If you want to laugh at the scientific pretensions that give us evolution as a God replacement read David Berlinski, “The Devil’s Delusion.” I laughed so hard at his sendups of materialistic arrogance I almost fell out of bed.
I love that you argued against evolution with "Consider the birds of the air"! Spoken like a true mystic. About the tiger perhaps he has his sharp teeth and desire to kill because of the angels who were over him fell. As above so below.
I take very seriously the notion that sin corrupted the world. To the extent that I wonder if Genesis 1-2 isn't the true account of creation that became "false" after our ejection from Eden.
That is, that as the microcosm and macroanthropos, Adam's sin was backwritten into cosmic history. When he ate the apple, the history of the universe became the history we know, including predation and death. Which is why the whole cosmos waits expectantly for us to get our act together.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I too am concerned by the possibility entertained by many Christians that a loving God created a world in which sinless beings killed, died, suffered, and fought for their lives for eons, until someone developed the ability to be guilty of it all. Although I suppose many Christians manage to believe an unborn child is as guilty as the rest of us.
These days I find myself believing that both the scientific consensus and the fundamentalists have Earth's history dead wrong. It's not a fun intellectual place to be, since it just pisses everyone off equally.
Yoshi! This elicits so much deep pondering on my part that I may have to respond with an essay of my own. Thank you for laying out your argument beautifully -- I really loved reading it, and it fits squarely into the place I find myself lately: questioning everything I've accepted most of my life as fact. Well done!!
I don't think this works. I'm not married to any of Darwin's theories, and I certainly can't argue on the science, but I don't think your criticism hits the mark. Natural selection doesn't state that only the most ruthless survive. De Waal's work on chimpanzee behaviour is a good place to look for this, but bottom line is that co-operation is often a better survival strategy than competition. Both are required in different measures to pass on one's genes, which I think represents quite well the tension in which we live. Additionally, I don't see anything in evolution that denies the wrongness of nature's brutality. "How did the tiger get its teeth" is a separate question from "what should the tiger have been"
Cooperation being sometimes useful, eg, combining forces on a hunt for example, doesn’t get rid of the problem that an evolutionary universe is fundamentally a zero sum game where the survival of one organism comes at the cost of many others.
I’m interested in how you would justify a moral stance against things like I outlined in the article on evolutionary grounds. I can’t come up with one personally.
But the survival of one organism coming at the cost of many others isn't something you need evolution for, just watch the lions eat their prey. The way that earthly survival works is brutal and opposed to God's plan, but Christ says those who seek to save their life will lose it, and those who give up their life will find it. In order to join Jesus' conquering of death, we have to ultimately accept that this evolutionary game (or if Darwin is wildly wrong, then whatever other mechanisms by which we survive and pass down earthly legacies) is not the final solution, and God has a plan to transcend it such that the wolf will lie down with the lamb.
On justifying the moral stance against the way things are, I agree with you that human sin is ultimately the reason why nature is often vicious; I think that's well attested to by the saints, but saying that implies a kind of temporal causality where evolution can't happen does weird things to our theology. Causes aren't always temporally first things, and to say otherwise is to reduce God to being an agent confined by time rather than the very God who grounds time itself. In Orthodox iconography, OT appearances of God get depicted as Jesus Christ, so it's Jesus' 1st century Jewish body walking in the garden of Eden. Jesus, a first century human being, created the world at the beginning of all things, and once you accept that, it doesn't lock you in this box where scientific investigation into the past can debunk that the world isn't in fact meant to be this way by finding that it's bad and brutal as far back as we can see. I can hold in my head at the same time that Genesis is absolutely true and that scientific investigation cannot ever approach it. It's *too* true to have something as measly as our flawed scientific descriptions get in its way.
Dear Yoshi, thanks for wrestling with this vexing matter in such a thoughtful way. Darwinism certainly isn’t right about every single detail, but seems right about some of the big picture. We should follow where the science leads, while we contend with the over reach of Darwinian evolutionary activists of the militant atheist kind. As for the theological problem of nature being red in tooth and claw, we likely will be wrestling for some time to come. There is no getting around the reality of a sovereign Creator permitting pain and death and also sometimes inflicting it. Like Job, we are left with two choices, “curse God and die (Job 2:9) or “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” (Job 13:15). I suspect that nothing short of standing in His presence will offer any kind of resolution on this matter.
I don't know if I agree with your take on Darwin. IIRC, the dude stopped going to church because his daughter died. And as you said, he was not serious Christian, being one only because of his surroundings (not to mention his pious wife). On the other hand, the idea of evolution is much older than Darwin, so perhaps Darwin did try to soften the blow, however misguided. Idk.
And your point about communism is spot on. I heard from Hugh Owen (of the Kolbe Center) about how in the early days of Communist China, the commies would force evolution down the throats of the peasants. That might sound weird until you realize that once you internalize the idea that you're descended from apes, then you're more likely to accept whatever crap the commies do to you.
As usual, a thought-provoking article. Thank you, sir.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that your conclusion is predicated on the belief that God is in control.
I find this indefensible on the clear evidence, unless we are to hide behind infantilizing bromides like "I don't know why bad things happen, but God has a plan". As a Christian (a God-fearing one, I like to think), this would indeed be very comforting. But just because I wish something were true does not make it so.
It is commonly presumed that the existence of God requires that God in fact BE in control. I cannot see the logic behind this at all. In fact, it seems almost a deliberate setup, to destroy the faith of people who try and think. Like this: If God is God, he must be in control, else he isn't God. If God is in control, then he is a capricious and cruel God who cares not a whit for the suffering of his creatures. And if God is such a person, then he is not fit to be called God, and we are right to rebel.
No. God is God yet he is clearly not in control of what happens in his creation, and not being in control (i.e., not imposing his will by force) does not in absolutely any way represent an attack on his being God.
But to your broader point, for creation to be anything else but red in tooth and claw, the universe would have to follow entirely different laws of physics. The recycling of nutrients, the reproductive capacity of each species, and space and resources being limited to merely a planet makes it utterly impossible for nature to survive without constant death. And death is, fundamentally, violence. Even a 'peaceful' death during sleep, is, on a cellular scale, massive violence.
We hold it as a matter of unquestionable faith that God is, and that God is good. And while this is a matter of faith, there is vast evidence of the veracity of this, for those who choose to see.
And yet in this universe created by a good and holy God, there is terrible violence and pain.
God cannot desire this, for then he would not be good, but, in fact, pure evil. Things most obviously are not as God wishes them to be. With that simple observation we can firmly conclude that God does not impose his will on his creation. In other words, God is NOT in control.
Now, it is a cop-out to say that God made it perfect then at some point it was wrested from his will, a.k.a., sin entered the world, in Eden. This is a cop-out because death is an integral and inesperable part of nature, by the very laws of physics. So the only rationally plausible way to claim that the fall corrupted nature, would be to say that the fall led us to a different universe. Perhaps it did, I don't know, but Occam's razor would have serious issue with that claim.
I have spent decades slowly (so slowly) stumbling my way to answer this question, and I have not yet arrived. But to hope to find an answer, you must know the question clearly, not hide behind comforting bromides (not meaning you, sir).
Finally, I also have severe reservations regarding the popular interpretation of evolution.
I would answer that I think the laws of physics are probably fallen too and that I think maybe God is “in control” in a way that your have considered. For example, I grow my hair and my fingernails and digest my food, yet I don’t consciously do any of these things. There’s a difference between something being your action and being under your will.
Thank you for the excellent article and thought provoking response.
I've been devouring Wolfgang Smith's book against theistic evolution (& Teilhard de Chardin) lately. He does posit an argument that the pre-fall state existed in an intensely different reality than the world as we know it, emphasizing that, for example, humans in union with God would experience time as the eternal now rather than chronological time as we know it.
I'm a Catholic and I tend to take the stories of the saints (as well as some wild things I've experienced in my own life) at face value. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of accounts of holy men and women who stop eating for years at a time, whose bodies don't decay for decades or centuries after death, who pray and experience food spontaneously materializing in front of them, who heal terminal illnesses and even raise the dead at a touch or a prayer, etc. Either these accounts are all lies - thousands of lies told in a similar fashion over two thousand years, or there is another level of reality (that is most likely to manifest in the lives of those most intimate with God) where the 'laws' of physics and biology are no obstacle to God. St. Charbel Makhlouf is one very dramatic and well documented example from the 19th century....
I'm fascinated by this - how the ordinary way the world appears to work and the way the world appears to work for the holy ones is quite different. Doesn't this begin to suggest that there's an entirely different order to reality that God in Christ is seeking to restore?
Not having read the books you mention, I cannot speak with authority to the specific arguments from the authors' perspective, but I do have a bit of an issue with the phrase 'humans in union with God'. While I have no issue with 'COMMunion' - and, indeed, avidly seek it and advise all to do so - I cannot see a scriptural basis for arguing 'union', which is an entirely different thing. While fundamentally different entities can be in communion, union itself can only exist between peers or close peers, and a union between non-peers demands that the greater of the entities be reduced to the level of the lesser. If union were indeed possible between such essentially different entities (an eternal entity, on the one hand, and created [and, ergo, not eternal] on the other), then, indeed, an argument could be made that humans in such a situation would not experience time. But this would require that we be exalted to non-physical entity status. I dare hope that something like this will be what we discover heaven to be, but while we have physical bodies, it cannot, logically, be so.
I am not, I fear, a Catholic. I have no prejudice against Catholics, and if the chance presented itself I would, in fact, seriously consider becoming one, all else being equal (my only real reservation is not with doctrine or praxis, but with the modern clergy). However, as regards the miracles you mention, I posit that there is a third alternative to the either/or paradigm you state. I, also, take at face value many claims from clearly holy people, in the sense that I believe they are speaking the truth as they honestly see it. But 'face value' does not necessarily equal 'literal and factual truth'. Allow me to illustrate. I take the stories of creation in Genesis at face value. Without any doubt. But I do not believe they were even written to be read as modern scientific statements to begin with. They are Truth, with a capital T, but they were not written as part of a scientific thesis using modern criteria of language. They are, in fact, immeasurably deeper than 'true'. So while I have the deepest admiration for many of the saints of old, I am not required by logic to interpret their words from the modern perspective of cold, dead, language.
Just some thoughts, Mark. And very much in the spirit of respectful debate.
The violent men of the Bible you write about were just as big racists as we are, if not bigger. They didn't use the same categories, but they certainly believed in their power to differentiate.
If you want to laugh at the scientific pretensions that give us evolution as a God replacement read David Berlinski, “The Devil’s Delusion.” I laughed so hard at his sendups of materialistic arrogance I almost fell out of bed.
I love that you argued against evolution with "Consider the birds of the air"! Spoken like a true mystic. About the tiger perhaps he has his sharp teeth and desire to kill because of the angels who were over him fell. As above so below.
That is an interesting idea.
I think this is precisely what Tolkien suggests in the Silmarillion?
I take very seriously the notion that sin corrupted the world. To the extent that I wonder if Genesis 1-2 isn't the true account of creation that became "false" after our ejection from Eden.
That is, that as the microcosm and macroanthropos, Adam's sin was backwritten into cosmic history. When he ate the apple, the history of the universe became the history we know, including predation and death. Which is why the whole cosmos waits expectantly for us to get our act together.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I too am concerned by the possibility entertained by many Christians that a loving God created a world in which sinless beings killed, died, suffered, and fought for their lives for eons, until someone developed the ability to be guilty of it all. Although I suppose many Christians manage to believe an unborn child is as guilty as the rest of us.
These days I find myself believing that both the scientific consensus and the fundamentalists have Earth's history dead wrong. It's not a fun intellectual place to be, since it just pisses everyone off equally.
Thanks again or sharing.
Yoshi! This elicits so much deep pondering on my part that I may have to respond with an essay of my own. Thank you for laying out your argument beautifully -- I really loved reading it, and it fits squarely into the place I find myself lately: questioning everything I've accepted most of my life as fact. Well done!!
Thank you Mary. If you write a response, please let me know!
I don't think this works. I'm not married to any of Darwin's theories, and I certainly can't argue on the science, but I don't think your criticism hits the mark. Natural selection doesn't state that only the most ruthless survive. De Waal's work on chimpanzee behaviour is a good place to look for this, but bottom line is that co-operation is often a better survival strategy than competition. Both are required in different measures to pass on one's genes, which I think represents quite well the tension in which we live. Additionally, I don't see anything in evolution that denies the wrongness of nature's brutality. "How did the tiger get its teeth" is a separate question from "what should the tiger have been"
Cooperation being sometimes useful, eg, combining forces on a hunt for example, doesn’t get rid of the problem that an evolutionary universe is fundamentally a zero sum game where the survival of one organism comes at the cost of many others.
I’m interested in how you would justify a moral stance against things like I outlined in the article on evolutionary grounds. I can’t come up with one personally.
But the survival of one organism coming at the cost of many others isn't something you need evolution for, just watch the lions eat their prey. The way that earthly survival works is brutal and opposed to God's plan, but Christ says those who seek to save their life will lose it, and those who give up their life will find it. In order to join Jesus' conquering of death, we have to ultimately accept that this evolutionary game (or if Darwin is wildly wrong, then whatever other mechanisms by which we survive and pass down earthly legacies) is not the final solution, and God has a plan to transcend it such that the wolf will lie down with the lamb.
On justifying the moral stance against the way things are, I agree with you that human sin is ultimately the reason why nature is often vicious; I think that's well attested to by the saints, but saying that implies a kind of temporal causality where evolution can't happen does weird things to our theology. Causes aren't always temporally first things, and to say otherwise is to reduce God to being an agent confined by time rather than the very God who grounds time itself. In Orthodox iconography, OT appearances of God get depicted as Jesus Christ, so it's Jesus' 1st century Jewish body walking in the garden of Eden. Jesus, a first century human being, created the world at the beginning of all things, and once you accept that, it doesn't lock you in this box where scientific investigation into the past can debunk that the world isn't in fact meant to be this way by finding that it's bad and brutal as far back as we can see. I can hold in my head at the same time that Genesis is absolutely true and that scientific investigation cannot ever approach it. It's *too* true to have something as measly as our flawed scientific descriptions get in its way.
Dear Yoshi, thanks for wrestling with this vexing matter in such a thoughtful way. Darwinism certainly isn’t right about every single detail, but seems right about some of the big picture. We should follow where the science leads, while we contend with the over reach of Darwinian evolutionary activists of the militant atheist kind. As for the theological problem of nature being red in tooth and claw, we likely will be wrestling for some time to come. There is no getting around the reality of a sovereign Creator permitting pain and death and also sometimes inflicting it. Like Job, we are left with two choices, “curse God and die (Job 2:9) or “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” (Job 13:15). I suspect that nothing short of standing in His presence will offer any kind of resolution on this matter.
I don't know if I agree with your take on Darwin. IIRC, the dude stopped going to church because his daughter died. And as you said, he was not serious Christian, being one only because of his surroundings (not to mention his pious wife). On the other hand, the idea of evolution is much older than Darwin, so perhaps Darwin did try to soften the blow, however misguided. Idk.
And your point about communism is spot on. I heard from Hugh Owen (of the Kolbe Center) about how in the early days of Communist China, the commies would force evolution down the throats of the peasants. That might sound weird until you realize that once you internalize the idea that you're descended from apes, then you're more likely to accept whatever crap the commies do to you.
As usual, a thought-provoking article. Thank you, sir.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that your conclusion is predicated on the belief that God is in control.
I find this indefensible on the clear evidence, unless we are to hide behind infantilizing bromides like "I don't know why bad things happen, but God has a plan". As a Christian (a God-fearing one, I like to think), this would indeed be very comforting. But just because I wish something were true does not make it so.
It is commonly presumed that the existence of God requires that God in fact BE in control. I cannot see the logic behind this at all. In fact, it seems almost a deliberate setup, to destroy the faith of people who try and think. Like this: If God is God, he must be in control, else he isn't God. If God is in control, then he is a capricious and cruel God who cares not a whit for the suffering of his creatures. And if God is such a person, then he is not fit to be called God, and we are right to rebel.
No. God is God yet he is clearly not in control of what happens in his creation, and not being in control (i.e., not imposing his will by force) does not in absolutely any way represent an attack on his being God.
But to your broader point, for creation to be anything else but red in tooth and claw, the universe would have to follow entirely different laws of physics. The recycling of nutrients, the reproductive capacity of each species, and space and resources being limited to merely a planet makes it utterly impossible for nature to survive without constant death. And death is, fundamentally, violence. Even a 'peaceful' death during sleep, is, on a cellular scale, massive violence.
We hold it as a matter of unquestionable faith that God is, and that God is good. And while this is a matter of faith, there is vast evidence of the veracity of this, for those who choose to see.
And yet in this universe created by a good and holy God, there is terrible violence and pain.
God cannot desire this, for then he would not be good, but, in fact, pure evil. Things most obviously are not as God wishes them to be. With that simple observation we can firmly conclude that God does not impose his will on his creation. In other words, God is NOT in control.
Now, it is a cop-out to say that God made it perfect then at some point it was wrested from his will, a.k.a., sin entered the world, in Eden. This is a cop-out because death is an integral and inesperable part of nature, by the very laws of physics. So the only rationally plausible way to claim that the fall corrupted nature, would be to say that the fall led us to a different universe. Perhaps it did, I don't know, but Occam's razor would have serious issue with that claim.
I have spent decades slowly (so slowly) stumbling my way to answer this question, and I have not yet arrived. But to hope to find an answer, you must know the question clearly, not hide behind comforting bromides (not meaning you, sir).
Finally, I also have severe reservations regarding the popular interpretation of evolution.
Then you for your comment Ian.
I would answer that I think the laws of physics are probably fallen too and that I think maybe God is “in control” in a way that your have considered. For example, I grow my hair and my fingernails and digest my food, yet I don’t consciously do any of these things. There’s a difference between something being your action and being under your will.
Hi Ian and Yoshi,
Thank you for the excellent article and thought provoking response.
I've been devouring Wolfgang Smith's book against theistic evolution (& Teilhard de Chardin) lately. He does posit an argument that the pre-fall state existed in an intensely different reality than the world as we know it, emphasizing that, for example, humans in union with God would experience time as the eternal now rather than chronological time as we know it.
I'm a Catholic and I tend to take the stories of the saints (as well as some wild things I've experienced in my own life) at face value. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of accounts of holy men and women who stop eating for years at a time, whose bodies don't decay for decades or centuries after death, who pray and experience food spontaneously materializing in front of them, who heal terminal illnesses and even raise the dead at a touch or a prayer, etc. Either these accounts are all lies - thousands of lies told in a similar fashion over two thousand years, or there is another level of reality (that is most likely to manifest in the lives of those most intimate with God) where the 'laws' of physics and biology are no obstacle to God. St. Charbel Makhlouf is one very dramatic and well documented example from the 19th century....
I'm fascinated by this - how the ordinary way the world appears to work and the way the world appears to work for the holy ones is quite different. Doesn't this begin to suggest that there's an entirely different order to reality that God in Christ is seeking to restore?
Hi Mark.
Thank you for your contribution to the thread.
Not having read the books you mention, I cannot speak with authority to the specific arguments from the authors' perspective, but I do have a bit of an issue with the phrase 'humans in union with God'. While I have no issue with 'COMMunion' - and, indeed, avidly seek it and advise all to do so - I cannot see a scriptural basis for arguing 'union', which is an entirely different thing. While fundamentally different entities can be in communion, union itself can only exist between peers or close peers, and a union between non-peers demands that the greater of the entities be reduced to the level of the lesser. If union were indeed possible between such essentially different entities (an eternal entity, on the one hand, and created [and, ergo, not eternal] on the other), then, indeed, an argument could be made that humans in such a situation would not experience time. But this would require that we be exalted to non-physical entity status. I dare hope that something like this will be what we discover heaven to be, but while we have physical bodies, it cannot, logically, be so.
I am not, I fear, a Catholic. I have no prejudice against Catholics, and if the chance presented itself I would, in fact, seriously consider becoming one, all else being equal (my only real reservation is not with doctrine or praxis, but with the modern clergy). However, as regards the miracles you mention, I posit that there is a third alternative to the either/or paradigm you state. I, also, take at face value many claims from clearly holy people, in the sense that I believe they are speaking the truth as they honestly see it. But 'face value' does not necessarily equal 'literal and factual truth'. Allow me to illustrate. I take the stories of creation in Genesis at face value. Without any doubt. But I do not believe they were even written to be read as modern scientific statements to begin with. They are Truth, with a capital T, but they were not written as part of a scientific thesis using modern criteria of language. They are, in fact, immeasurably deeper than 'true'. So while I have the deepest admiration for many of the saints of old, I am not required by logic to interpret their words from the modern perspective of cold, dead, language.
Just some thoughts, Mark. And very much in the spirit of respectful debate.
The violent men of the Bible you write about were just as big racists as we are, if not bigger. They didn't use the same categories, but they certainly believed in their power to differentiate.
Certainly true. I will probably write about this soon.