consistent, we must go on to assume that God had some overarching intention that made this risk worth taking, that there was and is some fundamental way of God being God which allows God’s relationship with freely responding persons to be valued by God. So our model of God as the personal agent of the creative process has had to be amplified to include a recognition of the Creator as suffering in creation as it brings into existence new and hazardous possibilities – most of all, those implicit in the creation of self-determining human persons.
If God willed the existence of self-conscious, intelligent, freely willing persons as an end, God must, to be self-consistent, be presumed to have willed the means to achieving that end. This divine purpose must be taken to have been an overriding one, for it involves as a corollary an element of risk whereby God renders Godself vulnerable in a way that only now are we able to perceive. This idea that God took a risk in creation is not new – as in the traditional, mythical narratives of creation in the Old Testament – but is now reinforced and given a wider context by these considerations based on the nature of biological processes.
The appropriation of values depends, because of their very nature, on free consent to do so. A compelled response nullifies their very character as values. God can instantiate in creation God’s own truth, beauty and goodness only by bringing into existence free beings capable of holding them. Hence free beings are incorporated by God as a potential outcome of the cosmic processes, with all the risks this involved. The cost to God, we may venture to say, was in a continuing self-limitation and self-emptying that constitutes both God’s creative action and a self-inflicted vulnerability of God to the very processes God creates in order to achieve an overriding purpose, the emergence of free persons. Creation thus involves for God what we have called a ‘risk’, which God incurs lovingly and willingly, and with suffering, for the opportunity of the greater good of freely responsive humanity coming to be within the created world. Love and self-sacrifice are, from this perspective, seen as inherent to the divine nature and expressed in the whole process of creation. Perhaps this is what the author of Revelation was hinting at when he did not shrink from describing Christ, whom he saw as now incorporated into God, as ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’.24