Saturday, January 19, 2008

Evolution: three faithful responses

In the October 2007 edition of First Things magazine, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., wrote an interesting article surveying the general approaches Christians (he says Roman Catholics, but includes many who are from different traditions) are taking to evolution. I would like to briefly summarize these positions.

“Catholics who are expert in the biological sciences,” Dulles begins, “take several different positions on evolution.” These are as follows.

Theistic evolutionism
Those who, believing that science and religion address “different levels of knowledge,” espouse a combination of “Darwinism in science and theism in theology.” This group rejects “Darwinism as a philosophical system” and “holds that God, eternally foreseeing all the products of evolution, uses the natural process of evolution to work out his creative plan.” Theistic evolutionists believe that science is epistemologically limited. “It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole.” God, to this group, gets things going by the big bang, knowing from that point how it will all go. Dulles includes in this group Kenneth R. Miller, Stephen M. Barr, Francis S. Collins, Fred Hoyle, and Arthur Peacock.

Intelligent design
Michael Behe is the only researcher named to this school, though there are others. Here we find the usual appeal to irreducible complexity. God interferes in development by producing organs that are irreducibly complex. Dulles says that sudden divine intervention in the formation of species should not be ruled out. Nevertheless, he prefers Darwin, and warns.

As a matter of policy, it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained [what today appears irreducibly complex], because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion.

Process thinking
A teleological position once called “vitalism,” Dulles includes Henri Bergson, Michael Polanyi, and Teilhard de Chardin in this group. This school believes that mechanical principles just can’t explain the behavior of living things. Living things want to live. And “this internal finality” sets them apart from the dead earth. Life goes somewhere. It stretches out toward the future. Dulles references English physicist John Polkinghorn’s insight that “there must be in the universe a thrust toward higher and more complex forms.” God urges, advocates, and initiates each graduate development. “Many adherents of this school would say that the transition from physicochemical existence to biological life, and the further transitions to animal and human life, require an additional input of divine creative energy.” And we hear from Georgetown professor John F. Haught [see my post “Let’s ask the Catholic about science”] who notes that

Natural science achieves exact results be restricting itself to measurable phenomena, ignoring deeper questions about meaning and purpose. By its method, it filters out subjectivity, feeling, and striving, all of which are essential to a full theory of cognition. Materialistic Darwinism is incapable of explaining why the universe gives rise to subjectivity, feeling, and striving.

Thomist Etienne Gilson, in his book From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again put the blame on Francis Bacon and his peers. Seeking to explain everything mechanically, they elided two of Aristotle’s four causes. They kept the material and efficient causes, but discarded formal and final causality. In their wake, writes Dulles, science “simply disallows the questions about why anything (including human life) exists, how we differ in nature from irrational animals, and how we ought to conduct our lives.” He continues,

Without the form, or the formal cause, it would be impossible to account for the unity and specific identity of any substance. In the human composite, the form is the spiritual soul, which makes the organism a single entity and gives it its human character. Once the form is lost, the material elements decompose, and the body ceases to be human. It would be futile, therefore, to try to define human beings in terms of their bodily components alone.

Final causality is particularly important in the realm of living organisms. The organs of the animal or human body are not intelligible except in terms of their purpose or finality. The brain is not intelligible without reference to the faculty of thinking that is its purpose, nor is the eye intelligible without reference to the function of seeing.

Blogger Michael Liccione has an interesting response to this part of Dulles’ argument in a post entitled, “God and evolution: the state of the question.” Liccione says that there is a good reason for excluding formal and final causes. Progress in the sciences requires their exclusion because including them would undermine the basis for rigorous experimentation. They are good philosophical principles, he says, that help contextualize scientific findings. But that context is philosophy, not science.

I like the way Liccione summarizes Dulles’ position: “Dulles' view may be summed up thus: he finds ID too dependent on a God of the gaps, and TE too deistic. Rather, and given the Church's irreformable teaching about the origin of the human soul, we should look to some form of vitalism as a viable option.” Science, of course, does not think God should interfere at all in the natural order of things. But Dulles is correct when he asserts that Christians believe in a God who incarnates, who works miracles, who reveals—indeed, who intervenes! He warns theistic evolutionists not to hold too tightly to the reasoning that is current in modern science. “Science and technology (science’s offspring) are totally inadequate in the field of morality.” And morality is where Dulles leaves off.

Right and wrong, and the inner understanding that it is a noble thing to choose the right even at the cost of suffering or pain—what can science tells us about this innate higher law, he asks. Evolutionists, he says, say that morality and religion arose for survival value. “But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system.” And just because science explains a belief, does this discount it? One might also point out that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is, itself, an incorrigibly moral act.

We should recover reason, Dulles concludes. Reason is the full range of human thinking, and we must discover and embrace all of it, and not limit its range merely to that which is empirically verifiable. In this, Dulles’ call to good thinking agrees entirely with Philip Kitcher [see my post “Evolution, providence, and the political”] who said that religious people should look to the riches of their theological and philosophical traditions and discover ways of understanding and dialoging in a secular world of science.


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6 comments:

  1. In recent years I have come to the conclusion that speculation on or attempts to divine the true nature of God's involvement in the origins of life are fated to mirror the efforts of those who (despite our Lord's specific statement on the subject) continue to seek the exact date that Jesus will return. Since Jesus said that only the Father knows that date it would seem logical that we should acquiesce to His sovereignty, but many Christians don't. My personal thought is that it is he same for the nuances of creation and science and how we came to be.

    Why is it that we try to know the unknowable? Can we see God's fingerprints now and again?..certainly, but to me much of our meanderings in scientific theology (as perhaps in theology itself) smacks of mortal hubris. Paul declares that we know in part...(and he was taken to the third level where he was given such revelations that he had to bear an infirmity that would control his pride)...and that eventually the time shall come (not in this world) that we shall know in full. We of the 21st century believe(as seemingly each generation is fond of thinking) that our accumulated "knowledge" has given us greater understanding, but the scribes and pharisees (supposed interpreters of the oracles of God)had spent centuries creating such a convoluted human wisdom that in the end only obfuscated the truth that lay in God's Word. They were unable to see the forest for the trees and it cost them all they had.

    It is lamentable that many seem to desire to echo their soulish accomplishments these days...instead of focusing on Jesus' promise in John 14:24. Is our faith in our own ability to reason out what God has done or do we rest in our faith that He will give us the truths he wants us to have? I for one have begun to pray that I only know what He alone wishes for me to know...not what the world, other men, the enemy, or my own intellect would devise.., that I would allow Him to fulfill His expressly stated will for my life as recorded in John 16:12-15. Is this too simple an answer for the soul/intellect of man? I wonder if many in the Body are able to put aside the apparent desire to be the authors and finishers of their faiths long enough to find out?

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  2. Thank you for writing, Jason. It is a pleasure to hear from you. The way you link the day of judgment and the day of creation (properly seeing the judgment of God and the creative power of God as the same thing) is, well, inspired. You opened my eyes, that's for sure. I also appreciate what you have to say about desiring to know more than is good for us. The Bible tells us what is good for us, which is usually too far for our hearts and not far enough for our heads. In grappling with the question of natural selection versus Genesis, science versus faith, it is a hard thing to make sure you don't go too far. Yours is a good word.

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  3. I'm not sure Tielhard would have appreciated being lumped in with the process crowd. My director is of the Tielhardian vein (she's a Thomas Berryite) and I've just finished a course on the whole matter of evolution as a way of doing science and religion. There are also the Creationists, but their approach to science lacks a lot of integrity. I would definitely distinguish the Tielhardians from the Process thinkers (Barbour, Haught, etc.)

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    1. Where, then, would you put Tielhardians? And how would you differentiate their position?

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  4. Roger Olson has been writing a series about his life as a theologian. Today's entry addresses Greg Boyd's embrace of Open Theism and Olson's defense of it as a possibility in the evangelical system. A meeting was called. Olson picks it up: ""About fifteen of us met in a conference room for an all day confab about open theism. It began with Timothy George, then dean of Beeson Divinity School, presenting arguments against open theism. I was convinced that all of his arguments against open theism would apply also to classical Arminianism. (George was and I assume is a Calvinist.) Then Northern Baptist Seminary dean Timothy Weber came into the room and presented arguments for open theism as not outside evangelical boundaries. After lunch Greg was given the opportunity to explain his version of open theism and defend it and himself. He did an excellent job and answered questions very well." I site Olson's comment to point out that theology was being wed, in this point, too closely to orthodoxy. A philosophical theology was being treated like a Biblical theology. I think it is wise to be careful about these categories--not every one deserves the certainty of a martyr.

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