I’ve still been thinking about creation and evil, so I thought I’d write a follow up to what I wrote last week about the problem of evil.
It is fashionable for Christians, anxious to distance themselves from any alleged conflict between faith and science or faith and reason, to say that biological evolution presents no theological or biblical interpretive problems. Historically, those Christians who have rejected evolution for theological reasons have identified the problem with evolution as death before sin—millions of years of millions of animals dying. They reasoned that because death is an evil that results from sin (as Saint Paul teaches), God would not create the good world by this process of randomness, mass extinction, relationships of predator and prey, and enormous waste. Too often, the rest of the Christians who do accept evolution end up handwaving about the difference between biological death and “spiritual death”—a distinction that may be useful in some contexts, but one that I think fails to answer this problem satisfactorily.
While I am not a creationist, I do think the creationists were wrong for the right reasons. The scientific evidence really does present important theological problems, and it’s chiefly the one that the creationists have identified.
(As I said, the creationists are wrong, and it’s not only for scientific reasons. God imposing death and disease onto the whole world to punish the disobedience of two individual humans is a high theological cost to pay for creationism. The creationist thinks that rejecting evolution keeps God’s hands clean of responsibility for “natural evil,” but I am pretty sure it intensifies that responsibility. As I wrote last week, the problem of evil has no theological or philosophical solution. And that means creationism gives up scientific knowledge, and it gains nothing in return theologically.)
The way I’d frame the problem is that evolution makes it nearly impossible to differentiate creation from fall; that is, the creationists were right that the Bible teaches that God intends to abolish as evils death, predation, and extinction—all those things that Christians have gathered under the label “fallenness.” But Saint Paul promises that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). If the condition of creation is already the condition of fallenness, then it’s more difficult to say that the creation is good. But if we say creation and fall are the same thing, we’ve veered into Gnostic heresy.
While clearly one can say, theologically and philosophically, that creation is good because existence is better than nonexistence, that doesn’t satisfactorily deal with the afflicted condition of the creation. And again, while the problem cannot be solved per se, there may be theological ways to describe how we live with the problem.
One that occurred to me this week relates to the second biblical creation account in Genesis 2. In this account, the Lord creates the man and the woman, who are later called Adam and Eve. First the Lord forms the man from the dust, and then determines that it is “not good that the man should be alone,” and so decides to make him a companion. But God does not immediately make the woman:
“So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner” (Gen. 2:19-20).
The parade of animals before Adam has a theatrical quality. The point is not zoology. The man is looking for his partner, and among the animals, none are suitable.
I suggest that we may read this text christologically. Saint Paul teaches that Adam is “a pattern of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:14). It is not just that there is a similitude or functional similarity between Adam and Christ, but that Adam is a “type” whose existence anticipates Christ.
If we read Genesis 2 as an allegory of what occurs with the Incarnation, we may say that the parade of animals before Adam is the succession of species before the creation of the human species, and that God the Son chooses that he will be made flesh and that he will have a bride. It is the human creature who is helpful as the Son’s partner. Like Adam with Eve, the Son’s partner comes to him from his sleep and from his wounded side: Christ wins his bride, the Church, through the sleep of death and through his broken body and blood poured from his own side―the Eucharist that makes the Church.
“So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (Gen. 2:21-22).
This may help us think of the goodness of creation in relation to the parade of species and their extinctions in at least two ways:
First, the creation is good because, as Robert Jenson put it, it is good for the Incarnation. The human race that the Lord chooses as his bride is the human race that has sinned, that suffers death and the conditions of death. And the Lord wins his bride by taking up these conditions himself and defeating them. Which is to say: the Lord chose the Incarnation, and chose his death and resurrection, when he chose this creation in which it’s hard to tell the difference between creation and fall.
Second, the man and woman whom God creates in Genesis are tasked with caring for the creation. Insofar as this is a “pattern” of what was to come, we may say all the more confidently that the Lord takes responsibility for the whole of created history and that in some way not yet known, all of that history will be redeemed. Saint Paul insists that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed” (Romans 8:18), and the prophesies of Isaiah and Revelation alike look forward to a whole creation restored, with animal creatures somehow involved. This promise seems inseparable from the fact of the Incarnation, which I would suggest is God’s purpose for creation from the beginning.
The loss of silly so called scientific knowledge is a rather low one and Paul's teaching that 'all of creation was subjected to futility' not willingly but because of the divine hope is the best answer possible to the Problem of Evil.
First, for the scientific knowledge. Mr. Keysor has identified the biological impossibility of evolution fairly well but to go into a little more detail: DNA does not simply sit in a cell by itself. It is 'packed' into a protective substrate which ensures that it is not changed, because 'ALL MUTATIONS ARE BAD'., and this is a very key point. Mutations invariably result in a less functional and frequently entirely non-viable lifeform. While the complexity argument is good and sensible it is important to notice that the entire cell division process is designed to eliminate mutation. The entire process is 'policed' by a protein called RNA transcriptase which ensures that mutation doesn't happen especially in critical areas.
Variation of offspring does not happen by mutation. It happens 'epigenetically', what used to be called microevolution. What this means is that the actual DNA is not changed. Rather the 'packing material' contains read instructions for the RNA, essentially it says when the cell is being built, "Start on page 3 and read to page 20. Skip every fifth word and read 'U' as 'E'". These changes are in response to the environment and allow adaptation but are specifically reset in the production of egg and sperm. You see, the science that you were worried about throwing out has already advanced to the point of throwing out evolution if only its practitioners can be brought to admit the consequences of their own discoveries. Of course, these 'discoveries' too will in large part be revised in a few years. Like the old Higher Critics of Scripture, the Tubingen school of the 19th century is who I have in mind, who began by claiming that John's Gospel was a product of the 3rd century and ended by admitting that it was produced within the Apostle's lifetime, science makes a lot of nonsense claims against scripture which it then is forced to backpedal on until no positive claims are left only a filthy smear of doubt which needs to be wiped away.
But the Problem of Evil, while highly upsetting, is not really so problematic. Once it is acknowledged that evil does not have a positive existence but is only a defect, an incompleteness and a lack, then it is clear that the Problem of Evil is really only the Problem of Time, the problem of God starting with seeds rather than full grown trees, of His moving creation from the imperfect to the perfect.
And what if Darwin's theory of evolution is a false theory? Briefly, a few problems:
(1) There is the problem of the genetic mechanism. For a fish's fin to develop into an amphibian's leg requires highly sophisticated genetic alterations in the DNA for the skin, the nerves, the muscles, and the bones, all of them happening simultaneously and by accident. This is a complete impossibility, unless you accept divinely guided evolution. And Darwin knew nothing about the genetic mechanisms and their highly sophisticated complexity, no one did in his time. He imagined that changes just sort of happened somehow.
(2) How did the first unicellular organism develop into male and female? One secular book I read on the mysteries of science said that this is such a complete mystery that there has not been even one single serious attempt to explain this phenomenon according to a Darwinian scenario. Did one organism split into two separate organisms with completely formed and functioning male/female reproductive organs, or did two separate organisms produce offspring, one with a female system and one with a male - both of these two parent organisms being, by coincidence, in the same place at the same time?
(3) The difference between microevolution and macroevolution. Darwin used examples of microevolution (and that guided by human intelligence) to make the giant leap to macroevolution. Everyone knows that microevolution, variations within an existing species, occurs all of the time, but transformations of one species into another have never been observed. After thousands of generations fruit flies remain fruit flies.
Personally I have no difficulty in believing that God spoke the universe and earth and the creatures in it into existence by his spoken word alone. There are ambiguities in Genesis, but they do not detract from the main point: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Many people embrace Darwinism not because the science compels them, but because they personally prefer a universe without God.
The creation of the world has never been observed in a laboratory or repeated in controlled experiment. It is and remains a complete mystery outside all of the known laws of physical science. Ditto for the emergence of the first man and the first woman.