List of Reasons for an Old Earth

Here we go and in no particular order.

1. Evidences of natural time esp. geological and astronomical
2. Fitness of natural selection to explain and predict biological changes
3. Evidence of ancient life / fossil evidence
4. Paucity of the challenges
5. The false-friend of ID (really an attempt to resurrect the Argument from Deisgn or the Teleological Argument. These are not explanatory; we see what we want to see. 
6. The "brain weight" including contemporaries like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne as well as ancients like Augustine
7. Hermeneutics properly practiced: thinking correctly about how to read ancient documents especially according to time and genre
8. The "very good" of God / God as trustworthy
9. The goodness of matter / natural law and its necessity for confessing the incarnation, the benefit of Jesus's sacrifice, and obtaining a real hope for eschatological deliverance
10. The danger of replacing the theology of the cross with a theology of glory
11. The importance of the Book of Nature
12. Animals need to hope as well
13. The danger that bad thinking poses for the health and growth of the church.

Objections that a friend of mine raised: Radiometric dating -- when does it start? Tampering. Mt. St. Helen's rocks. Slow formation of sediment trees. Logs in Mt St. Helens. Ken Ham and his group-basis for evaluations.

Sollereder 1: Leaving the Courtroom

A few posts ago, I said that epicenter for questions about theodicy has moved from human to animal suffering. In future posts, I will be working through the theodicy of Bethany A. Sollereder, who is a lecturer in science and religion at the University of Edinburgh. I am going to blog through her fascinating book God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (Routledge 2019). I heard an interview with Dr. Sollereder on the excellent theology podcast "OnScript" in 2021, and her arguments caught my imagination. She made some profound Christological statements that excited me. I wanted to know more!

The big idea here is: "I want to argue that evolution is the process by which God has created the world, and that the violence and suffering inherent in the process can be both contextualised and redeemed in light of the creative suffering of God" (2). There is a lot to unpack. But, first, she must do some intellectual floor clearing.

Chapter 1: Leaving the courtroom

Sollereder is an experimental theologian. Though she does a lot of careful exegesis, she is not trying to do Biblical theology or construct a systematic. She operates at the line of dialogue between theology and science. Nevertheless, her instincts are evangelical. Her motivation is the fundamental fact that since life began living things suffer violence. God made the world with natural selection in it and called it good. So how can this be true? And waving it away with the fall, as theology has been wont to do, simply will not do.

Traditional theology once drew a familiar map. It stated that God created a perfect and peaceable world. Then humans . . . ruined the whole scene . . . and now we live in a profoundly broken world characterised by the previously unknown elements of violence, death, and suffering. But using the fall as an explanation is . . . no longer a plausible way forward. Evolutionary evidence suggests that the world was only free from death and competition when it was also free from life. The complexity, interrelatedness, and beauty of life are directly related to the ever-present violence, death, and extinction of numberless creatures. . . . A new theological map is needed. (4)

As Dr. Gordon Heugenberger, my Old Testament professor in seminary, used to say, Animal death had to exist in the garden or Adam wouldn't have understood what God meant when he said, "On the day you eat of it, you will surely die." Heugenberger's point, ignoring the genre problem, is analogous to Sollereder's. The Bible assumes this evolutionary world and all that goes with it. How, then, can God call it good?

So, step one: the doctrine of the fall is problematic. Sollereder argues that the Bible does not require it: "The biblical witness does not require the assumption that disvalues such as suffering and death entered the world due to human or Satanic sin," (8). A fall also requires some kind of point of original perfection. And, where the natural world is concerned, no amount of geology or physics can discover one. And finally, the term itself is not always clear. She will go on in later chapters to differentiate and examine the arguments for a cosmological (or mysterious) fall, a Satanic fall, and a human fall.

Now step two: natural evil needs to go. Theology has taught that fallenness unleashed sin upon the world, producing moral and natural evil. But, setting moral evil aside, natural evil is a highly anthropocentric concept lacking evidentiary sophistication. Sollereder easily overturns it and, in its absence, suggests new vocabulary: harm and disvalue. Harm is suffering caused by natural things: tornadoes, flash flooding, ice storms, etc. That's the sort of thing Calvin said was produced by sin: but tornadoes are produced by weather. Calvin was thinking like a medieval man. Disvalue is the suffering produced by the violence of living things living. It has its origin not in some kind of supernatural evil but in the way that natural selection and the results of human fallenness (Sollereder believes in a human fall) combine to damage the cosmos, even though, she says, the natural world remains unfallen.

On the positive side, disvalue is antinomous to two other terms: flourishing and selving. Flourishing, she says, means the overall well-being of an individual creature, which would include a 360-degree relational goodness analogous to the Hebrew shalom.

A flourishing creature is in proper relationship to other members of its own species, to environmental conditions, to God, and to the stage of life it is in. This relational component might lead to some counterintuitive results, such as after a full life and in light of the new creation, a creature's best flourishing at a particular moment may be to die. (8)

Selving is subjective; it is concerned with the individual. Selving is a creature acting as itself in fulfillment of its God-given course. Here she follows the work of Christopher Southgate who said, "When a living creature 'selves' . . . it is conforming to the pattern offered by the divine Logos."[1] Sollereder is careful to avoid eugenic undertones here saying individual creatures have a common characteristic but also may innovate. "It would be better to speak of the gift of community and genetic inheritance that creatures are born into which confer regular ways of being rather than a sense of Platonic 'pattern' to which creatures are meant to conform" (Ibid.) I suspect these two terms, flourishing and selving, will play an important role as her argument moves forward.

These states--disvalue, harm, flourishing and selving--each operate at every level at which living things exist. And there is a kind of order to them. The basic id-like desires that go along with natural selection, aggression and self-interest are like raw materials. And the disvalue and harm which are their result exhibit behaviors which result from a kind of moral immaturity. Above that is a higher rung of altruistic level of self-giving which can itself be transcended via divine action into love itself. Love is, she says, "a particular divine act in the person that transmutes the basic evolutionary desires into the desires of divine love." "Love is a transformation of the spectrum of desires entirely" (6).

But how, then, does she understand love? Love is "non-controlling, particular, vulnerable to suffering, and responsive to the needs of the beloved." And, as in so much theology, freedom plays its part, for love requires radical freedom and divine interaction.

Traditional accounts of freewill have been heavily anthropocentric . . . I attempt to work out what freedom for the non-human world entails in light of the two desires of love: the desire for the good of the beloved and the desire for union with the beloved. God's love leaves room for creatures to develop towards their own good, the good of the ecosystem they participate in, and in the ultimate history of the world.

A final aside. Sollereder has positioned these two systems of transcending love and natural selection together in a way. First, there is the mechanism of natural selection, where fitness creates an ability to step above or transcend. Natural selection produces disvalue, but it also produces selving, as individuals can improve on their genetic and socially conditioned model of behavior. Second, there is a definition of love built from desire and freedom. Love is a result of developmental leaps from lower to higher, from self-interest to selflessness. Love seems to set the board on which natural selection plays. Or, is love more fundamental? I am not sure.

__________

[1] Christopher Southgate. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 16. Note also: Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming -- Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993) and Daryl Domning and Monika Hellwig. Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in Light of Evolution. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).

Note this interesting footnote about Southgate's understanding of selving: "[Selving] allows a unique view of fallenness: a creature is fallen when it does not embrace the divine invitation to transcendence and therefore remains what it is. In this notion of fallenness, it is potential that is lost rather than acquired characteristics" (12n29).

Creation, soteriology, and the "problem" of the two Adams

I am not concerned with the problem of a first Adam. The fact is, we have no idea what creatio ex nihilo is (see also Karl Jaspers on Creation). We, as the created, only know creatio ex materia. Resurrection is the same way. We think we know what it is, but we really have no more idea than we do about creation. We only know the result, the what, but not the how. We know that resurrection is not reanimation and creation is not reworking some pliable, neutral, and everlasting material. God is not a thing among things, but we are.

Similarly, why does evolution present a problem? God creates from nothing, an act that does not preclude an infinity of changing somethings. The universe may stretch back into the forever, expanding and changing, hissing and sparking out world after world like a firecracker held in the dark. This is not a problem: an infinity of changing somethings is not a from nothing. Evolution is just a closer view of some long length of something. Flesh may change, but it does not create flesh from nothing at all.

I tend to think that evolution is soteriological gift. It tells us that human beings are a piece with all of creation--that we are of the same stuff as everthing else. It tells us that the human being, the imago Dei, Jesus, assumed all flesh and so redeemed all flesh: soteriology is ecology; ecology, soteriology. In the resurrected flesh of Jesus all creation hopes. The us among whom God tabernacled includes the rocks that cry out and the trees that clap their hands.

Finally, for the sake of further thinking (and this is very speculative now), I would like to consider the existence of Adam and Even in parallel with the election of God.[1] Even as Jesus set himself apart, so his people are set apart in him. The imago Dei becomes, then, something graciously received from and through and because of Jesus. Adam and Eve become the beginning of those people in time, the first of the elect and also representatives of elect humanity to come. Therefore, perhaps the language of "fall" is unhelpful. Humanity is made good, but still vulnerable. (I'm thinking of the language of Augustine and human creation in a state of innocence.) Elected humanity can then be made perfect in him ("Be perfect because he is perfect."), though as gold is purified through fire.

Note also the interesting, tri-fold distinction of God's creating activity outlined in Mark Harris's The Nature of Creation. Harris understands the creation texts in scripture to describe the relationship of God with the world. Creation out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is “best expressed as a statement of God’s transcendence.” Continuous creation, creatio continua, “is most clearly an expression of God’s immanence.” God is in intimate relationship with humans and the rest of creation. Creation from the old, creatio ex vetere, (Harris's innovative addition) “is fundamentally a descriptive term for God’s redemptive activity in creation (186). Creation from the old is clearly connected with the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrected body is in a discernible continuity with the pre-death body plus something new as well: “more than the resuscitation of a corpse.” Still, Harris sees examples of creation from the old in other texts and situations also.

These three aspects of creation are simplifications and should not be separated rigorously.

God’s work of creation ex nihilo, continua, and ex vetere are not three different actions, but one creative action, while at the same time they point to the diversity of the unitary God. It is no accident that this is reminiscent of Trinitarian language of God – three in one and one in three – for it was through observations such as these, of God’s diverse work in the theatres of creation and redemption, that the three persons of the Trinity came to be recognized and distinguished as such. But the three categories of creative work are not to be identified with the three persons of the Trinity; rather it is distinctions such as these that have been important in the development of Trinitarian thinking. (187)

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[1] Note this abstract of Joshua M. Mortiz "Are Hominins Special? Human Origins as the Image and Likeness of God" Theology and Science (19: 2020), 537-551. "The recent discovery of a number of non-human hominin species who, as language, technology, and culture-bearing beings, lived both before and as contemporaries with early anatomically modern humans, has raised a number of problems with the notion of humans as evolutionarily unique. These discoveries have also raised issues regarding the concept of human uniqueness that has long played a central role within key interpretations of the hominin fossil record and has also provided the key lens through which many theologians have interpreted the meaning of humans as the “image and likeness of God” (imago Dei). I suggest that the best way to understand the imago Dei in light of human origins and hominid diversity is the early Jewish and early Christian concept of historical or biblical election."

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.

faith and science; John Haught; evolution; epistemology; Avery Cardinal Dulles; causation ; scientific method ; Etienne Gilson