.-- Billy Grassie
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The Challenge and Stimulus of the Epic of Evolution to Theology
By Arthur Peacocke
Excerpted from ³Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life
& the Theological Implications², edited by Steven Dick, Templeton
Press, 2000.
[Editor: The chapter begins with a review of the scientific Epic of
Evolution and issues raised. We pick up here with Peacocke¹s
understanding of Christian theology in light of the Epic of
Evolution.]
A Theology of and for Evolution
I urge that far from the epic of evolution being a threat to
Christian theology, it is a stimulus to and a basis for a more
encompassing and enriched understanding of the interrelations of God,
humanity, and nature. An argument for the existence of God in
Anglo-Saxon "physico-theology" (an eighteenth and early nineteenth
century form of natural theology) was based on attributing to the
direct action of God the Designer the intricacy of particular
biological mechanisms. This argument collapsed when Darwin and his
successors showed that this apparent design could evolve by a purely
natural process based on scientifically intelligible processes. The
beginning of the impact of Darwinism on theology is usually dated
from the legend of the debate of the then Bishop of Oxford with T.H.
Huxley at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science on Saturday, 30 June, 1860. I say legend because
historical studies show that the story is mainly a later construct of
Huxley and his biographers, for the impact of this now much-quoted
event was not great at the time. No mention of it has been found in
any publication between 1860 and 1880. After this, triumphalist
accounts, on behalf of Huxley's science and for the independence of
the profession of scientists, began to appear in various "Lives" and
"Letters." So it is indeed a legend, and today often an icon, of the
so-called conflict of religion and science, biology in particular,
which we have all inherited. But even in the nineteenth century, many
Anglican theologians, both evangelical and catholic, embraced
positively the proposal of evolution. Of the former, one can think of
Charles Kingsley, who in his Water Babies affirmed that God makes
"things make themselves"; of the latter, we may instance Aubrey
Moore, who in Lux Mundi in 1889 (a publication of a group of Oxford
High Anglicans) wrote:
³Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work
of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an
inestimable benefit, by showing us that we must choose between two
alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is
nowhere.² (23)
God and the World
Immanence. Such an emphasis on the immanence of God as Creator in,
with, and under the natural processes of the world unveiled by the
sciences is certainly in accord with all that the sciences have
revealed since those debates of the nineteenth century. For a notable
aspect of the scientific account on the natural world in general is
the seamless character of the web that has been spun on the loom of
time: the process appears as continuous from its cosmic beginning, in
the hot Big Bang, to the present and at no point do modern natural
scientists have to invoke any nonnatural causes to explain their
observations and inferences about the past.
The processes that have occurred can, as we saw, be characterized as
one of emergence, for new forms of matter, and a hierarchy of
organization of these forms themselves, appear in the course of time.
New kinds of reality may be said to emerge in time.
The scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world,
inexorably impresses on us a dynamic picture of the world of entities
and structures involved in continuous and incessant change and in
process without ceasing. This impels us to re-introduce into our
understanding of God's creative relation to the world a dynamic
element that was always implicit in the Hebrew conception of a living
God, dynamic in action-even if obscured by the tendency to think of
creation as an event in the past. God has again to be conceived of
continuously creating, continuously giving existence to what is new;
that God is semper Creator; that the world is a creatio continua. The
traditional notion of God sustaining the world in its general order
and structure now has to be enriched by a dynamic and creative
dimension-the model of God sustaining and giving continuous existence
to a process that has an inbuilt creativity, built into it by God.
God is creating at every moment of the world's existence in and
through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the
world.
All of which reinforces this need to re-affirm more strongly than at
any other time in the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) traditions
that in a very strong sense God is the immanent Creator creating in
and through the processes of the natural order. The processes
themselves, as unveiled by the biological sciences are
God-acting-as-Creator, God qua Creator. The processes are not
themselves God, but the action of God-as-Creator. God gives existence
in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the
new: thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look for
any extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms whereby, God might be
supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world.
Panentheism.(24) Classical philosophical theism maintained the
ontological distinction between God and creative world that is
necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of
different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.
There was a space outside God in which the realm of created
substances existed. This substantival way of speaking has become
inadequate for it has become increasingly difficult to express the
way in which God is present to the world in terms of substances,
which by definition cannot be internally present to each other. God
can only intervene in the world in such a model. This inadequacy of
classical theism is aggravated by the evolutionary perspective which,
as we have just seen, requires that natural processes in the world
need to be regarded as God's creative action. In other words, the
world is to God, rather as our bodies are to us as personal agents,
with the necessary caveat that the ultimate ontology of God as
Creator is distinct from that of the world (panentheism, not
pantheism). Moreover, this personal model of embodied subjectivity
(with that essential caveat) represents better how we are now
impelled to understand God's perennial action in the world as coming
from the inside, both in its natural regularities and in any special
patterns of events. These three factors-the stronger emphasis on
God's immanence in the world, the stressing (as in the biblical
tradition) of God as at least personal, and the need to avoid the use
of substance in this context-lead to a panentheistic relation of God
and the world. Panentheism is, accordingly,
³The belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole
universe, so that every part of it exists in Him but (as against
pantheism) that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the
universe².(25)
This concept has strong philosophical foundations and is scriptural,
as has been carefully argued by P. Clayton (26) -recall Paul's
address at Athens when he says of God that "In him we live and move
and have our being."(27) It is in fact also deeply embedded in the
Eastern Christian tradition.
The Wisdom (Sophia) and the Word (Logos) of God. Biblical scholars
have in recent decades come to emphasize the significance of the
central themes of the so-called Wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, and Wisdom). In this broad corpus of
writings, the feminine figure of Wisdom (Sophia), according to J.G.
Dunn, is a convenient way of speaking about God acting in creation,
revelation, and salvation; Wisdom never becomes more than a
personification of God's activity.(28) This Wisdom endows some human
beings, at least, with a personal wisdom that is rooted in their
concrete experiences and in their systematic and ordinary
observations of the natural world-what we would call science. But it
is not confined to this and represents the distillation of wider
human, ethical, and social experiences and even cosmological ones,
since knowledge of the heavens figured in the capabilities of the
sage. The natural order is valued as a gift and source of wonder,
something to be celebrated. All such wisdom, imprinted as a pattern
on the natural world and in the mind of the sage, is but a pale image
of the divine wisdom-that activity distinctive of God's relation to
the world.
In the New Testament, Jesus came to be regarded as "the one who so
embodied God's creative power and saving wisdom (particularly in his
death and resurrection) that he can be identified as 'the power of
God and the wisdom of God' [1 Cor. 1.24]."(29)
That wisdom is an attribute of God, personified as female, has been
of especial significance to feminist theologians30 one of whom has
argued, on the basis of a wider range of biblical sources, that the
feminine in God refers to all persons of the Christian Triune God.
Thus, Wisdom (Sophia) becomes "the feminine face of God expressed in
all persons of the Trinity."(31) In the present context, it is
pertinent that this important concept of Wisdom (Sophia) unites
intimately the divine activity of creation, human experience, and the
processes of the natural world. It therefore constitutes a biblical
resource for imaging the panentheism we have been urging.
So also does the closely related concept of the Word (Logos) of God,
which is regarded(32) as existing eternally as a mode of God's own
being, as active in creation, and as a self-expression of God's own
being and becoming imprinted in the very warp and woof of the created
order. It seems to be a conflation of the largely Hebraic concept of
the "Word of the Lord," as the will of God in creative activity, with
the divine logos of Stoic thought. This latter is the principle of
rationality as both manifest in the cosmos and in the human reason
(also named by the Stoics as logos). Again we have a panentheistic
notion that unites, intimately, as three facets of one integrated and
interlocked activity: the divine, the human, and (nonhuman) natural.
It is, needless to say, significant that for Christians this logos
was regarded as "made flesh"(33) in the person of Jesus the Christ.
A Sacramental Universe. The evolutionary epic, as I have called it
for brevity, recounts in its sweep and continuity how over eons of
time the mental and spiritual potentialities of matter have been
actualized above all in the evolved complex of the
human-brain-in-the-human-body. The original fluctuating quantum
field, quark soup or whatever, has in some twelve or so billion years
become a Mozart, a Shakespeare, a Buddha, a Jesus of Nazareth-and you
and me!
Every advance of the biological, cognitive, and psychological
sciences shows human beings as psychosomatic unities-that is, as
persons. Matter has manifest personal qualities, that unique
combination of physical, mental, and spiritual capacities. (I use
"spiritual" as indicating relatable to God in a personal way.) For
the panentheist, who sees God working in, with, and under natural
processes, this unique result (to date) of the evolutionary process
corroborates that God is using that process as an instrument of God's
purposes and as a symbol of the divine nature, that is, as the means
of conveying insight into these purposes.
But in the Christian tradition, this is precisely what its sacraments
do. They are valued for what God is effecting instrumentally and for
what God is conveying symbolically through them. Thus, William Temple
came to speak of the "sacramental universe"34 and we can come to see
nature as sacrament, or at least, as sacramental. Hence, my continued
need to apply the phrase of in, with, and under, which Luther used to
refer to the mode of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, to the
presence of God in the processes of the world.
This could be (and has been35) developed further in relation to the doctrine of
the Incarnation and to the new valuation of the very stuff of the
world, which ensues from those significant words of Jesus at the Last
Supper: "This: my body" and "This: my blood"-referring, as it is
often said in the Liturgy, to bread "which earth has given and human
hands have made" and to "wine, fruit of the vine and work of human
hands." But this is best considered in the light of how Jesus the
Christ is to be regarded in the light of all the forgiving. To this
we must now turn.
Humanity and Jesus the Christ in an Evolutionary Perspective
We have already seen that humanity is incomplete, unfinished, falling
short of that instantiation of the ultimate values of truth, beauty,
and goodness that God, their ultimate source, must be seeking to
achieve to bring them into harmonious relation to Godself. We have
not yet become fully adapted to the ultimate, eternal "environment"
of God.
It was not long after Darwin published the Origin that some
theologians began to discern the significance of the central
distinctive Christian affirmation of the Incarnation of God in the
human person of Jesus the Christ as especially congruent with an
evolutionary perspective. Thus, again in Lux Mundi in 1891, we find
J.R. Illingworth boldly affirming:
³. . . [I]n scientific language, the Incarnation may be said to have
introduced a new species into the world-the Divine man transcending
past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal
creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process
to subsequent generations. . . .²(36)
Jesus' resurrection convinced the disciples, including Paul, that it
is the union with God of his kind of life that is not broken by death
and capable of being taken into God. For Jesus manifested the kind of
human life which, it was believed, can become fully life with God,
not only here and now, but eternally beyond the threshold of death.
Hence his imperative "Follow me" constitutes a call for the
transformation of humanity into a new kind of human being and
becoming. What happened to Jesus, it was thought, could happen to all.
In this perspective, Jesus the Christ (the whole Christ event) has, I
would suggest, shown us what is possible for humanity. The
actualization of this potentiality can properly be regarded as the
consummation of the purposes of God already manifested incompletely
in evolving humanity. In Jesus there was a divine act of new creation
because Christians may now say the initiative was from God, within
human history, within the responsive human will of Jesus inspired by
that outreach of God into humanity designated as God the Holy Spirit.
Jesus the Christ is thereby seen, in the context of the whole complex
of events in which he participated as the paradigm of what God
intends for all human beings, now revealed as having the potentiality
of responding to, of being open to, of becoming united with God. In
this perspective, he represents the consummation of the evolutionary
creative process that God has been effecting in and through the world.
In this perspective, the ever-present, self-expression in all-that-is
of God as Word or Logos attains its most explicit, personal
revelation in Jesus the Christ. But because it is (albeit unique for
Christians) a manifestation of this eternal and perennial mode of
God's interaction in, with, and under the created order, what was
revealed in Jesus the Christ could also, in principle, be manifest
both in other human beings and indeed also on other planets, in any
sentient, self-conscious, nonhuman persons (whatever their physical
form) inhabiting them that are capable of relating to God. This
vision of a universe permeated by the ever-acting, ever-working, and
potentially explicit self-expression of the divine Word/Logos was
never better expressed than in a poem of Alice Meynell (1847-1922):
Christ in the Universe
With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
the lesson and the young Man crucified.But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How he administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord's entrusted Word . . .No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.Nor, in our little day,
May his devices with the heavens he guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or his bestowals there be manifest.But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.(37)
For on Earth the epic of evolution is consummated in the Incarnation
in a human person of the cosmic self-expression of God, God's
Word-and in the hope this gives to all self-conscious persons of
being united with the Source of all Being and Becoming that is the
"Love that moves the heavens and the other stars."
May I suggest that, in the second century, Irenaeus said it all, in
inviting us to contemplate:
The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ
Who of his boundless love
became what we are
to make us what even he himself is. (Adv. Haer., V praef.)
Notes1. T. Dobzhansky, American Biology Teacher (1973).2. Genesis 2:10.3. Genesis 3:19.4. M. Eigen, "The Self-Organisation of Matter and the
Evolution of Biological Macromolecules," Naturwissenschaffen, 58
(1971), 465-523. See also R. Winkler and M. Eigen, Das Spiel (Munich
and Zurich: R. Piper and Co. Verlag, 1975). For Prigogene's work, see
I. Prigogene and I. Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (London: Heinemann,
1984).5. I long ago learned this device from Professor David
Nichols of the University of Exeter (see A.R. Peacocke, Science and
the Christian Experiment [London: Oxford University Press, 1971] 72,
n. 1).6. Genesis 1:31 (NRSV).7. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, 6th ed., chap. iii (London: Thinkers Library Ed., Watts
and Co.), 97-98.8. G.G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New York:
Bantam Press; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 20.9. Romans, 6:23 (A.V.)10.See K.J. Narr, "Cultural Achievements of Early Man"
in G. Altner, ed., The Human Creature (New York: Anchor Books,
Doubleday, 1974), 115-116: ". . . A marked evolutionary expansion
manifests itself after around 30,000 B.C. at the beginning of the
upper Palaeolithic. The new picture that emerges can be characterised
by such terms as accumulation, differentiation and specialization.
There is an increase and concentration of cultural goods, a more
refined technology with greater variety in the forms of weapons and
tools produced and corresponding specialisation of their respective
functions, more pronounced economic and general cultural
differentiation of individual groups."11.See the article by A. Richardson on Adam in A.
Richardson, ed., A Theological Word Book of the Bible (London: SCM
Press, 1957), 14.12.D.T. Campbell "On the Conflicts Between Biological
and Social Evolution and Between Psychology and Moral Tradition,"
Zygon, 11 (1976), 192.13.T. Chalmers, "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of
God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral
and Intellectual Constitution of Man," The First Bridgewater
Treatise, 1832, 308.14.Augustine, Confessions, Book I [1], 1.15.K.R. Popper, A World of Propensities (Bristol:
Thoemmes, 1996), 12, 1716.S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the
Nature of History (London: Pengiun Books, 1989), 306, citing D.M.
Kaup.17.R.C. Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess
Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).18.Ibid., 201 ff.19.Ibid., 202.20.Ibid., 14, 22.21.The judgment of C. de Duve, a participant in this
symposium, Nobel laureate, cell biologist, and biochemist, is
relevant. "Particularly remarkable, in animal evolution, is the
unswerving vertical drive-with horizontal evolution producing side
branches all along the way, of course-in the direction of polyneural
complexity. . . . No doubt the environment played an important role
in molding the details of this pathway . . . but the overriding
element, surely, is the fact that a more complex brain is an asset in
almost any circumstance. Viewed in this context, the emergence of
humankind or, at least, of conscious, intelligent beings, appears as
much less improbable than many maintain. Contrary to what Monod
stated, the biosphere was pregnant with man (p. 7)." C. de Duve,
"Constraints on the Origin and Evolution of Life," Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, 142 (1998), 1-8.22.P.S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988), 3.23.A. Moore, "The Christian Doctrine of God," in C.
Gore, ed., Luz Mundi, 12th ed. (London: John Murray, 1891), 73.24.For further exposition, see my Theology for a
Scientific World (TSA), 2nd enlarged ed. (London and Minneapolis: SCM
and Fortress Press [1993]) 370-372; "A Response to Polkinghorne,"
Science and Christian Belief, 7 (1995), 109-110; P. Clayton, "The
Case for Christian Panentheism," Dialog, 37 (1998), 201-208 to which
this account here is greatly indebted.25.F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, eds., Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983), 1027. See also Augustine, Confessions, VII 7, quoted in TSA,
p. 159.26.P. Clayton, God in Contemporary Science (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1997), chaps. 2, 4.27.Acts 17:28 (NRSV).28.J.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM
Press, 1980), 210.29.Ibid., p. 211.30.S. Coakley, "Feminine and the Holy Spirit?", in M.
Furlong, ed., Mirror to the Church: Reflections on Sexism (London:
SPCK, 1988), 124-135.31.C. Deane-Drummond, "Sophia: The Feminine Face of God
as Metaphor for an Ecotheology," Feminist Theology, 16 (1997), 11-31;
"Futurenatural?: A Future of Science through the Lens of Wisdom,"
Heythrop J. XL (1999), 41-59 (specifically here, p. 5).32.CF. John 1.33.John 1:14.34.W. Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan,
1934), chap. 19.35.A.R. Peacocke, "Matter in Religion and Science," in
God and the New Biology (London: Dent, 1986; repr. Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1994) chap. 9; "Nature as Sacrament" in Affirming
Catholicism, Sept./Oct., 1999.36.J.R. Illingworth, "The Incarnation in relation to
Development," in C. Gore, ed., Lux Mundi, 12th ed. (London: John
Murray, 1981), 151-152. But we cannot today use for this
transformation his phrase "a new species" in any literal sense, for
species is for us now a purely biological term.37.A. Meynell, "Christ in the Universe," in Helen
Gardner, ed., The Faber Book of Religious Verse (London: Faber and
Faber, 1972), 292.
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