Isn’t it time to make peace with Darwin?
Another vintage 2009 post from my CP days, this one focuses on the overdue need for reconciliation between Darwin and evangelicals. Content-wise it seems especially apposite as the fall semester at university is about to begin.
I develop these thoughts further in a chapter from my book You’re not as Crazy as I Think (Biblica, 2011) which is entitled “Not all Darwinists are monkeys”.
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It is an anniversary that not many evangelicals will be celebrating: 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The hostility is understandable given the widespread assumption that neo-Darwinian evolution is little more than atheism for biologists. This assumption leads to many Christian youth being sheltered from the undisputed, reigning theoretical framework of the biological sciences. It also leads them to read the Genesis creation narrative in a literalistic fashion as if they were reading an article on cosmology in Nature magazine rather than an ancient near eastern cosmogonic-theological poetic narrative. (Sadly, in their fervor to respect the Bible’s authority, they undermine it in the same way that the Catholic Church undermined scripture in its dispute with Galileo.) The result is a suspicion of any Christian who would countenance divinely-guided evolution as broaching an unacceptable compromise with liberalism, secularism, methodological naturalism, atheism … pick your poison.
These young Christians are thus unaware of the large number of Christian evolutionary biologists back to the great Theodosius Dobzhansky, and indeed all the way back to Asa Gray, a contemporary of Darwin and America’s leading botanist of the 19th century. They are often unaware that the Catholic Church embraces evolution, as do leading evangelical scientists like Francis Collins and Denis Lamoureux. Not surprisingly, they also remain unaware that most of those theologians laboring in the theology/science dialogue made peace with Darwin long ago (Alister McGrath, John Polkinghorne, R.J. Russell, Ted Peters, Arthur Peacocke, Ian Barbour and many many others besides).
Many of these young Christians will go off to university in the fall and encounter neo-Darwinism for the first time. They will discover that it is a theory that the vast majority of brilliant, highly educated scientists consider essential to make sense of the natural world. And many of those scientists, familiar only with the same warfare model of Christianity and evolution, will simply reinforce the festering doubts of those students. By the time they come home for thanksgiving, many of these students will be harboring new doubts. Within a few years they will face a crisis of faith. And some will walk away from the church as a result. And the most tragic part is, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Tags: atheism, Charles Darwin, Darwinism, evolution
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Brap Gronk says:
Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 10:32pm
Hopefully this will save some of your detractors a little time:
Heretic!!
Beetle says:
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:20am
You are ahead of your time! This came up on NPR a couple of weeks ago: Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.
randal says:
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 1:41am
Actually, I think we’re way behind the times. In the 19th century many North American evangelicals embraced evotion from scientist Asa Gray to theologian B.B. Warfield.
Beetle says:
Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 2:39am
Are there any good historical accounts (i.e. mainstream books) of how the evangelical tradition became antithetical to science?
randal says:
Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 1:28pm
The best I’ve read is Ronald Numbers, The Creationists. I guarantee you’ll find it a fascinating read and Numbers is a first rate historian.
MGT2 says:
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 7:20pm
I think it is premature to subjugate the Biblical account of the history of human beings to the theories of Darwinism – even with what we know today. Especially with what we know today.
Much of what appeals to these brilliant, highly educated scientists amount to no more than evolution of the gaps, because they are trapped in the paradigm that determines that whatever happens must be the result of evolution, even if some current evidence defies and undermines evolutionary theories. That is how they “make sense” of the natural world.
Also, for all those Christian evolutionists from antiquity to today, there are as many brilliant Christian scholars, Christian scientists, secular scholars and secular scientists who reject Darwinism as it relates to human history. Some even reject Darwinism altogether. And for good reasons.
First, it is a false choice between Darwinism and the Bible account, because it is based upon the false premise that the Bible is giving a detailed scientific description of the development of the world. This has implications for the kind of hermeneutics applied.
Second, as the NPR program made clear, to accept Darwinism is to deny the historicity of Adam and Eve. This does not square with Scripture unless one claims that Jesus, Paul, et al, were wrong.
Which leads to the last reason: One would have to surrender the authority of Scripture under that paradigm. The Scripture teaches that man was created de novo. Whereas one may quibble about the meaning of “yom” and the age of the earth, there is no wiggle room for the unique creation of man.
randal says:
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 1:48am
“First, it is a false choice between Darwinism and the Bible account, because it is based upon the false premise that the Bible is giving a detailed scientific description of the development of the world.”
What is based on this premise exactly? I heartily concur that Genesis does not provide an account of human origins inconsistent with a Neo-Darwinian one.
“Second, as the NPR program made clear, to accept Darwinism is to deny the historicity of Adam and Eve.”
This is false. But you don’t really lose much if there isn’t a historical Adam anyway, because we’re all Adam.
MGT2 says:
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 12:22pm
“…you don’t really lose much if there isn’t a historical Adam anyway, because we’re all Adam.”
I do not see how we don’t. It means that Jesus, as an adult, made a false claim, and if that holds, then by implication, he is not who he claims to be. We end up with what Thom Stark concludes, that Jesus is a failed prophet. Nothing more.
There is also Paul’s claim, “Because of one man…” meaning Adam, and “Adam was first made, then Eve…” This is not metaphorical language. If Adam and Eve are not historical people, then these claims are false and we cannot rely upon Scripture.
randal says:
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 1:22pm
“It means that Jesus, as an adult, made a false claim, and if that holds, then by implication, he is not who he claims to be.”
Jesus had all sorts of false beliefs in the kenosis of the incarnation. Why couldn’t this be one of them?
A person can interpret the narrative of the fall as a myth not meaning that it is false but rather that it communicates a universal truth: we are all Adam because we all rebel. In an evolutionary context one can take the view that through evolutionary history we developed certain impulses such as selfishness instead of altruism, cowardice instead of courage. That is our fallen nature, and when we act on those impulses as the highly evolved homo sapiens sapiens that we are, we are “in Adam” and in need of redemption.
That story is consistent with all the big doctrines of Christianity: Trinity, creation, incarnation, redemption, consummation.
wilbur says:
Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:43am
Jesus had all sorts of false beliefs in the kenosis of the incarnation. Why couldn’t this be one of them?
that’s a pretty big and vague statement. what were these so many beliefs that jesus was wrong about? other than the messianic complex, which must be what he had if he was so wrong about everything.
randal says:
Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:09pm
I’ll respond in the blog Wilbur.
pete says:
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 6:40am
While I would be most likely labelled a little closer to the conservative evangelical position, I think the creationist vs. evolution controversy is predicated upon a false dichotomy.
Traditionally: the combatant in the red corner weighing in later in the Copernican march to unbind free thinkers from the bonds of the hegemony of Christendom, is Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evelolution.
While the pugilist in the blue corner, hailing from the “City Above” is Lord Protector of all that his rabbi sent him to protect, the Evangelical Christian.
The problem is, is that neither position can prove or disprove Christian Theism, while neither position can prove or disprove Atheistic Belief (and the ranges between).
To start, even on a young or old earth creationist view, neither possibility excludes the plausibility of a deistic origin, which life and existence on this planet is then left for us critters to sort out, devoid of any orthodox Christian notions of theistic providence.
To finish, natural selection does not exclude the possiblity of Intelligent Design or Christian Theism (what appears to be natural selection is possibly divine providence/infinite intelligence at work), as the starting point is origin of life on this planet. All the “stuff” still had to have a first cause. Additionally, “natural selection” is an abstract concept which places nature in the traditional seat of God, as the medium of providence. The argument could be reduced to semantical jousting.
While this is by no stretch of the imagination a complete or exhaustive argument, I definitely lean more to the side of those who have intellectual and moral charity for the opponents view, as the one thing we all have in common, is that at this point, we do not have an even close to complete clear window on ultimate origins.
As someone who has a belief in old earth creationism and a more literalistic hermenutical approach to the Book of Genesis, I think even in this case, we can still have an “iron sharpens iron” approach to collaborative truth seeking that honors the starting points of the properly basic beliefs of those on all sides of the coin.
Grady says:
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 3:04pm
Why do we need to reconcile with Darwin? He’s dead. And the theories he propounded have been modified in many ways.
Scientific theories are provisional, always subject to change.
One example, the cell has multilevel layers of complexity that Dawin did not know about. It is not just the blob of protoplasm that his bulldog Huxley proposed as giving rise to all life.
randal says:
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 8:07pm
“Why do we need to reconcile with Darwin? He’s dead.”
Er, yes, I know. “Darwin” is a metonym for neo-Darwinian theory.
Stuart says:
Saturday, March 31, 2012 at 9:03am
If we accept Dawin and evolution then we need to accept a God who for millions of years ‘directed’ things to ensure the arrival of humans by using death, disease, suffering and cruelty and all of this before Adam and Eve Sinned.
Not the God I serve.