In this chapter I will not enter into models critical of evolution, such as creationism or theories about intelligent design, because I believe that both approaches are irrelevant. I shall follow a theological hermeneutics of nature and ask about an interpretation of natural phenomena sub specie aeternitatis. For this, we have to revise the traditional doctrine of creation, and to look at God’s creative processes in the history of nature.[1] Having described the earth as creative space, we shall now consider the life-creating history of the earth and the evolution of life on earth. The Neolithic revolution to which we are indebted for our civilization took place only about twelve thousand years ago.
The biblical idea about God’s creation took its impress from Israel’s experience of God in history: the experience of the exodus from captivity through the wilderness into the promised land. Consequently, the idea about creation in the beginning is really the idea about the beginning of the divine creating. It is true that according to Hermann Hesse ‘there is a magic deep in every beginning’, but in creation the beginning holds within itself the promise of the goal and consummation of the divine creative activity. The creation Sabbath points toward the goal, which is the indwelling of God in the completed creation, the cosmic Shekinah.
Creation in the beginning initiates a divine creative process which will end in the new, eternal creation. We may therefore distinguish three stages in God’s creative process:
1. The creating at the beginning: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1.1).
2. The continuing creation of the new: ‘Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isa. 43.18–19).
3. The completion of God’s creating activity: ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Rev. 21.5).
We are therefore talking about a unified creative process on God’s part, with a beginning, a way and a goal, and we ourselves are in the midst of this creative process, together with the history of the cosmos and the evolution of life.
Why is there something and not nothing? This is the child’s question underlying all profound metaphysics, and inherent in it is the human being’s astonishment over the wonder of being. The belief in creation is an answer to this ‘Why?’ question. Everything that is, doesn’t have to be there, but that it is there, is good. It is a being that is threatened by non-being. It is an ordered being, which is threatened by chaos. The theological formula for this is creatio ex nihilo, ‘creation out of nothing’. But the formula paraphrases in a merely negative sense the fact that all things have been created in an act of God’s freedom. God did not have to create—God resolved for creation. Why? Out of love. Love drew God out of himself, so to speak, and drew him into the adventure of this creation. For love is the self-communication of the good. God could perhaps have sufficed for himself, but he wanted to have a counterpart who is not divine. So a reality is called to life which is not divine, but is not meaningless either, but is blessed—that is the world; and as God’s good creation, the world is lovable and lovely.
The fact that the reality in which we too exist is God’s creation emerges from the creator’s self-distinction from his creation. The world is not divine, but as God’s beloved creation it has its own dignity and its own right. A non-divine world coexists with God, a finite world coexists with the infinite God: that presupposes a kind of self-limitation on God’s part: God withdraws himself in order to give those he has created space, time and a relative freedom, and he awaits their response, which the Bible calls their praise.[2] The meaning of everything created is ‘to glorify God and enjoy him forever’.
The idea of creation out of chaos assumes that created things are different from chaos but are threatened by it. The cosmic powers ‘sea’ and ‘night’ reach into creation, but they are restricted by God’s order: land and sea, day and night. If at this point we already turn our gaze toward the completion, we find that according to Revelation 21 these cosmic forces will be wholly excluded from creation. As Paul too says in 1 Corinthians 15.28, ‘God will be all in all.’
Throughout its history, tradition has talked about the finished creation and its preservation through God’s providence. It has overlooked not only the future of creation still to come but, together with that, God’s continuing creative process. But in the Old Testament the singular word for the divine creating, barah, is used more often for God’s activity in history than for the creation ‘in the beginning’. In God’s creative world process, where the beginning is concerned it is a matter of preservation, but in respect of the goal it is a matter of innovation. ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? ‘ (Isa. 43.19), and, 65.17–18, ‘Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth … and they will be glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create’.
What kind of creation is this? It is not a creation out of nothing. It is creation afresh out of what is old, a renewal and intensification, and the giving of new form to what has already been created and is already there.
God’s creative process, therefore, has a double character: preservation and renewal. And in this we can detect another double character still: God’s passion and his action. In order to preserve this world as his creation, God suffers and endures its contradictions, as the story of the Flood in Genesis 6:6 tells: when the earth was full of wickedness, ‘The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.’ God wipes out the wickedness by means of the Flood and with Noah begins a new creation, because he remains true to his creative resolve in spite of the wickedness of human beings. From early on this story was called ‘the pain of God’.
God is a God who bears. He does not just rule from heaven with an unfathomable will, but carries and bears from below. The Exodus story describes this when it says: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings’ (Ex. 19.4). There is a feminine image for this patient and purposeful ‘carrying’: ‘As a nurse carries the suckling child’ (Num. 11.12), and a masculine one, ‘as a man bears his son’ (Deut. 1.31).
In line with the New Testament, the passion of Christ is described similarly in the Agnus Dei of the eucharistic liturgy: ‘Thou who bearest the sin of the world …’, and the passion story also allows us to say: ‘Thou who bearest the suffering of the world’. ‘The Suffering Servant of God (Isaiah 53) carries our sicknesses and shares in our sorrows. The Epistle to the Hebrews, finally, sums it up: ‘who bears all things by his powerful word’ (Heb. 1.3).
The God who ‘bears’ like this is not like Zeus, the father of the gods, in a far-off heaven; he is more like Atlas, who carries the world on his shoulders. He stands where according to Greek philosophy the hypokeimenon stands, ‘that which underlies everything’.[3]
In our personal biographies, the God who bears is also important for trust in God: ‘Even to your old age I am He, and to grey hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.’ (Isa. 46.4).
A symbol for the sustaining foundation is the earth on which we can stand and lie; a symbol for the God who creates afresh is the morning sunrise: ‘New every morning is the love’. . . We shall now turn to this new thing, and shall set the perceptions of evolutionary theory into the prophetic and apostolic category of the Novum, as Ernst Bloch presented it philosophically in his Principle of Hope.[4]
Darwin’s researches are realistic and have been a hundred times confirmed by other research. What is in dispute is his interpretation of the results, that is to say his hermeneutics of nature.
In his own time Darwin did not attack the Christian religion’s belief in creation. The target of his opposition was the divine-like position of the human being in the cosmos which has been maintained and justified by modern religion, modern atheism, and the modern natural sciences every since the beginning of modern times. ‘Subdue the earth’ was read in the biblical creation account, and Descartes declared that by means of science and technology human beings would become ‘the lords and possessors of nature’, for as Francis Bacon had said ‘knowledge is power’, and the more power the human being acquires over nature the more clearly his likeness to God will be restored. This is what H. E. Richter calls the ‘God complex’ of modern human beings. That is why so many people react with horror to the question: is the human being descended from the ape?
This became plain in the famous debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in Oxford in 1860. Wilberforce opened the discussion with the impertinent question to Huxley: ‘Was it on his father’s or his mother’s side that he was descended from an ape? ‘ Huxley answered indignantly that he would prefer to be descended from an ape rather than from a Church of England bishop who tried to make a subject of scientific research ridiculous.
If Darwin is right and human beings and apes have a common ancestry, this means the end of the human being’s godlike position. As the Bible says, he is formed of the earth and can fulfil his specific human tasks only within the community of creation. Since we have come to realize that it is the religious-scientific anthropocentricism of modern times which has brought us to the present ecological crisis of nature and human civilization, we no longer see Darwin’s evolutionary theory as an attack on Christian anthropology, but begin to understand that the human being belongs to the same family as other living things on this fruitful earth. That is ultimately also the substance of the covenant with Noah, with which creation begins afresh after the Flood. It is a covenant ‘with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature’ (Gen. 9.9–10). So all living creatures are God’s covenant partners and our covenant partners too.
Darwin used the word ‘descent’. His pupils talked about ‘evolution’. By that they meant a development of species through variations and selection of those who adapted best to changed circumstances for living (‘the fittest’). But the term was conducive to a glance backwards: enquiry was directed only to the origin, for in a ‘development’ what emerges is only what was ‘enveloped’. Consequently an evolution too only brings out what it presupposes. Consequently, only the variety of life forms which can be explained from the potential of the past is recognized. The concept of evolution lets us understand how whatever exists today has come about, but not how it might have been and can today possibly become. In the conceptual world of evolutionary theory, the past determines the present but not the future. Critically, it might be said that nothing new ever happens under the sun of evolution, Nature makes no leaps. I assume that this is the reason why historians have not applied the concept of evolution to human history.
The new emergence theories break down this frontier in the concept of evolution.[5] They tell us that in the history of nature something new does come into being which cannot be explained from the already given components. In the history of living forms there are not merely continuous developments but leaps in quality as well. An ant heap is something different from a sum total of ants. The whole is a new organisational principle, which makes parts out of particles and links the parts to the whole and to one another. The stages in the build-up of matter and life systems shows this: out of protons and neutrons there become atoms, from atoms develop molecules, from macromolecules cells, from cells organisms, from organisms living things, and so forth. And in each qualitative leap we cannot explain the new whole from the given parts. Let us take an example. A short time ago the famous genetic scientist Craig Venter analysed and published his own genome. We could wonder at it in the newspaper. Do we now know who Craig Venter is? After studying his genome we don’t even know his name. Two years ago I met Craig Venter, person to person, so to speak. He told me that the Vietnam war had changed his life. From this I deduce that we don’t understand the whole of his personality merely by investigating his genome, and generalizing from it. We don’t understand the whole if we divide it up and investigate only its parts. This scientific reduction is certainly essential for our knowledge, but it is equally essential to put it aside so as once more to gain a view of the whole. Reductionism by way of the phrase ‘is nothing other than’ is not science.
This leads me to the conclusion that in the history of nature there is a build up of systems of matter and forms of life, and that in this process ever new wholes emerge. Nature is not after all blind. In the interplay of chance and necessity, there is a trend toward increasingly complex forms of life and symbiotic networks. Nature plays with its forms and experiments with its mutations.
This trend has been called the ‘self-organization of the universe’ or the self-organization of life.[6] The theological interpretation does not dispute this, on the contrary: it gives this idea new depth through the idea of ‘self-transcendence’ (Karl Rahner), on the basis of the immanence of the transcendent divine Spirit. That is age-old idea of natural theology, which has been current ever since Jakob Böhme. In his Frühschriften, Karl Marx wrote: ‘Among the innate characteristics of matter, movement is the first and most excellent, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical movement, but even more as drive, vitality, tension, as the torment—to take Jakob Böhme’s word,—of matter.’[7] Embedded in this idea is the insight of the apostle Paul into the ‘eager longing’ of creation (Rom. 8.19) which ‘waits with us’ for liberation from transience. That is the hope of nature. What follows from it for Marx is a non-materialistic, a dialectical materialism, and for Ernst Bloch a natural philosophy of hope: ‘experimentum mundi’. I myself interpret these signs of nature as the presence of the divine Spirit which thrusts towards transcending, and which in the appearance of new wholes anticipates the future of nature in the kingdom of God.[8] According to human experience, the divine Spirit ‘frees and unites’ and anticipates the new creation of all things. Consequently we can see in the history of nature too the liberations and unifications and anticipations of the future which is sought and longed for. We understand the present not merely as the presence of past evolution; we also understand the past as ‘past future,[9] because we comprehend the present as the present of what is to come, and reach out toward God’s future.
Are we right to start like Darwin from a ‘war of nature’ and a continual ‘struggle for existence’, or is it more appropriate to start from cooperation as the principle of evolution, and mutual recognition as the principle of humanity? As we know, Darwin’s ‘struggle-for-existence’ interpretation was exploited by the so-called social and racist Darwinists. But according to more recent research, in the build-up of complex systems of life in the evolution of nature, the principle of co-operation is more successful than the principle of competition. The Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin already pointed this out as early as 1902 in his book Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution (1902), a book Gustav Landauer published in German in 1920 at the time of the Munich soviet republic (Räterepublik) under the title Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Menschen- und Tierwelt.[10] For the naturalist Jakob von Uexküll too in his research into animal environment, life-promoting relationship is the fundamental principle of life; and the well-known American biologist Lynn Margulis talks about ‘symbiogenesis’ instead of evolution through selection.
Where the development and unfolding of human beings is concerned, the new neurobiology of Joachim Bauer shows us that the genetic disposition of human beings is regulated by their motivation system.[11] But our motivation system is stimulated and enlivened by the acceptance, recognition, appreciation and esteem of other people. Rejection, depreciation, isolation and existential fears weakens it, and in the extreme cases eliminates it altogether. The fight of all against all makes human beings lonely. ‘United we stand, divided we fall’, said Patrick Henry during the American Revolution, and that is a general truth.
Giacomo Rizzolati’s discovery of mirror neurons in 2003 proves that human beings already react unconsciously to signs and signals from outside, in the way that apes already do. Mirror neutrons are responsible for empathy, spontaneous participation and cognitive capabilities, which means for a large part of our inter-personal communication.
These new biological perceptions confirm in their own way the Christian doctrine of justification: ‘receive one another as Christ has received you for the glory of God.’ The unconditional acceptance by God—in spite of all unacceptability, as Paul Tillich added—is the heart of the Christian experience of God and is the eternal ground for self-respect and neighbourly love.
The theory of evolution often went hand in hand with a judgment. For Darwin, ‘the semi-civilized’ were better than ‘the savages’, and the ‘civilized peoples’ were better than the semi-civilized peoples. For him, the Victorian age in England was the peak of progress. If the theory of evolution is bound up with belief in progress of this kind, then every stage of development receives its value only through what proceeds from it, as the next higher stage. But according to the theological viewpoint sub specie aeternitatis—more simply, before God every form of life has its own value and rights. It is by no means merely a stage on the ladder of progress. The historian Leopold von Ranke was right when he said in opposition to Hegel: ‘Every epoch is immediate to God, and its value does not depend on that which proceeds from it, but in its existence itself, in its own being.[12] So ‘the savages’ in Tierra del Fuego from whom Darwin shrank back were not subhuman, and children are not those who are not yet grown-up, and embryos are not human material. In the transcendent perspective they are all immediate to God. The insight that follows from this is that all forms of life have their own dignity in themselves and belong to the same family of creation, whether they lived millions of years ago or only came into being yesterday.
The particularly Jewish-Christian perspective which is added to this transcendent perspective sees the history of nature in the light of the coming of God, not merely in the light of his eternity.[13] It looks at the self-transcendence of all living things and perceives that the human being is aligned toward future. Human existence is open to the world, open to the future, and open to God. In Greek antiquity, eternity was expressed by saying that God is and was and always will be, that is to say, is simultaneous to all three times. But the Christian experience of God interrupts time and talks about the God ‘who is and who was and who is to come’ (Rev. 1.4). The God ‘who is to come’ is ‘the God of hope’ (Rom. 15.13), whom Ernst Bloch described as a God with future as his essential nature.
It follows from this for the self-understanding of human beings that they are neither the final product of a development, nor are they always the same. Rather, ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3.2). Theologically this means that human beings in the present will be viewed as an anticipation and beginning of a greater future. That is why they are born with ‘restless hearts’ (Augustine).
Pronouncements about the future of history can be made only with the guides of historical experience and hope. Otherwise they are speculative. In the prophetic and apostolic visions of the future of creation we find two formative principles: (1) the negation of the negative, and (2) the fulfilment of the anticipations. In this double form, statements about the future are simultaneously realistic and futurist.
The negation of the negative is: ‘Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more’ (Rev. 21.4). This delineates the open space for the positive. The fulfilment of the experiences of God in history will fill this space: ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people’ (Rev. 21.3). Heaven and earth, the visible and the invisible, will be created anew, so that they may become the cosmic temple in which God can dwell and come to rest. Then the presence of God will fill everything, and the powers of chaos and annihilation will be driven out of creation. That is the all-pervading cosmic indwelling of God, the Shekinah. Towards that indwelling God’s creation Sabbath already pointed. Thus the new creation at the end will become the fulfilment of the creation in the beginning, and all the being God has created will become true promises of their own eternal future in the new creation. This hope also embraces ‘a new earth’ in which ‘righteousness dwells’ (2 Pet. 3.13). Righteousness is one of the names of God.
The true creation is not behind us but ahead of us.