Today’s creationism is mainly a Protestant phenomenon, an extreme 19th- and 20th-century development of biblical literalism stemming ultimately from the Reformation’s emphasis on “Scripture alone” as the source of Christian faith. A lesser, but apparently growing, challenge to science education comes from Catholics such as Michael Behe (1996), George Sim Johnston (1998), and Anthony Zimmerman (1998), who accept evolution only with major, religiously-inspired reservations about “Darwinism” - defined as the thesis that natural selection and random mutation are the main forces that produce evolution - or other crucial details. It thus behooves defenders of good science to understand some of the thinking on this other side of Western Christianity, where the interpretation of Scripture is tempered by the tradition of church teaching. The latter approach to theology also has its pitfalls, especially under the present papacy, in which efforts to impose uniformity of thought from above are pursued with a vigor unprecedented in recent times. But the news from this ecclesiastical neighborhood concerning evolution is much more good than bad.
Four recent books on this theme show that progressive theology is indeed being done in Catholic circles. These books not only accept, but enthusiastically embrace, evolution as a positive source for the development of theological ideas. Those who regard “theistic evolution” as some pallid compromise or limp accommodation between the rock-hard extremes of creationism and materialistic evolutionism will instead find here a muscular, assertive body of thought, with a clear vision of where it is headed, and with few or no reservations about the conclusions of science. Together with Catholic biologist Kenneth R Miller, whose 1999 book Finding Darwin’s God (to be reviewed in RNCSE 2002; 22 [1]) has received more prominent notices, these writers confidently bang together the heads of creationists, materialists, and “intelligent design” aficionados, and stuff them all in the trash can of intellectual history. Scientific materialists in particular, to whom “cutting-edge theology” is an oxymoron, may be surprised at how much sharper that edge is than that of the theology they may vaguely recall from Sunday school.
In any case, all these books will be abundantly quoted in the creation-evolution debate, and they may persuade some committed Christians who are sincerely trying to make up their minds to accept evolution. They are worth knowing about.
Karl Schmitz-Moormann was perhaps best known as an editor (with his wife Nicole) of the collected works of the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his posthumously published book Theology of Creation in an Evolutionary World (written in collaboration with Jesuit chemist and theologian Jim Salmon), Schmitz-Moormann presents “a theological vision of creation” within the evolutionary world that Teilhard envisioned. At the very outset, he states his position with startling clarity: “The debate over creation or evolution has ceased. Hence the task of theology is to read the evolving universe as creation. In this text we accept the fact of evolution as the way creation is” (p. xi).
He goes on to summarize scientific conclusions about the history of the universe, for the benefit of “most theologians and many Christians” who are inadequately informed on this topic. This follows the tradition of medieval scholastic theology, in which “nobody was admitted to study theology without having acquired a solid scientific background” (p. xiii). Schmitz-Moormann himself has certainly done so; the breadth and depth of his knowledge of contemporary science is impressive, especially in a non-scientist. Drawing constantly and heavily on scientific data of all sorts, he discusses in successive chapters the progressive evolutionary emergence of union, consciousness, information, and freedom, with a view to asking how each of these characteristics “makes intelligible God’s intention in creation” (p. xiv). In the final summary chapter, he reflects on insights about God (and in particular the Trinity) that can be inferred from our knowledge of the evolving creation.
Those who wonder what the result of using science, or evolution, as a “positive source” for sophisticated theology might look like in practice will find in this scholarly book an excellent and thought-provoking example. It even comes equipped with extensive, field-tested study questions that make the book especially suited for use in college courses or ecumenical adult study groups.
There is, unfortunately, one flaw in this otherwise commendable work. Educated in Germany, Schmitz-Moormann shared with many other Continental thinkers a strong skepticism about, indeed an aversion to, Darwinian explanations of the evolutionary process - hence his view that existing theories of how evolution works are “far from satisfactory” (p. 16). Indeed, he finds no other theory in the whole realm of science to be deserving of the vitriolic criticism he levels at “Darwinian dogmatists” (p. 83-4, 171-2). His only real objection to neo-Darwinism, however, is the elementary canard that evolutionary change comes about ultimately by “chance.” I (one of those “Darwinian dogmatists”!) made his acquaintance shortly before his sudden death in 1996, and we enjoyed several marathon arguments over this topic. He was quite immovable on this point, which I found regrettable, because I think that details of the Darwinian selective process have implications of immense importance for theology (see Domning 2001). Perhaps not coincidentally, natural selection was also a blind spot for Teilhard, who seems scarcely to have discussed it.
Jerry Korsmeyer earned his doctorate in theology only after a successful career in physics and nuclear engineering. His book Evolution and Eden is slightly shorter than some of the others reviewed here, and possibly more approachable by the scientist who has little or no prior knowledge of theology. To the author’s credit, he avoids the specialist’s predilection to overemphasize his own discipline, neither belaboring marginally relevant expositions of physics and cosmology nor hesitating to venture into the field of biology. He stays on course by setting his sights clearly on the one key obstacle, in the official Catholic view, to a thoroughgoing evolutionary theology: the traditional understanding of original sin (from which the Church’s official catechism has still not departed, despite over half a century of theological progress).
The first half of the book helpfully reviews the history of Catholic thought on original sin and evolution. These chapters should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the roles played by Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden in the thinking of Christians past and present, and why evolution seems threatening even to some theologically literate people who have no across-the-board commitment to biblical inerrancy.
Next, Korsmeyer quickly recapitulates the evolutionary story, developing the idea that God created the world not by instantaneous coercion, but through a sharing of power with creatures and a process of “persuasion” extended over geological time. This idea (which owes much to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and is central to most of the evolutionary theology now being done) is a tricky one, because it is hard to explain what this “persuasion” is without seeming to open a door for direct tweaking of creatures by the Creator, in the way implied by “intelligent design” theory. The problem arises simply from the fact that (as in the case of Haught’s book, discussed below) this new way of envisioning creation is itself still a work in progress. But it is clear that the “intelligent design” model of ongoing divine intervention is not what Korsmeyer has in mind; in fact, he makes no reference to the argument from design or the work of Behe or similar writers. Instead, he emphasizes that God has “no detailed pre-ordained plan for our existence, because our response, and that of all God’s creatures, [to God and creation] cannot be coerced or exactly predicted” (p. 104).
As in visiting any work in progress, it is easy to stumble over the things that lie around in seeming disarray; Korsmeyer himself stumbles over this idea of “persuasion” at one point in discussing the origins of physical evil. “Our God of persuasive power calls into existence creatures who have some power of self-determination”, he says, and because these evolving creatures “resist the divine call and seek selfish ends, natural evil is produced” (p. 123). Whereas Schmitz-Moormann emphatically rejected the testimony of Darwinism, Korsmeyer here seems merely to overlook it - as though evolution could occur without competition. But it cannot be meaningful to say that the Divine calls these non-human creatures to be anything other than the selfish seekers of survival and self-replication that natural selection has made them to be. In the end, Korsmeyer’s explanation of original sin is mostly satisfactory, but his treatment of the closely related problem of physical evil still needs to be reworked to take the biological data into full account.
Georgetown University theology professor John Haught has written a book, God After Darwin, which aims for a wide-ranging theological synthesis. It takes us back more in the direction of Schmitz-Moormann’s work, rather than continuing Korsmeyer’s quest for a solution to the specific problem of original sin. This is not to say that Haught is less interested in or informed about science, although he rightly sees no need to devote space in this theological book to strictly scientific exposition. He is well acquainted with the modern understanding of evolution, and thoroughly convinced of its theological importance - even going as far, here and in earlier works, as to forthrightly call it “Darwin’s gift to theology.”
Haught’s theology is heavily indebted to Whitehead’s process philosophy for its underlying metaphysics, which Haught calls a “metaphysics of the future.” From the outset, he argues that an adequate evolutionary theology can be based neither on a metaphysics of the past (represented both by the materialist and the creationist views, in which history either unfolds deterministically according to physical laws, or goes downhill from the perfection established by the Creator) nor on a metaphysics of the eternal present (represented by the Platonic view, according to which the natural world is an always deficient reflection of, or deviation from, a perfection existing in a timeless realm “above” creation). The unifying theme of Haught’s book is this: a metaphysics of the future is needed because the heart of evolution is emergent novelty - genuinely new things come about in the course of evolution which could not, even in principle, be predicted.
This metaphysics of the future is not easy to grasp. As noted above, it is still a problematic concept, with logical difficulties yet to be ironed out. It may be easier to understand for those who accept (or are familiar with) religious traditions, like Taoism, that already resonate with it; Haught concedes that the notion has “an irreducibly religious origin” (p. 89). But Haught’s vision of ultimate reality and the source of novelty as being, in some subtle and nontrivial sense, “found most characteristically in the constantly arriving and renewing future” (p. 88) is intuitively appealing in comparison with the alternatives presented.
Haught agrees with Whitehead that the fatalism of materialist metaphysics has “choked out any sense of the emergent novelty in life’s evolution” (p. 1), and he uses this criticism to argue that Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins essentially betray evolution by reducing it to the deterministic working out of physical laws. Even before addressing these familiar opponents of theology, however, he pauses to demolish the argument from design, using much the same considerations. RNCSE readers will be particularly gratified by this professional theologian’s verdict on Behe’s “intelligent design” approach as “both apologetically ineffective and theologically inconsequential” (p. 45; see also p. 3-5). Like materialism, “intelligent design” ignores the messiness of real life, imagining instead a pervasive orderliness (whether attributed to natural laws or to a Designer) that ends up “leaving out the novelty characteristic of living processes” (p. 4, emphasis in original). Haught adds:
“Theological fixation on ‘intelligent design’…sloughs off the fact that living systems require the continual breakdown of fixed order. It ignores the fact that life requires the dissolution of rigid “design,” precisely in order to be alive at all…What is worse, by associating the idea of God only with the fact of order at the expense of novelty, a theology based on design is likely to attribute nature’s disorder to the demonic. By exonerating ultimate reality of any complicity in chaos, such a theology removes God from the flow of life itself (p. 5, emphasis in original).
Modern process theology instead proposes a God who “is less concerned with imposing a plan or design” on the universe “than with providing it with opportunities to participate in its own creation.” This idea of a novelty-encouraging God is not only “compatible with evolution but also logically anticipates the kind of life-world that neo-Darwinian biology sets before us” (p. 6).
Haught then proceeds (brushing aside Phillip Johnson and like-minded creationists along the way) to expound the close correspondence of the evolutionary worldview with the biblical picture of the “humility of God”: the image of a vulnerable deity who willingly suffers along with suffering creatures, even (in the Christian view) submitting to incarnation and physical death, and one whose power is manifested not in coercion but in the almost limitless possibilities offered to the world. This is a major theme in contemporary theology, which promises, in the hands of Haught and others, to be a very fruitful one. Here he uses it to explore, in relation to evolution, the diverse topics of information, tragedy, purpose, ethics, ecology, and divine action, in ways that I found generally persuasive as well as readable and thought-provoking.
Of course I have quibbles, mainly about chapter 8, which happens to be one of the few chapters written expressly for this book and not adapted from the author’s previous essays. Here I think Haught adheres too closely to the Whiteheadian notion that the ultimate aim of novelty is “beauty,” inadvertently making God sound like a rather callous, coolly detached aesthete. This is a jarring contrast with the biblical character of other parts of the book, which suggest that the Creator would value the “good” (for example, love and justice) over the mere variety so beloved of Haldane’s God (the one with the “inordinate fondness for beetles”).
Finally, where Haught directly addresses original sin, he asserts without supporting argument that it is “theologically inappropriate to identify original sin simply with the instincts of aggression or selfishness” we have inherited from the animals (p. 139). The operative word here is “simply”: Haught, with most other Catholic theologians today (and partly in reaction against the genetic determinism of strict sociobiologists), wants to stress our culturally - and environmentally - conditioned nastiness in preference to the genetic legacy that impels us in the same direction. Here, I think, he misses something important, because closer attention to what evolutionary ecologists are saying about that genetic influence on behavior could fill the still-gaping holes in the doctrine of original sin and lead to a much more satisfactory theological-scientific synthesis.
Denis Edwards, an Australian priest and theologian, has written a shorter and just as strictly theological book, The God of Evolution, which focuses more narrowly on how the idea of a self-limiting Creator sheds light on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps most relevant to NCSE’s concerns is chapter 4, where Edwards briefly reviews current ideas on human origins and some attempts by others to understand original sin in the light of these data. He then offers his own proposal, which resembles the others in identifying original sin merely with our “cultural history of personal and communal sin...It is not the structure of the human (as a fallible symbiosis of genes and culture) that constitutes original sin, but the inner impact on each human person’s free situation of previous human rejection of God” (p. 66-7).
The question that instantly occurs to the evolutionary biologist at this point (and which seems not to have occurred to any theologian in the 35-odd years this idea has been around) is this: What could have had this sort of impact on the first human persons, when no previous human cultural history existed? Our prehuman genetic ancestry, together with the recognition that other higher primates also have “culture” (which evolved out of genetically determined behavior), provides the obvious answer. But this puts us at once on the slippery slope that leads quickly to more genetic and less cultural causality as we go backward in time and phylogeny.
Contemporary theologians peer nervously down this slope into the unfamiliar and scary biological depths below, and turn away on the very brink of stumbling into the problem’s solution. But this is clearly a chance for sympathetic biologists to play a helpful role in the science-religion dialogue, as guides to these nether regions for the more adventurous theological Dantes of our time. All of these authors are struggling to fit the Darwinian pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of creation, evil, and the power and justice of God. All the necessary pieces, in my view, are on the table; it is just a matter of turning each one the right way. Natural selection, and the selfish individual behavior it enforces, are pieces absolutely critical to the solution; but these writers - perhaps because they lack first-hand professional experience in manipulating Darwinian concepts - either discount their importance or have yet to hit on the trick to fitting them together. But their success will be our success, because a synthesis that is convincing to church leaders will eventually be communicated to the ordinary faithful, whose objections to evolution (as Pennock [1996] has pointed out) are far more existential and ethical than technical.
To the scientific reader who doubts the relevance of all this God-talk, I repeat: this body of writing is about to change the hitherto bipolar battlefield of evolution and creation into a tripolar one. This is not your father’s theistic evolution. Creationists who want to brand all evolution as atheistic, and materialists who want to brand all theism as anti-evolutionary, need to rethink, retool, and redeploy in the face of this challenge. Those in the middle, long caught in the crossfire and drowned out by the louder lungs on either side, are finding their own vigorous voices.
References
Behe, M. J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Domning, D. P. “Evolution, evil and original sin: Putting the puzzle together.” America 2001 Nov. 12; 185 (15) nr 4547: 14-21.
Johnston, G. S. “Did Darwin Get it Right? Catholics and the Theory of Evolution.” Huntington (IN): Our Sunday Visitor, 1998.
Miller, K. R. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Pennock, R. T. “Naturalism, creationism, and the meaning of life: The case of Phillip Johnson revisited.” Creation/Evolution 1996; 16 (2): 10-30.
Zimmerman, A. Evolution and the Sin in Eden: A New Christian Synthesis. Lanham (MD): University Press of America, 1998.