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Proverbs 9:1-6 (Proper 15, Year B, RCL)

“We answer that …” a proper updating of the scientific worldview, one that incorporates the findings of quantum mechanics and chaos/complexity theory, brings us “into a wider world” indeed. In this world, it is not so hard to conceive of God’s divine action having a place, and it is perhaps impossible to rule such action out. Once again, the scientific and religious accounts may not be as conflicting as we thought. Our first task, then, is to fast-forward in our account of the history of science and take note of two discoveries that changed, perhaps forever (though that remains to be seen) our understanding of causality and history from a scientific perspective.

Science update, part 1: Quantum mechanics

Those of you who have studied quantum mechanics in a course on, say, modern physics, physical chemistry, or molecular biology know that it is an exceedingly difficult subject, full of counter-intuitive behavior and challenging mathematics. Never fear: the understanding necessary for our purposes is minimal.

One way of narrating the emergence of quantum mechanics in the history of twentieth-century physics is by considering a motivating question about the nature of light. Since the mid-nineteenth-century, physicists had been sure that light was a wave. Indeed, James Clerk Maxwell and others had developed a theory (based on four elegant equations that have come to be known as Maxwell’s Equations) that showed very convincingly that visible light was a special kind of electromagnetic radiation that, like all such radiation, travels through the universe in waves.

However, in the first few years of the twentieth century, mathematical physicists started treating light like a particle (a quanta) in an attempt to explain some strange experimental results. Their intuition that light might behave both as a wave and as a particle was later confirmed by subsequent experiment. A further strange finding followed: tiny particles behave the exact same way. At the subatomic level, the level of electrons and even smaller building blocks of the universe, particles can behave like waves. The universe appeared to be stranger than we’d thought.

The strangest of all these phenomena, and the one that most interests philosophers and theologians, is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The easiest way to understand this idea is to think about how you would measure the position and velocity of, say, an electron. Stephen Hawking writes,

The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle. Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distance between the wave crests of light, so one needs to use light of a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely … [O]ne cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use at least one quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted … Heisenberg showed that the uncertainty in the position of the particle times the uncertainty in its velocity times the mass of the particle can never be smaller than a certain quantity … Moreover, this limit does not depend on the way in which one tries to measure the position or velocity of the particle, or on the type of particle: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world. [1, 56-57]

Hawking also describes what he believes this picture meant for Laplace’s grand visions: “The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace’s dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely” [1, 57]. All of a sudden, there was a chink in the armor of the purely mechanical universe. Through the lens of quantum mechanics, the world looked a little fuzzier than it did before.

Science update, part 2: Chaos and complexity theory

In our opinion, the strange world of chaos and complexity theory is even harder to understand. Unfortunately, as we will see, these newer disciplines are also important to modern discussions about the causal joint problem.

Perhaps the easiest way in to chaos theory is through the eyes of one of the first researchers to stumble upon it and understand what it meant: Edward Lorenz. Imagine for a moment that Laplace was somehow transported to the early 1960s. He might have tried exactly the experiment Edward Lorenz was up to, which was an attempt to learn how to predict the weather by simulating it on a computer.

“Ah, but what about about the Uncertainty Principle?” you rightly ask. Well, our transformed Laplace might have been relatively undeterred, despite Hawking’s warnings above. “I don’t care about predicting the behavior of electrons,” he might have said. “I only want to study systems I can see, systems whose macroscopic behavior shouldn’t be affected by quantum-level fuzziness. Systems like the weather.” The mechanical worldview of Laplace was in many ways still operative for Lorenz.

Journalist and early popularizer of chaos theory James Gleick describes a subtle assumption in this thinking, the error of which Lorenz was about to discover:

There was always one small compromise, so small the working scientists usually forgot it was there, lurking in a corner of their philosophies like an unpaid bill. Measurements [even macroscopic measurements unaffected by the Uncertainty Principle] could never be perfect. Scientists marching under Newton’s [and Laplace’s] banner actually waved another flag that said something like this: Given an approximate knowledge of a system’s initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system. [2, 14-15]

This assumption turns out to be wrong. Lorentz discovered this fact one day when he got impatient with his computer and re-entered the simulation’s initial conditions by hand. In doing so, he slightly changed them, because he was entering them from an old printout that rounded the numbers off. So he ended up with two simulations, one where a starting variable had the value 0.506127 and one where that same variable was rounded to 0.506000. [2, 16]

If the above assumption is correct, it shouldn’t have mattered. Such a small change in the initial conditions should only have had a small effect on the weather simulation that followed. But it didn’t; it had a large effect (this introduction has a picture of the two weather patterns mapped over time). As it turns out, the weather can only be modelled using what mathematicians call nonlinear equations. And nonlinear equations like the ones Lorenz was using exhibit “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” Lorenz went on to name this phenomenon using a helpful analogy. He called it the butterfly effect:

The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does. [3, 129]

The science of chaos theory developed in fits and starts over the next twenty years. With its younger sibling complexity theory, it has discovered a strange and beautiful world (a Google Image Search for “chaos theory math” should give you some idea). We don’t have time for a more systematic treatment, but Gleick’s Chaos [2] is a fascinating and accessible introduction. (Math geeks will also almost certainly enjoy the video some Cornell students made of Jonathan Coulton’s song, “Mandelbrot Set.” Warning: there’s a small amount of profanity in the lyrics.)

We will let sharper thinkers than us make some careful points about the implications of chaos and complexity theory for the idea of divine action and the causal joint problem. For this introductory sketch, we’ll leave you with the following evocative summary:

There is order in chaos: randomness has an underlying geometric form. Chaos imposes fundamental limits on prediction, but it also suggests causal relationships were none were previously suspected. [4, 35]

Implications for divine action: Causal joints revisited

What have we learned from our updating of the scientific picture of the world? Robert John Russell, who edits the journal Theology and Science sees in this picture the possibility for “a new view of special providence which holds both that God acts in the world objectively, and yet that such action is not by intervening in or suspending the laws of nature” [5, 84]. On the theological side, Haught sees as the key to understanding this claim the idea of a personal God whose “mighty acts” are nonetheless gently performed:

[T]he universe of complexity and chaos suggests an understanding of God’s power as gentle and persuasive rather than coercive. A world which, as a whole, is so sensitive to the initial conditions from which it has evolved is one that seems to be guided more by tenderness than by brute force … God apparently does not force the world into some final shape in an instantaneous display of magic. Nor is God a linear mathematician, deterministically directing the world in the manner of a cosmic ruler. But still the universe does exhibit, from its very beginning, the character of being influenced by some gentle, noncoercive quality of self-ordering … The kind of creator we might associate with this spectacle is not the same as the narrowly conceived divine mechanic of classical natural theology. [6, 157]

On the more scientific side, Polkinghorne believes that the causal joint by which God can bring these gentle acts about may lie somewhere in the interaction between the material and the mental, an interaction that cannot be ruled out of our current physical picture of the universe:

Read from the bottom-upwards, physics provides us with no more than an envelope of possibility, within which future development is constrained to lie. Within that envelope, the path actually taken depends upon the realization of a specific set of options selected from among proliferating possibilities. These different possibilities are not discriminated from each other by energetic considerations … but by something much more like an information-input … One sees the opportunity for using this information-input, necessary to resolve what actually occurs, as the vehicle for a downward operating causality, a role for the “mental” (information) in the determination of the material. [7, 25-26; see also 8, 33]

That’s a mouthful. What he’s saying is that it doesn’t actually look like God would have to “inject” energy into the apparently closed system that is the universe in order to have a noticeable effect on it (because most real physical systems are so sensitive). Thus, God’s will (here Polkinghorne calls it the “mental”) doesn’t need to violate a physical law such as the conservation of energy in order to have an effect on the material world (such a violation would be what Russell calls “intervention” and Haught calls “coercion”). Just as our mental powers can bring about a change in the physical world (such as when we decide to move our own bodies in some way), so can God analogously participate in the physical world. In both cases (not just the latter), the causal joints are “hidden within the unpredictability of process” [8, 34]. Hidden, but not imaginary.

Of course, we need to be modest in our claims. The “contrast theologians” would be quick to remind us that our theological tasks are quite distinct from the scientists’ and that the two should not be conflated. Moreover, a careful examination of what has been put forth shows that we’re certainly not dealing with a recapitulation of those famous “proofs” for God’s existence which have fared so poorly on the philosophical scene.

No, at most we have what Markham and many others call “pointers” to God [9, 39]. But at the very least, we can say something like this: “Of course, we don’t know, and never will, how God interacts with the world. But the supple and open-ended picture of the universe that has arrived in science suggests that it is by no means unreasonable to suppose that God might do so.” For those wishing to state this conclusion a bit more strongly, you could do worse than a phrase Polkinghorne used in a recent personal conversation with us at a gathering of Christian scholars: “The defeatists have been defeated.”

Miracles: A case study

It’s interesting to apply what we’ve learned above to the mightiest of God’s acts, those occurrences we call miracles. Notice right away, though, that there is a continuity between miraculous acts of God and more mundane ones if we subscribe to the outdated model of the clockwork universe. If it’s supposedly impossible for God to interact with the physical world, then what does it matter if the supposed interaction is raising the dead or redistributing the rain in Spain? Conversely, if we take the findings of more current science seriously, and are open to the various proposals about possible causal joints, then a certain cautious openness to the reality of miracles doesn’t sound quite so absurd.

We can no more make a systematic study of miracles here than we could attempt to pin down an exact answer to the causal joint problem. However, we can once again share a few helpful comments from two important (and mutually appreciative) thinkers in this area of theology.

Both Polkinhorne and Ward are careful not to assent to a sloppy definition of miracle in light of our conversation above. Language of interference with or intervention in nature or its laws will not do within our picture of the surprising suppleness and flexibility in nature. Ward’s definition of “extraordinary events that show spiritual power” [9, 105] seems in this respect a helpful choice. A further advantage of this definition is that it reminds us of the religious purpose of miracles, which the Biblical witness insists is wrapped up in their ability to serve as a sign for us of the reality of God [8, 45].

This purpose also then points to limitations. Polkinghorne writes, “God is no celestial conjurer, doing an occasional turn, but his actions must always be characterized by the deepest possible consistency and rationality” [8, 45]. Thus, seemingly senseless “acts of God” in the sense that we often use that word are anything but. God does not go around capriciously spinning off hurricanes or other disasters.

“But why aren’t there more miracles of the opposite variety?” we might well ask. Why not more prevention of such disasters. Putting aside the difficulty of ruling them out (how would we know, if the disasters never went on to take place?), Polkinghorne thinks the answer lies in God’s reliability:

People say that they cannot at all believe in a God who acts if he did not do so to stop the Holocaust. If God were a God who simply interferes at will with his creation, the charge against him would be unanswerable. But if his action is self-limited by a consistent respect for the freedom of his creation … and also by his own utter reliability (so that he excludes the shortcuts of magic) it is not clear that he is to be blamed for not overruling the wickedness of humankind. [8, 53-54]

You’re perhaps noticing that whenever we talk about how God interacts with the world, a visit from the theodicy question is seldom far behind.

Polkinghorne goes on to summarize his position on miracles with the following statement: “miracles are neither ruled out by scientific knowledge that the world is a relentlessly inflexible mechanism (it is not) nor by theological knowledge that God is just the deistic upholder of general process (he is more than that). That there may have been miracles is a coherent possibility” [8, 54]. However, neither he nor Ward would want to let that comment stand without a word of caution. Ward’s is appropriately sober: “Legends readily multiply, and human imagination is strong. It is, therefore, reasonable to be very cautious in affirming that a [particular] miracle has occurred” [9, 105-106]. Obviously, fidelity to the reality of certain miracles, such as the resurrection of Christ, is an important part of Christian faith.

Closing remarks

We hope the foregoing material has been sufficient to whet your appetite. There’s so much to learn about both the science we’ve discussed and its relevance to current theology. Perhaps for this topic in particular, about the best we can do is get you thinking and reading. Ward’s chapter on miracles in The Big Questions in Science and Religion [9, 83-106] is particularly accessible and treats miracles from a variety of religious perspectives. Haught’s chapter “Why Is There Complexity in Nature” in Science and Religion [6, 142-161] is a careful (and moving) exploration of some intriguing aspects of chaos/complexity theory that we’ve given short shrift here.

“On the contrary …” the worldview that began to emerge with the rise of disciplined scientific thinking was fairly hostile to the idea of God’s action in the world. At the heart of this worldview was an awareness of mechanisms, the increasingly complex machines that began to emerge during this period with the help of scientific methods for understanding their operation. To return again to our image of the watchmaker, thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment began to wonder if the whole world might be understood via this metaphor. The plausible role of God was thus reduced to, at most, winding the clock at the beginning of time.

The emergence of mechanics

To begin, have a look at this video. You don’t have to watch the whole thing if you’re not so inclined, but check out enough of it to get the general gist.

You probably know that this fabulous contraption is called a Rube Goldberg machine. The idea is to accomplish some task, usually a humorously trivial one, in as many steps as possible. Rube Goldberg machines make for great high school physics projects, because they allow you to bring together an arbitrary number of physical principles in the form of components in the overall machine. For instance, if you’ve been teaching your students projectile motion, then you could include in the assignment a component that requires the designer to successfully identify where such a projectile will land. Guess wrong, and the machine won’t complete its task.

What happened during the early modern period is that scientists got really good at guessing. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that they showed you don’t need to guess. If you know the right mathematics (in the case of projectiles, the shape of a parabola), you can simply calculate the answer. Beginning with Galileo, the branch of physics that has come to be known as mechanics has mathematically described, among other things, the movement of bodies subject to physical forces. One of the most relevant forces to the behavior of the universe is gravity, which Isaac Newton made great strides in describing:

With the work of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, something quite extraordinary had been accomplished. Human beings could now reliably predict–calculate!–the movement of celestial bodies in the solar system and, in more and more cases, the movement of terrestrial bodies in the Earth’s atmosphere. Of course, some problems were harder than others. Wind resistance, frictional forces, and other complicating factors disrupt the ideal behavior described by the growing set of equations used to “model” the real world.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that, amid this era of discovery, some physicists thought the science of mechanics could be the ultimate source of all explanation. Perhaps the entire universe could be reduced to mechanism. Perhaps the world is God’s endlessly complex Rube Goldberg machine, albeit one that carries out innumerable tasks in frightfully subtle ways.

Determinism, deism, and the “god of the gaps”

We turn for a simple statement of this idea, which is known as causal determinism, to Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace speculated that the techniques of mathematical physics could, in theory, be a sufficient explanation for both history and the future:

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior [past] state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it–an intelligent sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis–it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. [1, 4]

Can you guess where he’s going? Carl Hoefer writes, “Laplace probably had God in mind as the powerful intelligence to whose gaze the whole future is open.”

These ideas set in motion, as it were, a line of thinking that ends up relegating God’s role to, at most, setting what a mathematical physicist like Laplace would call the “initial conditions” of the universe. Once the initial state of the universe at t=0 is set, the mechanism can be set in motion to play out the predetermined drama of existence. God has infinite “computing power” and so can know what is going to happen. But God is also hands-off, taking the role of, in Polkinghorne’s words, an “Absentee Landlord” [2, 5].

This position is known as deism, and it exhibits an approach generally known as “god of the gaps.” This god doesn’t fare to well in the final analysis. Guy Consolmagno, summarizing the work of Michael Buckley [3], suggests that

the atheism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries arose precisely because the religious thinkers of those times tried to base their religion on the new certainties of Newton and Leibniz. In some cases, they tried to fit the traditional ideas of an omnipotent, active God into the gaps where the new physics was not yet successful in completely describing how the universe worked … But as physics and chemistry developed, they kept reducing the role of God in the universe until he was nothing more than the clock maker who started things going and then watched them evolve from a distance. Finally, it reached the point where a mathematician like Laplace could quite properly say of such a God, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” [4, 41]

In the words of Douglas Adams, and in the minds of so many scientific skeptics, “Well That About Wraps It Up for God.”

The “causal joint” problem

The crux of the challenge posed to theism by the mechanical worldview is what philosophers and theologians call the causal joint problem. Scientific skeptics purport to explain cause and effect through what Dawkins calls “hierarchical reductionism.” In this approach, physical mechanisms explain physical phenomena, chemical mechanisms explain chemical phenomena, biological mechanisms explain biological phenomena, etc. [5, 13; see also “Purity” comic below].

In such a view, there seems to be no “room” for God, no mechanism by which God can physically interact with the world, no joint by which God’s action can be linked in to physical mechanisms. The universe, it seems, is a “Closed Causal Web” [6, 263]. Of course, as Markham points out, “the classical concept of God” is not ignorant of the problems such thinking poses for the ideas of human free will and God’s control of natural phenomena. But Markham also notes that “most [modern] theologians find … very unsatisfying” the various ideas thinkers have put forth to address those problems [7, 4]. Plus, the reductionists dismiss such answers as so much impotent philosophizing in the face of concrete reality.

To summarize, then: It seemed, from a scientific perspective, that we were stuck with either (1) an increasingly impotent “god of the gaps” who does not act in the world at all or (2) a micromanaging Rube Goldberg God who knows everything that will ever happen and may also have ordained it that way. The former god becomes remarkably easy to dismiss altogether, and the latter God seems, to many thinkers, to eliminate the possibility of human freedom.

However, the bizarre and wonderful findings of twentieth-century science may once again have opened the door for speculation about plausible causal joints. We think these discoveries may clear the way once again for staunchly science-minded people to envision a God who genuinely responds to what happens in the world. The story will be the final of our course and also, we think, a fitting example of where the disciplines of science and theology can work together side-by-side in their quest for truth.

“We answer that …” both the religious and scientific perspectives have important and complementary insights to offer to any worldview that takes full and proper account of the complexity and wonder of life of Earth. From a religious perspective, we take as essential that life, and especially human life, does have purpose and meaning. From the scientific perspective, we acknowledge that the mechanism whereby the Creator brought us into being does seem to contain a genuine openness to a variety of possible ways by which life on Earth became the way it is.

Science vs. scientism (reprise)

As we stated earlier, our plan in this lesson is to spend less time on the “contrast” perspective, which is concerned with resolving the apparent conflict between these two accounts by properly differentiating between science and religion as disciplined ways of knowing. Nevertheless, it is important that we make a few “contrast”-related observations before moving on to more sophisticated concerns.

First, many thinkers agree that Dawkins’s perspective on life’s origins conflates a physical theory with metaphysical speculation [1, 55; 2, 163-164; 3 178-179, 4, 162-163]. Of course, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that philosophical move. It’s simply important to realize that, in doing so, Dawkins uses examples from the natural world in support of an empirically untestable belief system, not a set of evidence-based scientific claims. This particular brand of scientism is often called evolutionism. It is related to its physics-based counterpart, which we encountered via Stephen Hawking in the last lesson.

The point is, of course, that theistic belief systems offer reasonable alternatives to Dawkins’s evolutionist view (see below). We take it that it is perfectly coherent to agree with Dawkins that the mechanism of “slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection” is a description of how life came about but not “the ultimate explanation for our existence” [5, 318]. Once again, science does not answer to our satisfaction the big-picture question, the why?

Hopefully this insight from the contrast theologians, together with our earlier discussion about the good reasons for Jews and Christians not to be overly concerned about factual inconsistencies in the Old Testament’s mythic and poetic manner of presentation, have cleared up some of the more superficial worries about the apparent conflict between the scientific and religious accounts of the origin of life on earth. Francis Collins ably summarizes what seems to us a harmonious account, technically known as theistic evolution:

God, who is not limited in space or time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to created microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. [2, 200-201]

As writer Walker Percy observed, “The Christians need not have got in such a sweat. The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man … are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology” [4, 162]. We are inclined to agree, though we would add that in agreeing we are not forced to “throw out” or treat as having secondary importance the important theological and spiritual insight the Genesis account offers.

Blindness, carefully considered

In our opinion, much of the confusion in the “evolution debates” arises from Dawkins’s provocative choice of the term “blind” to characterize the seemingly paradoxical interworkings of random and nonrandom processes in evolution. This choice corresponds to his interpretation that there is no ultimate purpose guiding evolutionary processes. Critics of Dawkins understandably want to expose this interpretation for what it is, an interpretation. But in so doing, many make intellectual mistakes of their own.

First, many critics overlook Dawkins’s subtlety (a reflection of the subtlety in evolution itself), assuming blindness means complete randomness. (Presumably, they haven’t read Dawkins’s book; the distinction is subtle but carefully emphasized [6, 39].) They point out that a completely random process could no more create the complexity of life than a bag containing disassembled pocketwatch parts could be shaken until those parts came together in a functional way. Of course, Dawkins realizes this; indeed, it is a principle motivating observation in his thesis! His point is that evolution isn’t like shaking a bag of stopwatch parts. Evolution involves “untamed” but “tame” chance: “To ‘tame’ chance means to break down the very improbably into less improbable small components arranged in series. No matter how improbable it is that an X could have arisen from a Y in a single step, it is always possible to conceive of infinitesimally graded intermediates between them [5, 317].”

Once over this important hump, there is surely room to take Dawkins to task. John Haught summarizes some standard arguments against Dawkins’s appeal to chance and purposelessness:

In the first place, the “chance” character of the variations which natural selection chooses for survival may easily be accounted for on the basis of our inevitable human narrowness and ignorance. Allegedly “random” genetic mutations may not really be random at all. They could very well be mere illusions resulting from the limitedness of our human perspective. Our religious faith convinces us in any case that a purely human angle of vision is always restricted. … [F]inally, there is no more theological difficulty in the remorseless law of natural selection, which is said to be impersonal and blind, than in the laws of inertia, gravity, or any other impersonal aspect of scince. Gravity, like natural selection, has no regard for our inherent personal dignity either. It pulls toward earth the weak and powerful alike–at times in a deadly way. But very few thinkers have ever insisted that gravity is a serious argument against God’s existence. Perhaps natural selection should be viewed no less leniently. [1, 59-60]

These are strong and important arguments. Indeed, it’s hard not to be reminded here of Isaiah 55:8: “my thoughts are not your thoughts, / nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” But there is a serious intellectual point at stake here that we believe too few theologians account for adequately. They rightly reject the notion that evolution necessarily rules out the existence of God. But Dawkins’s book does make a definite point about how God must have gone about the work of creatio continua, continuing creation. The evidence Dawkins accumulates, in our opinion, makes a strong case for the idea that God gave the world a large amout of leeway to become what it would. Mutations happened, some organisms and their offspring survived preferentially, and some of the resulting solutions nature came up with in the process make it very clear, to use Collins’s words, that “no special supernatural intervention was required” [2, 200].

Perhaps the most awe-inspiring example comes from Dawkins’s discussion of “convergent evolution”–the fact that the mechanisms of evolution seem to arrive at similar solutions to similar problems via very different evolutionary paths. For instance, “The leg of a litoptern is all but indistinguishable from the leg of a horse, yet the two animals are only distantly related.” The two species each independently “lost all their toes except the middle one on each leg, which became enlarged as the bottom joint of the leg and developed a hoof.” In both cases, nature brought forth “the same qualities to cope with the problems of grassland life” [5, 103-104]. So too evolved only distantly related “specialists” in the ant-eating game and also independent practitioners of the “many different branches of the ant/termite trade” [5, 106].

The list could go on and on. The point is, it seems to us a right interpretation of this data (though it is still interpretation) to say that God did not actively nudge these disparate species toward pre-determined successful solutions. It seems more likely that the process of evolution simply converged converged on the successful strategies. How? Because if they weren’t successful, these species would not have survived. So, we do not want to totally override the contrast-theologians’ points about human beings being limited in our understanding of God’s complex and subtle purposes. But if there is not some genuine freedom built into the evolutionary system, God sure went to some serious effort to make it look like there is. Might God have done so to test or confuse us? The idea is not inconceivable, but it does seem inconsistent with God’s goodness and with the traditional Christian belief that the Holy Spirit is active in the world guiding us “into all the truth” (John 16:13).

Now, this belief in some “give” in the system need not commit us to the God of deism, the hands-off God of Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson who creates the universe but never again relates to it. We will make the case for this claim in the next lesson. For now simply note that John Polkinghorne in particular consistently emphasizes that in letting science inform our theology we must always be faithful to the witness of scripture to a God who is no “impoten[t] or indifferen[t] … Deistic Spectator” [7, 80].

What these findings do seem to mean is that God didn’t “micromanage” evolution. Thus, science suggests to theologians something about the openness of the world God created, and probably something about that Creator as well. God has embued the world with what Polkinghorne calls “true becoming” [7, 61]. Yes we are “marvelously made” (Psalm 139:13), and that would be no less true if we had, say, a different number of toes [6, 40]. Though some of you will not wish to go with us this far (in which case Haught’s observations above might better represent your position), we believe Christian de Duve achieves an intellectually satisfying harmony of the scientists’ common sticking point and the theologians’ convictions about God’s most special creation:

Evolution, though dependent on chance events, proceeds under a number of inner and outer constraints that compel it to move in the direction of greater complexity if circumstances permit. Had these circumstances been different, evolution might have followed a different course in time. It might have produced organisms different from those we know, perhaps even thinking beings different than humans. [quoted in 8, 160]

If we were instead those different “thinking beings,” would we be any less God’s special creation, nurtured throughout our development and held in God’s loving arms? Would God have been any less capable of becoming one of us to redeem us from our sins? If we answer these questions in the negative, then even an interpretation of the facts of evolution that takes very seriously the apparent freedom in the system ought not to put Christians on the defensive.

And perhaps it is this freedom to “become” that gives evolution those remarkable characteristics that convince many of us that there is indeed purpose at work within it. Perhaps it is that freedom that gives rise to so much diversity and fecundity, to wonderfully peculiar characters like the platypus and the playwright. Perhaps Arthur Peacocke is right to characterize evolution as the “unfolding the divinely endowed potentialities of the universe through a process in which its creative possibilities and propensities become actualized” [quoted in 9, 75]. Haught captures this line of speculation beautifully:

[M]ight it not be [that] God wants the world and beings within the world to partake of the divine joy of creating novelty that the cosmos is left unfinished, and that it is invited to be at least to some degree self-creative? And if it is in some ways self-creative can we be too baffled about its undisciplined experimentation with the many different, delightful, baffling, and bizarre forms that we find in the fossil record and in the diversity of life that surrounds us even now? And can’t we therefore learn much about the ways of God’s creative love by looking at the pictures of nature that evolutionists like [Stephen J.] Gould are giving us today? [1, 63]

This is “contact theology” at its best, grounded in convictions about who God is (and who we are) but open to the insights that a survey of the world’s wonders can offer us.

The theodicy question

We have treated the interrelated issue of randomness, blindness, openness, and purpose in some detail because it cuts to the heart of why evolution is unsettling even for those who, as a popular bumper sticker goes, “take the bible too seriously to take it literally.” But we mentioned in the last page another common sticking point, and we should at least sketch a possible answer here. As always, our goal cannot be absolute certainty, since that’s something theology cannot provide (plus, quite frankly, these are difficult questions that philosophers and theologians have been arguing about for thousands of years).

As you may recall, this other point involves the theodicy question,

“It would seem…” from the traditional Judeo-Christian perspective that the universe was created by God “[i]n the beginning” and consists, fundamentally, of “the heavens and the earth” (see Genesis 1:1). You may be surprised to learn how difficult it is to say much more than that without stepping into highly contested theological territory. Below we’ll let the Bible speak for itself about creation, but it’s important first to introduce just what kind of world the ancients looked to their religions for an explanation of.

A three-tiered cosmology

The biblical authors seem to have understood the world with respect to a three-tiered cosmology, “with the earth sandwiched between the firmament of God’s dwelling place above, and the underworld controlled by evil powers below” [1, 39]. New Testament scholar Gregory Riley elaborates:

The physical universe as the ancients perceived it was small, much like a sphere half filled with water, upon which floated the flat disk of the earth. There was water everywhere else–above the heavens, around the earth, and below, flowing around the underworld … The whole universe was immersed like a giant bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of saltwater. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Egypt or Greece or Mesopotamia and its neighboring lands; in the center stood the city of Babylon for the Babylonians, Nippur for the Sumerians, Delphi for the Greeks, and and Jerusalem for Israel. [2, 27]

You can see a beautiful artist’s rendering of this cosmology here.

Once you have the ancient conception in view, you start to notice traces of it throughout the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, pronounces the following fate for the doomed prince of Tyre:

They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas. (Ezekiel 28:8)

The writers of the psalms also espouse this worldview, envisioning God as a Cosmic Orderer who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” and “still[s]” its rising waves (Psalm 89:9). In the Book of Job, God is even said to “walk[] on the dome of heaven” (Job 22:14).

Whether or not this cosmology served for the ancient Hebrew people as “a prescientific attempt to understand the universe” or as something more purely poetic and evocative, the biblical writings bear its stamp. This is especially true of the creation narrative itself, to which we now turn our attention.

The days of creation

Take a moment to read Genesis 1:1-19, either in the New Revised Standard Version text below or in a translation of your choosing. This passage comprises the first four of the six days of creation–seven if you count the following day, on which God rested. We will examine the latter days, and the alternative creation account in Genesis 2, in the next lesson.

In the beginning when God created^* the heavens and the earth, ²the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God^* swept over the face of the waters. ³Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. ⁴And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

6 And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ ⁷So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. ⁸God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. ¹⁰God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. ¹¹Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. ¹²The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. ¹³And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

14 And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, ¹⁵and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. ¹⁶God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. ¹⁷God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, ¹⁸to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:1-19)

What do you notice about the passage? Well, hopefully the making of the “dome in the midst of the waters” on the second day jumped out at you for starters, not to mention the emergence of “dry land” on day three. There’s our ancient cosmology at work.

More importantly, note that the various aspects of that cosmos come into being at God’s command. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” This is obviously a key aspect of the theistic account of the universe: it has a finite existence that depended on God’s providential sustenance. The Gospel According to John in the Christian New Testament makes this point rather more explicitly when it says “without him, not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The “him” is Christ, “the Word” who “was with God” and who “was God” (John 1:2). (If you haven’t read the prologue to John’s gospel, 1:1-18, treat yourself and do so now. There’s probably no more concise or beautiful summary of Christian doctrine anywhere.) So our religious picture is one where God wills creation into being. (NOTE ABOUT CREATIO CONTINUA?)

And then there are those momentous words that usher in both Genesis in John: bereishit in Hebrew, en archē in Greek, “in the beginning” in English. As we shall see, much hinges in our conversation between science and theology on what we make of these words. At face value, though, their implication is simple enough. The world, the universe, the cosmos–it had a beginning, a starting point. The idea of a finite universe puts Judeo-Christian thinking in fairly marked contrast with the idea, long popular in philosophy, that matter is eternal. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas addresses Aristotle’s objections to that effect in his famous teaching on creation. It is to another point in that teaching that we go to finish our brief gloss on the religious understanding of the cosmos.

Creatio ex nihilo

Before considering whether the universe indeed had a beginning, Thomas asks a set of questions related to just what creation even means. His conclusion is one we might not expect based on what we read above in Genesis. Thomas says that the universe was created ex nihilo, “from nothing.” But recall what we read above, that “²the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God^* swept over the face of the waters.” What earth? What face? What deep? What waters? This description doesn’t sound very much like nothing.

What do we make of this? Well, the going is difficult, partly because that first phrase, “a formless void” is enigmatic in the original Hebrew: tohu wa bohu. Tohu is reasonably straightforward and has meanings associated with waste, desolation, and nothingness elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. Bohu, on the other hand, appears only three times, all of them in conjunction with tohu. (COMMENTARY)

Summary

To tip our hand a little bit, we hope you’re getting the message that to put forward a religious position on cosmology and creation theology is actually no simple task–and is certainly not so easy as merely quoting the relevant portions of scripture. But we believe it’s reasonably accurate and faithful to summarize the traditional Christian account of the universe as follows:

The universe has a certain structure, which was created over a certain period of time, and at the beginning of time, by God, who willed it into being and continues to will its sustained existence.

We will next describe the scientific account. As we do so, be thinking about what we’ve discussed here, and try to anticipate for yourself some of the contested, or at least apparently contested issues.

“It would seem…” from the traditional Judeo-Christian perspective that the universe was created by God “[i]n the beginning” and consists, fundamentally, of “the heavens and the earth” (see Genesis 1:1). You may be surprised to learn how difficult it is to say much more than that without stepping into highly contested theological territory. Below we’ll let the Bible speak for itself about creation, but it’s important first to introduce just what kind of world the ancients looked to their religions for an explanation of.

A three-tiered cosmology

The biblical authors seem to have understood the world with respect to a three-tiered cosmology, “with the earth sandwiched between the firmament of God’s dwelling place above, and the underworld controlled by evil powers below” [1, 39]. New Testament scholar Gregory Riley elaborates:

The physical universe as the ancients perceived it was small, much like a sphere half filled with water, upon which floated the flat disk of the earth. There was water everywhere else–above the heavens, around the earth, and below, flowing around the underworld … The whole universe was immersed like a giant bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of saltwater. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Egypt or Greece or Mesopotamia and its neighboring lands; in the center stood the city of Babylon for the Babylonians, Nippur for the Sumerians, Delphi for the Greeks, and and Jerusalem for Israel. [2, 27]

You can see a beautiful artist’s rendering of this cosmology here.

Once you have the ancient conception in view, you start to notice traces of it throughout the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, pronounces the following fate for the doomed prince of Tyre:

They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas. (Ezekiel 28:8)

The writers of the psalms also espouse this worldview, envisioning God as a Cosmic Orderer who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” and “still[s]” its rising waves (Psalm 89:9). In the Book of Job, God is even said to “walk[] on the dome of heaven” (Job 22:14).

Whether or not this cosmology served for the ancient Hebrew people as “a prescientific attempt to understand the universe” or as something more purely poetic and evocative, the biblical writings bear its stamp. This is especially true of the creation narrative itself, to which we now turn our attention.

The days of creation

Take a moment to read Genesis 1:1-19 , either in the New Revised Standard Version text below or in a translation of your choosing. This passage comprises the first four of the six days of creation–seven if you count the following day, on which God rested. We will examine the latter days, and to the alternative creation account in Genesis 2, in the next lesson.

In the beginning when God created^* the heavens and the earth, ²the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God^* swept over the face of the waters. ³Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. ⁴And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

6 And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ ⁷So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. ⁸God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. ¹⁰God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. ¹¹Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. ¹²The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. ¹³And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

14 And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, ¹⁵and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. ¹⁶God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. ¹⁷God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, ¹⁸to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:1-19)

What do you notice about the passage? Well, hopefully the making of the “dome in the midst of the waters” on the second day jumped out at you for starters, not to mention the emergence of “dry land” on day three. There’s our ancient cosmology at work.

More importantly, note that the various aspects of that cosmos come into being at God’s command. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” This is obviously a key aspect of the theistic account of the universe: it has a finite existence that depended on God’s providential sustenance. The Gospel According to John in the Christian New Testament makes this point rather more explicitly when it says “without him, not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The “him” is Christ, “the Word” who “was with God” and who “was God” (John 1:2). (If you haven’t read the prologue to John’s gospel, 1:1-18, treat yourself and do so now. There’s probably no more concise or beautiful summary of Christian doctrine anywhere.) So our religious picture is one where God wills creation into being.

And then there are those momentous words that usher in both Genesis in John: בְּרֵאשִׁית in Hebrew, ἐν ἀρχῇ in Greek, “in the beginning” in English. As we shall see, much hinges in our conversation between science and theology on what we make of these words. At face value, though, their implication is simple enough. The world, the universe, the cosmos–it had a beginning, a starting point, a time, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “.” This puts the Judeo-Christian thinking in fairly marked contrast with Greco-Roman thought, …

One consequence of a universe that depends on God

Creatio ex nihilo

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The first thing we need to know about the Bible’s cosmology is that the ancient Hebrew understanding of the world was not intellectual but mytho-poetic, just like those of neighboring cultures in the Ancient Near East [1, 1-2]. By mytho-poetic, we mean that these cultures’ thinking issued “more out of imaginative fancy than out of logical inference or disciplined inquiry” [2, 702]. So we shouldn’t be surprised if the creation accounts in Genesis don’t exactly read like a Stephen Jay Gould essay; that’s not how the people who wrote them thought. They thought like storytellers, in the best sense of that word. We shall have more to say on this point when we bring the biblical account into conversation with the scientific one. But even at this point, it is important to understand the following: though the biblical authors write in such a way as to give explanations for the way things are in the world [2, 702],

Indeed, what those stories most resemble is the Babylonian creation myths that describe the origin of the universe in terms of a “struggle between cosmic order and chaos.” Scholars are fairly sure these Babylonian myths, famously published by English Assyriologist George Smithin in 1876 under the title The Chaldean Account of Genesis, predate their Hebrew counterparts in the Old Testament. Although this discovery shook the world of the religious establishment, who had long taken the Genesis stories as “‘gospel truth’ and sober fact,” it eventually led Christian thinkers clarify [Anderson1-3]

If I’m understanding it correctly, then I’m massively disappointed with how someone (Gizmodo? headline writers?) is shaping reports of NASA’s new findings on Gammaproteobacteria GFAJ-1. The first release I read, by Gizmodo at Wired Science via an excerpt on Episcopal Café (I love my church), made it sound like a life form had been discovered in Mono Lake whose biochemical makeup included arsenic in the places we expect phosphorus to be.

Not so, explains a second post on Wired Science by Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News. Researchers believe they have coaxed the bacteria to replace phosphorus with arsenic. The actual situation is still pretty mind-blowing but much more modest than we’d been originally led to believe (apparently Tom Faber commenting on Episcopal Café’s Facebbok page has since also caught the error). Here’s the NYT‘s take:

The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.

I’m usually not concerned with “Who’s to blame?!” in these situations, but I just spent ten minutes thinking the universe was vastly different from what we thought it was. And now I find out that, well, some people working in a lab think that maybe it might be that way and have compiled some evidence based on a clever experiment. Again, this is still a mind-blowing piece of science news, but the ball has definitely been dropped, journalistically.

So who is to blame? Well, it may be that Gizmodo just didn’t write a very good article. But if you go over to the NASA press release, I think you may find that the culprit could be who the culprit almost always is in these situations: the damn headline writer. Sure, the release itself starts with the outsized claim, “NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.” But then it immediately makes clear that the new life form is “able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic.” That, in my opinion, is a far cry from the reality touted in the headline: “NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical.” At the very least, it should be “NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Capable of Rebuilding Itself With Toxic Chemical.”

To go back to Gizmodo: Yes, “This changes everything.” But not quite so massively as it would have if they actually “discovered” (instead of, more accurately, “built”) “a completely new life form” that, when the experiment started, was a completely ordinary life form with an intriguing habitat and a possibly novel biochemical ability.

My guess is that it started with the misleading NASA headline. How many times do we have to make that mistake? Editors: please, please, please, let your writers suggest the headline. Doing otherwise is just asking to embarrass yourself…and to dash the hopes of excited science geeks.

Well, we’re three days into our CPE, and we visited patients for the first time today (shadowing full-time chaplains). I was struck by how fast it all went; in an hour we

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