The God Darwin Did Not Believe In
The God Darwin Did Not Believe In and a Call for an Artistic Paradigm
James W. Gustafson
August 29, 2005
The substance of this paper is based on a provocative book by Cornelius G. Hunter titled Darwin’s God. I intend to show that Hunter’s conclusions support the need for a new paradigm in our thinking about God in his relation to the world—what theologians discuss in terms of creation and providence . I will draw on ideas from philosophers as diverse as Pascal, John Stuart Mill, George Berkeley, Hegel and Karl Marx and attempt a recommendation for conceiving God in terms of artist rather than engineer.
Although we live in what might be called the twilight of rationalistic enlightenment philosophy, we are still too much influenced by its paradigm of autonomous reason and scientific materialism and its theological companion, the deistic view of God. While scientific materialism has been successful in improving the technological aspects of life, it seems to be bankrupt as a support for the life of shalom. Scientific materialism has been often criticized for creating a worldview that allows de-humanizing human life, humanizing non-human life, and trivializing and marginalizing God. It has contributed to an unintended consequence among many in the general populace—reducing life to acquiring material affluence and personal power and pleasure, thus denying the spiritual nature of mankind. Hence our quest for fulfillment—inherent in the human heart—lies unfulfilled. As a result we see the proliferation of unrest of soul, dysfunction in relationships, including marriage and family, and other trends that promise to increase social disintegration, international tensions and environmental degradation. While not a direct cause, scientific materialism has contributed to a climate friendly to this lifestyle. Darwin played a key role in establishing its dominance in western thinking. Yet in contrast to this, and perhaps because of it, we now see a mounting interest in spiritual matters, though often outside the context of the God of the Bible.
Darwin’s “evolution revolution” rested upon certain assumptions about metaphysical reality—assumptions that were commonly made by those following the rationalistic method of scientific materialism. While claiming to be wholly scientific, Darwinism employs philosophic arguments to prop up its claims. Hunter shows how conclusions favoring evolution depend as much on Darwin’s concept of God and creation as on his scientific observations. It can be put as follows:
1. Natural phenomena are due either to a) special creation or to b) unguided evolution of natural processes.
2. Since the empirical facts are not what the theory of special creation predicts, creation of species by the direct hand of God (a) must be false.
3. Therefore the theory of evolution (b) must be true.
The logic of Darwin’s reasoning contains several weaknesses, chief of which are his simplistic concept of God the creator and his dependence on a faulty application of the process of elimination.
In addition, Darwin’s understanding of nature, while consistent with the state of science in his time, contributes to his misunderstanding of God. As Hunter points out, evolutionists to this day show a primitive understanding of who God is according to Christian theism and thus fall prey to the same logical errors that Darwin made. I shall give an outline of this in what follows.
I. God. Darwin’s concept pictures God as an engineer whose cardinal virtue is efficiency and theoretical perfection. Darwin could not reconcile such a Creator with natural evil. (Moral evil might be justified by the freewill theodicy. But Darwin was troubled by natural evil. ) The God of biblical theism, however, is more like an artist who creates a story designed to show his glory to a delighted audience of men and angels. As in every skillful drama, darkness and calamity are required to show the power and genius of the creating artist.
II. Nature. Darwin’s understanding of nature was also limited by the insights of Newtonian physics: the world is a fine-tuned machine that operates by fixed natural laws, such as the law of gravitation. Darwin—no fault to him—knew nothing of how the world works at molecular, atomic or sub-atomic levels. As a scientist he might have been expected to show more humility in light of the accepted dogma that science can reach no higher than probability in any of its conclusions, if for no other reason than that our observations are but an infinitesimal slice of the events going on in the universe at any given time, not to mention our relative ignorance of events that occurred over the eons of primordial time. The scientist’s bible ought to contain a verse like this: “We know in part because we observe in part. Therefore, let us prophesy in part.”
Although a layman regarding science, I have always had a love for it and have followed its new discoveries with much interest. Some of what scientists now tell us seems so counter-intuitive that it strains credibility. For example, take the complexity of organic life at the cellular level. Not only is the single cell a universe of incredibly complex activity, but also events at the molecular level within the cell are even more astonishing. Molecular transactions and protein exchanges at the chemical level can occur millions of times per second. And there are many types of chemical processes going on. The cell is not a simple building block of life. It is more like a miniature galaxy. Naturally we cannot fault Darwin for not knowing what was unknowable at the time. But I think we can fault him for not being more cautious and tentative in his conclusions. Darwin did allow that his theory of evolution (by random variation in the context of natural selection) would be defeated if we ever discovered creatures whose survival depends on features that could not have risen gradually over time. And yet he was zealous to come to a firm conclusion that his theory was the correct one. Why was Darwin so eager?
Hunter makes the case that Darwin was driven by his desire to rule out the claim of God’s special creation of biological organisms. He was as much trying to defeat the philosophic claim that God was directly responsible for nature as to establish evolution as an alternate explanation. Why was Darwin so concerned about this?
Whenever a scientist speaks of God, he leaves the realm of science per se and steps into the realm of philosophical speculation—in this case into metaphysics and theology. Darwin stepped over this boundary. In fact, it can be said that his theory of the evolution of species by unguided natural processes provided him a way to rid himself of uneasiness stemming from his worldview. His motivation is not purely scientific—following evidence whether it confirms or denies the hypothesis in question. It seems that Darwin wanted his theory to be the correct one.
A major debate among scientists (primarily geologists and biologists) in Darwin’s day was the role of God in the governance of the natural world. What troubled many enlightenment philosophers and theologians, such as Leibniz, was the unseemliness of implicating God in the moral and natural evils of the created order. The Bible, on the one hand, does not shrink from admitting that God is the cause of calamities and judgments, both human and natural, by his direct decree. “I bring calamity,” says the Lord God (Isaiah 45:7). He brought the flood as a judgment upon the evil of mankind. He not only sends rain to the just and the unjust, but he allows the righteous to suffer and the wicked to prosper. He selects some for his favor and others for his wrath. These mostly Old Covenant pronouncements were increasingly embarrassing to thinking people in the enlightenment era of which Darwin was a part. The Bible sees these events as unintended consequences of human rebellion against God (the Fall of Man), resulting in the whole of nature being out of joint until the new heaven and the new earth reverses the Fall of Man and all of its effects.
The 17th century enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity. Whether he succeeded in his goal of showing how Christian teachings were coherent when understood properly and thus should satisfy the philosophical mind is debatable. But it is an example of the often unspoken assumption of the Enlightenment that only rationally defensible doctrines and events can be admitted to our body of knowledge. As philosophers picked at the allegedly irrational elements of biblical faith, they slowly redefined God into what Pascal had earlier derided as the “God of the philosophers”—a bloodless abstraction, a mere concept. God was an idea to be understood more than a person to know. God was being reduced to something the philosophic mind could be comfortable with, replacing the unpredictable and therefore embarrassing the God of the Bible. Darwin is of this mindset. Natural evil was not compatible with a rational creation in which God created every creature directly.
Prior to Darwin, philosophers and theologians had tried to insulate God from moral evil by various theodicies but did not adequately address natural evil. They relied mostly on the free-will theodicy—God created creatures with free will who abused their freedom, bringing sin and evil into the created order. Thus God is not the creator of evil. While God creates the conditions that make evil possible (autonomous free will), he does so to create the conditions necessary for the highest good. Love, the crown of God’s moral and communicable attributes, stemming as it does from His nature, requires that creatures give love of their own free will.” Coerced love” is an oxymoron. There is no such thing as “programmed-to-love” at all times. One could imagine a machine designed always to do and say the loving act and word. But if it cannot say, “I hate you,” its “I love you” is meaningless. Love implies free will. But free will brings with it ipso facto, inescapably, the conditions needed for moral evil also. Therefore, God, the author of free will, is not the author of or an agent of evil.
Evidently Darwin was aware of all this. But while philosophers had thus addressed the problem of moral evil (whether successfully or not is still debated), Darwin, in his study of biological organisms, was face to face with natural evil. Alfred Lord Tennyson expressed the disturbing truth poetically with this line: “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Darwin observed the agonizing death often suffered by the victims of carnivores, many of which are eaten alive. He noted that parasitic wasps could survive only by slowly consuming the host caterpillar. Multiply such examples by the thousands, and you have before your empirically trained eyes a scene that does not sit comfortably with the proprieties of Victorian gentlemen. The world of nature is a bloody business. Could God have designed such a world? Darwin was troubled—though not as a scientist. For science deals with what is, not with what ought to be. It traces linkages that explain how elements of nature are connected in terms of causes and effects, not in terms of reasons and values.
But Darwin could not compartmentalize. He could not insulate his understanding of biology from his broader worldview. Hunter shows in detail how Darwin actually appealed to his view of God as he constructed his case for evolution: we know species originate by unguided natural causes because God would not have created the world as we know it to be through observation.
Hence our syllogism noted previously. If God creates biological species, we can predict that nature would be furnished with perfect organisms that survive without cruelty. But nature is replete with imperfect organisms surviving by predation and competition. Therefore we can conclude that God cannot have created the biological world as we find it. Notice that Darwin has introduced a value component into his supposedly scientific reasoning—cruelty.
In reasoning about this, Darwin assumed that there were only two possibilities: either God created every species perfectly pre-adapted for its niche in the world, or species came into being by unguided influences independent of divine activity.
By the process of elimination, Darwin had shown divine creation to be false. Hence evolution must be true. Darwin and many biologists since have used this logic. Having convinced themselves of the absence of a Creator, they consciously or unconsciously interpret the empirical data to support evolution. Hunter shows in detail how a good many events in nature that count against the theory of unguided evolution are glossed to fit the evolutionary paradigm.
So where did Darwin go wrong, thus starting his successors down a path where the theory of evolution would be considered a proven fact rather than a possibility?
I suggest the answer lies in Darwin’s philosophical worldview. Darwin’s God is too small. His theology is simplistic, even though it was the common view in his time. What might Darwin have thought if he had had better understanding of biblical theology? This question now leads us toward a new formulation of the paradigm for the relation of God to creation. While acknowledging that all paradigms are incomplete, I realize that we tend to think of God in terms of some sort of model that we think is appropriate. The way Darwin thought of God limited his ability to reconcile the Creator and the created order.
Inadequate 19th Century Models of God
The Deistic Model The God revealed in the Bible is a mysterious being in many ways. He is not averse to tinkering with the affairs of men to achieve his purposes. He blesses and curses. He gives life and he takes life. He pardons sometimes while at other times bringing fearful judgments upon individuals and nations. Enlightenment philosophers disliked these “messy” events.
Actually, they tended to make God in their own image—a common weakness among us mortals. God, if there is one, must be a like a Victorian gentleman. Or at least God must be a rationally consistent agent—perhaps acting in line with Kant’s categorical imperative. Since an enlightened intelligence would not create a messy world like the one we find, we can conclude that God must not have created this messy world. While some tried to pretend that nature was completely perfect, eternally harmonious, and full of beauty that honors the perfections of the Creator, Darwin could not deceive himself in this regard in light of his observations. He could not agree.
So Darwin begins by trying to distance God from the events of nature. He agreed with many philosophers of his time that God governs indirectly through natural laws that operate on their own, once set in motion. God is perhaps like a parent who engenders general principles in the children and then steps back and lets things work out from there. In other words God creates the rules (natural laws) and then steps out of the way. God does not directly cause each bolt of lightning. Nor does God create each species directly.
Another way to express this is to say that Darwin applied a deistic notion of God to biological phenomena. God does not tinker with his product. Being perfect his creation is perfect. So he lets it operate on its own without interference. Theologians and philosophers thus dismissed miracles as fanciful embellishments imagined by primitive people, who misguidedly sought to strengthen their accounts with fictitious miracles. God is such that his perfections shine on their own. There is no need to make him into a miracle-worker. Darwin thought that his theory got God off the hook. God creates species by the law of variation and natural selection. This accounts for the untidy and often gruesome aspects of biological reality.
But it was not long before Darwin’s God shrank to a vanishing point. Perhaps, it was soon said, the God of Darwin does not exist at all.
And if God is not needed to account for the details of biological events, the same principle can be applied to sociological events. This application of the idea of evolution was proposed by Auguste Comte—God is an agent only in primitive explanations of the world—and underscored by Frederick Nietzsche—God is dead. That is, there is nothing to explain in human cultures for which the hypothesis of God is needed.
Whether Darwin intended it or not, he set biology—as well as sociology and psychology—on the road to agnosticism and finally atheism. Thus began the acrimonious war between science and theistic religion.
This unfortunate result is unnecessary. We know that nature is far greater than what we have observed thus far. We also know that the doctrine of God is more complex than Darwin’s concept.
We now know that the world Darwin tried to explain is much messier than the “mess” he observed. The non-biological world has much in it that appears to be irrational in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Let me give three examples. 1. Neutrinos can pass through the Earth in seconds and never hit a single atom of the seemingly infinite number that make up our planet. 2. The observation of particles changes them. 3. A change in the charge in a particle on one side of the galaxy is instantly compensated for by an opposite change in its counterpart many light-years distant.
In light of the countless mind-boggling events contemporary science describes, it seems to this writer that we know so little about both God and about nature that humility is in order in all our pronouncements. We should be tentative in our conclusions. But Darwin and many contemporary defenders of evolution state that the theory is now an undeniable fact.
The “clock-work” paradigm of William Paley’s universe was used by Darwin as a foil against which to show the inevitability of the truth of his theory. Now that the clockwork image is passé, Darwin’s arguments no longer convince.
The Engineering Model. Another weakness in the metaphysical trends of the 19th century that Darwin used in his argument lies in the paradigm of God as “the Consummate Engineer.”
It is not at all surprising that philosophers of Darwin’s day conceived of God in engineering terms. We tend to make God in our own image, according to whatever attribute of human nature is most admired at a given time in history. And engineering efficiency was prized then.
Ever since the invention of the printing press, we kept perfecting ways to increase efficiency and improve production of goods and services. With the coming of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, the prospects for increased efficiency and consequently of the improvement of life seemed limitless to many in the 19th century. We would soon be able to provide necessities and even luxuries so efficiently that many of the age-old ills of mankind would disappear. Poverty would be overcome. Leisure would increase. Culture would flourish as education, medicine, letters, religion and the like found an increasing place in the life of even the common people. In such a world of plenty, wars would become a thing of the past. This promise raised hopes for various utopian dreams. In Darwin’s time, Karl Marx proposed a method for engineering a world of peace and plenty by careful and benevolent reform of the means of production and distribution. He thought we could engineer a society whose ideals were formerly assigned to an otherworldly kingdom of God—from each according to ability, to each according to need. Marx claimed we could bring this about in the here and now by scientific measures (and a temporary period of violence).
This belief in the perfectibility of man by education and technology is the hallmark of modern liberalism. We believe we have the capacity to engineer a bright future for ourselves. We can overcome the cloying weights of the past. We can direct the future development of individuals and of societies to create a world of peace and prosperity. We may even defeat death by genetic manipulation and cloning. Free from the restrictions of the past and able to determine the future of our species, we can bring about what previously was assigned to another world, a heavenly world. Such was the confidence in engineering, both technological engineering and social engineering.
Nietzsche, following his predecessor Arthur Schopenhauer, was almost alone among 19th century philosophers in questioning this confidence in the innate rationality of mankind and its utopian vision. He appreciated the irrational volitional impulses that drive human conduct. Nietzsche anticipated the failure of those utopians who thought the coming 20th century would be a Golden Age of peace and prosperity. For all his lack of democratic sentiments, Nietzsche had a more biblical view of human nature than his idealistic counterparts. Man is not the rational animal, the benign animal. He is the competitive animal, asserting his will in competition for dominance. Nietzsche saw the implications of Darwinism for the human scene with remarkable clarity. In a way, he had a more biblical view of human nature than the optimistic thinkers of the enlightenment who preceded him.
For thinking people of Darwin’s day, however, God was the Celestial Mechanic of Isaac Newton’s worldview. He must do things with perfect efficiency and economy. He would not waste material or time with trial and error experiments. He is omniscient and omnipotent. He gets things right the first time.
This concept of “God the Engineer” impelled John Stuart Mill, a contemporary of Darwin, to argue for a finite God. The logic is simple. A perfect God (the God of Christianity) would do things in a perfect way. That is, his creation will be the most efficient imaginable. The assumption is that everyone who creates something does it as efficiently as possible, given his or her capacities. That is, we make sure the end product is produced to the highest quality in the shortest time possible.
For example, no competent engineer would design a new mode of transportation that consumes more time and energy than designs we already are using. And he will not take years to design something if he can design it in a few months. The quality and efficiency of the product indicates the engineering skill of its creator.
Therefore, if the world is the product of “creative forethought,” we can infer the capabilities of the creator by examining the product: the created world. How long does it take for the end product to be finished? What is the quality of that product?
Theists say that the creator has infinite intelligence and creative power. Logically, that means that the product should exhibit perfect quality (no flaws) and be finished in no time. We know from observation that the product (the world as we know it) is not perfect—there is sin and evil alongside much that is good. And it has already used up eons of time.
John Stuart Mill concludes, then, that the product is not perfect—at least not yet. If the world is a work-in-progress, it is obviously taking the creative intelligence (God) a long time to get the product finished. If God exists and if God wants a situation where his praise and glory is shared in an environment of peace and joy (heaven), then why didn’t he make it that way—perfectly—in the beginning? Why does God need so much time to accomplish his ends? Therefore, if there is a creative intelligence, Mill reasoned that this intelligence must be limited. God cannot be all-powerful, because he takes so much time to get the job done.
Darwin, while using the concept of God so defined in the area of biological creation, convinced himself, as did Mill, that the theistic God and the facts of the world cannot be reconciled. Since facts are undeniable, God must be reduced either to a finite being limited in power or to a non-existent fiction.
But is this the only conclusion open to us?
A New Paradigm: God as Artist
What if the attributes of God can be analyzed in a different way—a way that never occurred to the leading philosophers of the 19th century? Perhaps the proper paradigm to use in considering God as the creator is not an engineering model at all.
We might do well to think of God as an artist rather than an engineer. Efficiency may be no more than “a hobgoblin of small minds.” If God is infinite and beyond space and time, why need he be concerned with efficiency? We humans have an eye on efficiency because we have such a short time to realize our goals. We have an expiration date affixed to us. Although we do not know precisely when our time will be up, we know the grains of sand are draining from the hourglass even as we speak. So if we want to accomplish anything, we need to be efficient.
But this does not constrain God. He is eternal. He has all the time in the world. If he created time, he can extend it as long as he wants.
Even in our human experience, there is one activity where the main criterion of success is not efficiency: the realm of art. I suggest that the idea of “God the Artist” may be a useful paradigm to replace “God the Engineer.”
If accomplishing your goal as efficiently as possible were the criterion for artistic excellence, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and some of the novels of Charles Dickens and other great writers from many world cultures would be disappointments. If their authors had been true geniuses, their works of art would not be so long! They would have been more efficient. Surely this is preposterous.
Would a symphony that is but a few minutes in duration be superior to Beethoven’s Ninth? Would a hymn of praise be better if its composer could have shrunk it to three minutes instead of six? Would the Taj Mahal be more beautiful if it had taken only two years to build or if it had been half the size? Would a painting be improved by simplifying baroque detail into a few creative strokes? Surely art is not the same as engineering.
Theists consider God to be an Artist. In his own person as well as in his creation there is an aesthetic perfection that delights. God exhibits the beauty of holiness. His creation not only operates successfully but in many aspects is sublime. God may simply enjoy the process of creating. It may be more like the process of a drama, one that we would hate to see end too soon. Aesthetic experiences are intrinsically valuable. They are not always a means to a further end. Thus time and efficiency are irrelevant. The engineering paradigm assumes that God should get it all over with as quickly as possible. But for God, this is meaningless. He is not constrained by time. Let the play go on. At his right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Supporting the Concept of God the Artist
For the theist there are two major approaches we can use to support the idea that God creates as an artist more than as an engineer: biblical scriptures and philosophy.
Scripture
The Genesis creation account is in the form of Hebrew poetry. Since no one takes the Bible literally (not even those who say they do take literally references to the “four corners of the earth” or that the opponents of Jesus were literally vipers or that someone might have a log in their eye) one must use common sense and consider the literary genre one is dealing with. The Bible contains, history, poetry, allegories, parables, anecdotes, proverbs and more. We must ask what the original hearers would have understood the scripture to mean. Would they recognize it as poetry or prose, for example? In the modern translations of the Bible the three creation chapters (Genesis 1-3) are in a form that English speakers recognize as poetry. Is poetry a suitable medium for telling us about creation? I would answer affirmatively. In instances like this, the poetic medium conveys a more profound insight than would a scientific description. Besides, if God had given us the scientific story, probably not even our greatest cosmologists and physicists and mathematicians would be able to grasp it, since our understanding of the universe is still primitive compared to what it will be a thousand years from now. And the Genesis account has to make sense to semi-literate people many thousands of years ago. The first rule of communication is to use concepts and language your hearers can understand.
In comparison to other contemporary creation myths, the Genesis account is remarkable. No outlandish tales of gods cutting themselves into pieces to form the earth and the sky or to create the castes of human society . Most impressive of all, the order of events is precisely what modern science requires, spoken as though the poet were watching it all from a vantage point on Earth. First, a flash of light (the Big Bang?). Next the oceans and land masses. Vegetation comes before animals and before the clouds covering the earth open to reveal the sun and the moon. Then animal life as we know it (without the aid of microscopes and telescopes), and finally human beings.
But the point I want to emphasize is this. All through the process God is pictured as taking delight in what he is creating. Like an artist who steps back from his painting to view the latest refinements, God says, “That’s cool!” Or like a playwright who has the cast go through a draft of the latest act, God takes joy at how it is progressing.
Many references in the poetry of the Psalms and poetic passages in writings like that of Isaiah show similar signs of God being an artist. Science (as Newton believed) traces the creative ways of God, giving us details about how and when the creative effulgence of God the Artist manifests itself in what we call the natural world. Thus we find biblical support for thinking of God as an artist more than a mere engineer.
What can philosophy add to this thesis?
Philosophy
When we say that the cosmos at large and life in its minutest forms is breathtakingly wondrous, we give testimony to the creative energy of God. In my worldview, everything is being upheld by the infinite imagination of the Divine Playwright.
Think of it this way. We are living within the daydreams of God. Picture us as characters in his daydreams. Should God ever stop thinking of us (creating and sustaining us by the word of his power), we would cease to exist. Just as the characters in our human daydreams exist only in so far as we think about them and keep their creative story going, so God sustains the universe by the power of his imagination. Our universe is an amazing production. God devised special details, such as how there could constantly be a sunrise and a sunset on our planet at every instant of its history (talk about beauty!), as well as grand sweeping motifs, such as the story of redemption. These billboards advertise, “God maintains justice while rescuing his masterpiece from hell and destruction” (talk about drama).
Philosophically, we notice that all people who wonder about the meaning of life and the origin and destiny of the universe stand in awe of its power and sublimity, whether they believe in a creator or not. Some theologians, taking the idea of love as originated by Jesus of Nazareth, sentimentalize it to the degree that they cannot bear the thought of creatures having to prey upon others. We have seen that Darwin thought the idea of God creating a world of nature “red in tooth and claw” was obscene. Yet from an artistic standpoint these messy aspects show that the theme has artistic integrity. The drama requires that God himself become “prey” to effect salvation. Everything that exists does so only by taking from something already existing and incorporating it into its own life cycle. This is true of the formation of galaxies, stars and planetary bodies. It is true of all organic life. Some who are on the squeamish side find it abhorrent to eat the flesh of animals (especially those that they imagine have a soulful look in their eyes). They forget that they exist every day only by ingesting living things. Even carrots and beans “make the supreme sacrifice” at our hands so we can incorporate their vital elements into our bodies. And if Berkeley is correct, we are all maintaining our existence by drawing on the life force of God’s energy—an energy so vast that its “output dial” never registers a surge no matter how great the energy demand. This again shows the consistency of the Artist who is directing the drama. He will pull off a masterpiece in the end, when all the confusing twists and turns of the plot come together in the final act. Some, evidently, do not like the play at all and will spend eternity picking at its faults. Others will yield themselves to their own part in drama of salvation and join the Artist in the “after-party” to revel in its masterful production.
Maybe God is, as most artists are, bored with engineering. He can make stuff that merely “works” without much effort. But artists play with ever-changing possibilities, not mere repetitive functioning. The motive? They do it for the sheer joy of it and to show they can do it. To bring out talents deep within them in a public medium so others can enjoy it and admire it. Similarly, God brings forth his masterpiece to show what he is capable of—what theologians call “for his glory”—and to enable other intelligent beings to enjoy and admire this “Greatest Story Ever Told.”
Evaluation
We have suggested that the reasoning that Darwin used to support his theory of evolution is not as strictly scientific as is often supposed, but incorporates metaphysical and theological opinions that are open to objection. Darwin, and those who still reason as he did, are prey to the perils of an improper metaphysical paradigm and hence to faulty conclusions.
The question of God’s relation to creation is still open, and theists have nothing to fear in pursuing new avenues of understanding.
If it is true, as theists say, that God is a person, then God can be the immediate cause of events, in contrast to the 19th century thinkers whose suppositions Darwin took for granted. We have seen how the dominant paradigm of the 19th century motivated philosophers and theologians to distance God from creation in order to maintain God’s moral perfection relative to moral evil. The same line of thinking required Darwin to distance God from biological creation in order to maintain God’s moral perfection relative to natural evil. But if this attempt to insulate God from events in the world fails—as it does for Darwin—then God must be distanced not merely to a point of irrelevance (deism) or finitude (Mill), but eventually to non-existence (Nietzsche).
In the 20th century these very concepts and the logical consequences that follow from them would birth the ultimate “finite god” movement on the part of those who, unlike Mill, still believed that God is a real being who created the universe, Peter A. Bertocci interpreted the Christian life as a struggle against evil in which we humans must come to God’s aid in order to hasten his eventual triumph over evil. The next step in this line of thinking came with the Death of God movement in which theologians Hamilton and Altizer proposed that the God who created the universe actually annihilated himself upon the cross of Jesus. God is no longer with us, but we live on the inheritance he so heroically bequeathed us.
We have seen that Darwin didn’t believe in the God of Leibniz (the engineer of the best of all possible worlds) or the God of Kant (the final judge whose existence is a moral postulate necessary to make sense of our human quest for justice). But this “God of the Philosophers” is not the only possibility.
There is the God of the Scriptures, whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts. But for many philosophers and for Darwin, it was either the Victorian God (who is, after all, like us) or no God at all. Evidently it never occurred to them to re-examine their understanding of God, to think of alternative explanations. They might even have considered the intelligent Teleological God within Nature as conceived by Aristotle. Or perhaps the ineffable aspects of the God of Scripture, whose ways are revealed only to those who come before Him in humility.
Here Berkeley’s subjective idealism presents an avenue for creative thinking for us. If we take literally the statement of Acts 17:24, “In him (Christ as God) we live and move and have our being,” we have another intriguing possibility. God may be related to the creation in a way that merges his roles of creator and sustainer. It may be that the creation story, conveyed in the sublime poetry of Genesis 1 and 2, is God’s attempt to reveal to us how he provides the natural context for our lives. Genesis was addressed to a society that had a limited understanding of the natural world (scientific knowledge was just emerging) and needed to be understandable to people who had been slaves for centuries and were for the most part illiterate.
So God reveals himself in Genesis using categories they could readily grasp. Just as the Hebrews did their work with a rhythm of six days work and one of rest, so the Creator pictures himself in that familiar framework. Additionally, human beings must preserve what they have made by providing maintenance. So God pictures himself as the God of Providence. God first creates, takes a break, and thereafter shifts to a providential role. But is this how God looks at it from his perspective, or more how we look at it from a human perspective?
It may be that a full disclosure of God’s way with the world, while not contradicting the truth of the Genesis account, may be amenable to the paradigm of God as Artist. Berkeley suggested that the universe is constantly sustained by the power of God. If God were to stop the energy flow of creation, the universe would disappear. This agrees with the Scripture that says, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” God never ceases to create.
According to this theory, a miracle is not adding something to nature that is foreign, coming from “outside” and that violates immutable laws of nature. It is more like an intensification of the energy that holds all things together. God does not make a perfect machine, wind it up and then let it go on—the perfect perpetual motion machine—as 18th century philosophers suggested. God provides for creation constantly. A miracle is when God’s sustaining energy surprises us. It is not an unwarranted disruption of something that should not need tinkering. It is more like a surprise twist in a novel or play that brings delight to the audience. It is like the flow of a musical masterpiece where the continuum of sounds requires the seamless energy of the musicians sounding their instruments and in which an unexpected chord or cadence makes us sit up and take special notice. It satisfies us, even though the Artist (in this case God) chooses something surprising (miracles?), given the ordinary processes we have become used to. God delights in his creation. He is constantly creating new aspects. Creation and providence are inseparable and ongoing.
The God Darwin rejected is not the God who actually exists. He is a straw God. Darwin’s God is a lot like Darwin, who found so many aspects of nature detestable. So Darwin tried, unsuccessfully, to improve God. “Why can’t God be more like us?” he seems to ask. “Why can’t God be more rational, more refined, more Victorian? If I were God I certainly would not do as this God does. I could do a better job at creating and managing the world.” Darwin prefers what I call a “cold God” who produces clockwork.
Yet Darwin is right in one respect: his God would not create a universe like the one we have. This “cold God” is the God Darwin didn’t believe in. While others tried to sanitize nature by glossing over some of its realities, we must credit Darwin with at least maintaining an honest eye for facts. But his conclusion does not follow from those facts. Rather than searching for a more accurate understanding of the living God, Darwin gave up on God altogether.
The true and living God is bigger than any of our formulations of his nature. His ways are not our ways. Just as Job was finally reduced to silent awe in God’s presence, so we do well to humble ourselves. Our understanding of the world of nature is primitive still. Our understanding of the God who designed and now executes the world as his work of art is small. I suggest that a shift in our paradigm for God the Creator may open a fresh avenue of understanding. God may be more like an Artist—a “warm God” who draws us to enjoy the surprises only he can design. He is transcendent but also immanent. He is mysterious in so many ways. He cannot be fully fathomed by the human intellect. If he hadn’t revealed himself, we should never have discovered the warmth of his heart for his creatures—even though he does not shrink from making a world that at times delights us but also frightens and disturbs us. The facts that science so painstakingly uncovers are not incompatible with this God. The conflict between science and God is unnecessary.
Conclusion
Let’s review several theoretical options that present themselves for philosophic consideration.
One is that the universe is the product of random, unguided forces. As Francis Schaeffer put it, “the impersonal + infinite time + chance = the cosmos. Carl Sagan took this position when he opened the 1980 PBS program Cosmos by stating that the universe is all there is, all there ever has been, and all there ever will be. For this sweeping philosophical statement (in a program passed off as pure science) he offered no supporting justification.
A second theoretical option is that the universe is the product of a divine directional system such as the God of Aristotle, whose self-absorbed thinking processes draw or guide all events in the cosmos into an orderly structure. This enables us to detect the laws of nature. This God does not even know the universe exists and does not care, even though the final cause of all things resides in God’s nature, drawing all things toward perfection.
A third is “god-in-nature” as Hegel may have conceived it: an impersonal but rational being objectifying itself in nature and understanding itself in human thought. The process of evolution here would entail conflict—the conflict of opposites—that always moves toward an ultimate and perfect conclusion. In the end, all reality becomes completely rational and hence meaningful.
A fourth is a theistic but finite God whose limitations produce defects that result in imperfections and sufferings in creation. We alluded to this earlier in reference to Mill’s idea of a finite God.
A fifth is the God of biblical theism, an infinite personal supreme being—a God who can create any universe he chooses that is consistent with his nature and his will. Being finite, our understanding of God is extremely limited. But we can grasp the idea that God’s nature includes what we think of as an artist’s skills. Thus we can understand how the universe (what little we know of it) could be as it is—in all its puzzling variety and seemingly “messy” aspects.
Currently known facts about microevolution do not adequately support the first option—evolutionism, the philosophic theory advocated by many scientists who follow the philosophy of Darwin. Thus the others remain as legitimate possibilities.
Of those possibilities, the last option is compatible with orthodox Christian philosophy and is my preference. It is the most satisfactory explanation presently known to us. God is the infinite-personal Supreme Being and also the Grand Artist, who incorporates astounding engineering elements into something far more impressive—the awe-inspiring and beautiful world shown in those breath-taking photographs of the infinitesimal intricacies of micro-organisms and the sweeping grandeur of the galaxies.
While the task of plumbing the mysteries of the world and of God will always be an unfinished business (thus scientists should go forward with their task), the facts (and God knows them all) and belief in an ever-creating God are compatible.
Meanwhile, let us be open-minded as we ponder the wonders of the world. As we honor the God whose eternal power and glory are so evident only humility can accept the premise that, despite the knowledge we are gaining each day, we know very little. Let us open not only our minds but also our whole being to the Creator. Pascal, a notable 17th century scientist, came to the consolation of faith not by his brilliant philosophical mind but by an inner experience of the God of Jesus Christ that both humbled and thrilled him. “The heart” he then said, finds “reasons the mind knows not of.”
“We know in part and we prophesy in part.” But when he reveals himself more fully, we shall see face to face and know as we are known.
And then at last we shall be satisfied.
Resources
The Creation-Evolution Controversy. www.kiva.net/%7Ekls/controversy4.html
Cornelius Hunter: Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazsos Press, 2001
James W. Gustafson: The Quest for Truth: an Introduction to Philosophy, 5th edition. Acton, MA: Copley Custom Publishing, 2004
Nathan Aviezer: In the Beginning…Biblical Creation and Science. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc. 1990 ISBN 0-88125-328-6 The author is professor of physics, Bar-Ilan University
James W. Gustafson
August 29, 2005
The substance of this paper is based on a provocative book by Cornelius G. Hunter titled Darwin’s God. I intend to show that Hunter’s conclusions support the need for a new paradigm in our thinking about God in his relation to the world—what theologians discuss in terms of creation and providence . I will draw on ideas from philosophers as diverse as Pascal, John Stuart Mill, George Berkeley, Hegel and Karl Marx and attempt a recommendation for conceiving God in terms of artist rather than engineer.
Although we live in what might be called the twilight of rationalistic enlightenment philosophy, we are still too much influenced by its paradigm of autonomous reason and scientific materialism and its theological companion, the deistic view of God. While scientific materialism has been successful in improving the technological aspects of life, it seems to be bankrupt as a support for the life of shalom. Scientific materialism has been often criticized for creating a worldview that allows de-humanizing human life, humanizing non-human life, and trivializing and marginalizing God. It has contributed to an unintended consequence among many in the general populace—reducing life to acquiring material affluence and personal power and pleasure, thus denying the spiritual nature of mankind. Hence our quest for fulfillment—inherent in the human heart—lies unfulfilled. As a result we see the proliferation of unrest of soul, dysfunction in relationships, including marriage and family, and other trends that promise to increase social disintegration, international tensions and environmental degradation. While not a direct cause, scientific materialism has contributed to a climate friendly to this lifestyle. Darwin played a key role in establishing its dominance in western thinking. Yet in contrast to this, and perhaps because of it, we now see a mounting interest in spiritual matters, though often outside the context of the God of the Bible.
Darwin’s “evolution revolution” rested upon certain assumptions about metaphysical reality—assumptions that were commonly made by those following the rationalistic method of scientific materialism. While claiming to be wholly scientific, Darwinism employs philosophic arguments to prop up its claims. Hunter shows how conclusions favoring evolution depend as much on Darwin’s concept of God and creation as on his scientific observations. It can be put as follows:
1. Natural phenomena are due either to a) special creation or to b) unguided evolution of natural processes.
2. Since the empirical facts are not what the theory of special creation predicts, creation of species by the direct hand of God (a) must be false.
3. Therefore the theory of evolution (b) must be true.
The logic of Darwin’s reasoning contains several weaknesses, chief of which are his simplistic concept of God the creator and his dependence on a faulty application of the process of elimination.
In addition, Darwin’s understanding of nature, while consistent with the state of science in his time, contributes to his misunderstanding of God. As Hunter points out, evolutionists to this day show a primitive understanding of who God is according to Christian theism and thus fall prey to the same logical errors that Darwin made. I shall give an outline of this in what follows.
I. God. Darwin’s concept pictures God as an engineer whose cardinal virtue is efficiency and theoretical perfection. Darwin could not reconcile such a Creator with natural evil. (Moral evil might be justified by the freewill theodicy. But Darwin was troubled by natural evil. ) The God of biblical theism, however, is more like an artist who creates a story designed to show his glory to a delighted audience of men and angels. As in every skillful drama, darkness and calamity are required to show the power and genius of the creating artist.
II. Nature. Darwin’s understanding of nature was also limited by the insights of Newtonian physics: the world is a fine-tuned machine that operates by fixed natural laws, such as the law of gravitation. Darwin—no fault to him—knew nothing of how the world works at molecular, atomic or sub-atomic levels. As a scientist he might have been expected to show more humility in light of the accepted dogma that science can reach no higher than probability in any of its conclusions, if for no other reason than that our observations are but an infinitesimal slice of the events going on in the universe at any given time, not to mention our relative ignorance of events that occurred over the eons of primordial time. The scientist’s bible ought to contain a verse like this: “We know in part because we observe in part. Therefore, let us prophesy in part.”
Although a layman regarding science, I have always had a love for it and have followed its new discoveries with much interest. Some of what scientists now tell us seems so counter-intuitive that it strains credibility. For example, take the complexity of organic life at the cellular level. Not only is the single cell a universe of incredibly complex activity, but also events at the molecular level within the cell are even more astonishing. Molecular transactions and protein exchanges at the chemical level can occur millions of times per second. And there are many types of chemical processes going on. The cell is not a simple building block of life. It is more like a miniature galaxy. Naturally we cannot fault Darwin for not knowing what was unknowable at the time. But I think we can fault him for not being more cautious and tentative in his conclusions. Darwin did allow that his theory of evolution (by random variation in the context of natural selection) would be defeated if we ever discovered creatures whose survival depends on features that could not have risen gradually over time. And yet he was zealous to come to a firm conclusion that his theory was the correct one. Why was Darwin so eager?
Hunter makes the case that Darwin was driven by his desire to rule out the claim of God’s special creation of biological organisms. He was as much trying to defeat the philosophic claim that God was directly responsible for nature as to establish evolution as an alternate explanation. Why was Darwin so concerned about this?
Whenever a scientist speaks of God, he leaves the realm of science per se and steps into the realm of philosophical speculation—in this case into metaphysics and theology. Darwin stepped over this boundary. In fact, it can be said that his theory of the evolution of species by unguided natural processes provided him a way to rid himself of uneasiness stemming from his worldview. His motivation is not purely scientific—following evidence whether it confirms or denies the hypothesis in question. It seems that Darwin wanted his theory to be the correct one.
A major debate among scientists (primarily geologists and biologists) in Darwin’s day was the role of God in the governance of the natural world. What troubled many enlightenment philosophers and theologians, such as Leibniz, was the unseemliness of implicating God in the moral and natural evils of the created order. The Bible, on the one hand, does not shrink from admitting that God is the cause of calamities and judgments, both human and natural, by his direct decree. “I bring calamity,” says the Lord God (Isaiah 45:7). He brought the flood as a judgment upon the evil of mankind. He not only sends rain to the just and the unjust, but he allows the righteous to suffer and the wicked to prosper. He selects some for his favor and others for his wrath. These mostly Old Covenant pronouncements were increasingly embarrassing to thinking people in the enlightenment era of which Darwin was a part. The Bible sees these events as unintended consequences of human rebellion against God (the Fall of Man), resulting in the whole of nature being out of joint until the new heaven and the new earth reverses the Fall of Man and all of its effects.
The 17th century enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity. Whether he succeeded in his goal of showing how Christian teachings were coherent when understood properly and thus should satisfy the philosophical mind is debatable. But it is an example of the often unspoken assumption of the Enlightenment that only rationally defensible doctrines and events can be admitted to our body of knowledge. As philosophers picked at the allegedly irrational elements of biblical faith, they slowly redefined God into what Pascal had earlier derided as the “God of the philosophers”—a bloodless abstraction, a mere concept. God was an idea to be understood more than a person to know. God was being reduced to something the philosophic mind could be comfortable with, replacing the unpredictable and therefore embarrassing the God of the Bible. Darwin is of this mindset. Natural evil was not compatible with a rational creation in which God created every creature directly.
Prior to Darwin, philosophers and theologians had tried to insulate God from moral evil by various theodicies but did not adequately address natural evil. They relied mostly on the free-will theodicy—God created creatures with free will who abused their freedom, bringing sin and evil into the created order. Thus God is not the creator of evil. While God creates the conditions that make evil possible (autonomous free will), he does so to create the conditions necessary for the highest good. Love, the crown of God’s moral and communicable attributes, stemming as it does from His nature, requires that creatures give love of their own free will.” Coerced love” is an oxymoron. There is no such thing as “programmed-to-love” at all times. One could imagine a machine designed always to do and say the loving act and word. But if it cannot say, “I hate you,” its “I love you” is meaningless. Love implies free will. But free will brings with it ipso facto, inescapably, the conditions needed for moral evil also. Therefore, God, the author of free will, is not the author of or an agent of evil.
Evidently Darwin was aware of all this. But while philosophers had thus addressed the problem of moral evil (whether successfully or not is still debated), Darwin, in his study of biological organisms, was face to face with natural evil. Alfred Lord Tennyson expressed the disturbing truth poetically with this line: “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Darwin observed the agonizing death often suffered by the victims of carnivores, many of which are eaten alive. He noted that parasitic wasps could survive only by slowly consuming the host caterpillar. Multiply such examples by the thousands, and you have before your empirically trained eyes a scene that does not sit comfortably with the proprieties of Victorian gentlemen. The world of nature is a bloody business. Could God have designed such a world? Darwin was troubled—though not as a scientist. For science deals with what is, not with what ought to be. It traces linkages that explain how elements of nature are connected in terms of causes and effects, not in terms of reasons and values.
But Darwin could not compartmentalize. He could not insulate his understanding of biology from his broader worldview. Hunter shows in detail how Darwin actually appealed to his view of God as he constructed his case for evolution: we know species originate by unguided natural causes because God would not have created the world as we know it to be through observation.
Hence our syllogism noted previously. If God creates biological species, we can predict that nature would be furnished with perfect organisms that survive without cruelty. But nature is replete with imperfect organisms surviving by predation and competition. Therefore we can conclude that God cannot have created the biological world as we find it. Notice that Darwin has introduced a value component into his supposedly scientific reasoning—cruelty.
In reasoning about this, Darwin assumed that there were only two possibilities: either God created every species perfectly pre-adapted for its niche in the world, or species came into being by unguided influences independent of divine activity.
By the process of elimination, Darwin had shown divine creation to be false. Hence evolution must be true. Darwin and many biologists since have used this logic. Having convinced themselves of the absence of a Creator, they consciously or unconsciously interpret the empirical data to support evolution. Hunter shows in detail how a good many events in nature that count against the theory of unguided evolution are glossed to fit the evolutionary paradigm.
So where did Darwin go wrong, thus starting his successors down a path where the theory of evolution would be considered a proven fact rather than a possibility?
I suggest the answer lies in Darwin’s philosophical worldview. Darwin’s God is too small. His theology is simplistic, even though it was the common view in his time. What might Darwin have thought if he had had better understanding of biblical theology? This question now leads us toward a new formulation of the paradigm for the relation of God to creation. While acknowledging that all paradigms are incomplete, I realize that we tend to think of God in terms of some sort of model that we think is appropriate. The way Darwin thought of God limited his ability to reconcile the Creator and the created order.
Inadequate 19th Century Models of God
The Deistic Model The God revealed in the Bible is a mysterious being in many ways. He is not averse to tinkering with the affairs of men to achieve his purposes. He blesses and curses. He gives life and he takes life. He pardons sometimes while at other times bringing fearful judgments upon individuals and nations. Enlightenment philosophers disliked these “messy” events.
Actually, they tended to make God in their own image—a common weakness among us mortals. God, if there is one, must be a like a Victorian gentleman. Or at least God must be a rationally consistent agent—perhaps acting in line with Kant’s categorical imperative. Since an enlightened intelligence would not create a messy world like the one we find, we can conclude that God must not have created this messy world. While some tried to pretend that nature was completely perfect, eternally harmonious, and full of beauty that honors the perfections of the Creator, Darwin could not deceive himself in this regard in light of his observations. He could not agree.
So Darwin begins by trying to distance God from the events of nature. He agreed with many philosophers of his time that God governs indirectly through natural laws that operate on their own, once set in motion. God is perhaps like a parent who engenders general principles in the children and then steps back and lets things work out from there. In other words God creates the rules (natural laws) and then steps out of the way. God does not directly cause each bolt of lightning. Nor does God create each species directly.
Another way to express this is to say that Darwin applied a deistic notion of God to biological phenomena. God does not tinker with his product. Being perfect his creation is perfect. So he lets it operate on its own without interference. Theologians and philosophers thus dismissed miracles as fanciful embellishments imagined by primitive people, who misguidedly sought to strengthen their accounts with fictitious miracles. God is such that his perfections shine on their own. There is no need to make him into a miracle-worker. Darwin thought that his theory got God off the hook. God creates species by the law of variation and natural selection. This accounts for the untidy and often gruesome aspects of biological reality.
But it was not long before Darwin’s God shrank to a vanishing point. Perhaps, it was soon said, the God of Darwin does not exist at all.
And if God is not needed to account for the details of biological events, the same principle can be applied to sociological events. This application of the idea of evolution was proposed by Auguste Comte—God is an agent only in primitive explanations of the world—and underscored by Frederick Nietzsche—God is dead. That is, there is nothing to explain in human cultures for which the hypothesis of God is needed.
Whether Darwin intended it or not, he set biology—as well as sociology and psychology—on the road to agnosticism and finally atheism. Thus began the acrimonious war between science and theistic religion.
This unfortunate result is unnecessary. We know that nature is far greater than what we have observed thus far. We also know that the doctrine of God is more complex than Darwin’s concept.
We now know that the world Darwin tried to explain is much messier than the “mess” he observed. The non-biological world has much in it that appears to be irrational in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Let me give three examples. 1. Neutrinos can pass through the Earth in seconds and never hit a single atom of the seemingly infinite number that make up our planet. 2. The observation of particles changes them. 3. A change in the charge in a particle on one side of the galaxy is instantly compensated for by an opposite change in its counterpart many light-years distant.
In light of the countless mind-boggling events contemporary science describes, it seems to this writer that we know so little about both God and about nature that humility is in order in all our pronouncements. We should be tentative in our conclusions. But Darwin and many contemporary defenders of evolution state that the theory is now an undeniable fact.
The “clock-work” paradigm of William Paley’s universe was used by Darwin as a foil against which to show the inevitability of the truth of his theory. Now that the clockwork image is passé, Darwin’s arguments no longer convince.
The Engineering Model. Another weakness in the metaphysical trends of the 19th century that Darwin used in his argument lies in the paradigm of God as “the Consummate Engineer.”
It is not at all surprising that philosophers of Darwin’s day conceived of God in engineering terms. We tend to make God in our own image, according to whatever attribute of human nature is most admired at a given time in history. And engineering efficiency was prized then.
Ever since the invention of the printing press, we kept perfecting ways to increase efficiency and improve production of goods and services. With the coming of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, the prospects for increased efficiency and consequently of the improvement of life seemed limitless to many in the 19th century. We would soon be able to provide necessities and even luxuries so efficiently that many of the age-old ills of mankind would disappear. Poverty would be overcome. Leisure would increase. Culture would flourish as education, medicine, letters, religion and the like found an increasing place in the life of even the common people. In such a world of plenty, wars would become a thing of the past. This promise raised hopes for various utopian dreams. In Darwin’s time, Karl Marx proposed a method for engineering a world of peace and plenty by careful and benevolent reform of the means of production and distribution. He thought we could engineer a society whose ideals were formerly assigned to an otherworldly kingdom of God—from each according to ability, to each according to need. Marx claimed we could bring this about in the here and now by scientific measures (and a temporary period of violence).
This belief in the perfectibility of man by education and technology is the hallmark of modern liberalism. We believe we have the capacity to engineer a bright future for ourselves. We can overcome the cloying weights of the past. We can direct the future development of individuals and of societies to create a world of peace and prosperity. We may even defeat death by genetic manipulation and cloning. Free from the restrictions of the past and able to determine the future of our species, we can bring about what previously was assigned to another world, a heavenly world. Such was the confidence in engineering, both technological engineering and social engineering.
Nietzsche, following his predecessor Arthur Schopenhauer, was almost alone among 19th century philosophers in questioning this confidence in the innate rationality of mankind and its utopian vision. He appreciated the irrational volitional impulses that drive human conduct. Nietzsche anticipated the failure of those utopians who thought the coming 20th century would be a Golden Age of peace and prosperity. For all his lack of democratic sentiments, Nietzsche had a more biblical view of human nature than his idealistic counterparts. Man is not the rational animal, the benign animal. He is the competitive animal, asserting his will in competition for dominance. Nietzsche saw the implications of Darwinism for the human scene with remarkable clarity. In a way, he had a more biblical view of human nature than the optimistic thinkers of the enlightenment who preceded him.
For thinking people of Darwin’s day, however, God was the Celestial Mechanic of Isaac Newton’s worldview. He must do things with perfect efficiency and economy. He would not waste material or time with trial and error experiments. He is omniscient and omnipotent. He gets things right the first time.
This concept of “God the Engineer” impelled John Stuart Mill, a contemporary of Darwin, to argue for a finite God. The logic is simple. A perfect God (the God of Christianity) would do things in a perfect way. That is, his creation will be the most efficient imaginable. The assumption is that everyone who creates something does it as efficiently as possible, given his or her capacities. That is, we make sure the end product is produced to the highest quality in the shortest time possible.
For example, no competent engineer would design a new mode of transportation that consumes more time and energy than designs we already are using. And he will not take years to design something if he can design it in a few months. The quality and efficiency of the product indicates the engineering skill of its creator.
Therefore, if the world is the product of “creative forethought,” we can infer the capabilities of the creator by examining the product: the created world. How long does it take for the end product to be finished? What is the quality of that product?
Theists say that the creator has infinite intelligence and creative power. Logically, that means that the product should exhibit perfect quality (no flaws) and be finished in no time. We know from observation that the product (the world as we know it) is not perfect—there is sin and evil alongside much that is good. And it has already used up eons of time.
John Stuart Mill concludes, then, that the product is not perfect—at least not yet. If the world is a work-in-progress, it is obviously taking the creative intelligence (God) a long time to get the product finished. If God exists and if God wants a situation where his praise and glory is shared in an environment of peace and joy (heaven), then why didn’t he make it that way—perfectly—in the beginning? Why does God need so much time to accomplish his ends? Therefore, if there is a creative intelligence, Mill reasoned that this intelligence must be limited. God cannot be all-powerful, because he takes so much time to get the job done.
Darwin, while using the concept of God so defined in the area of biological creation, convinced himself, as did Mill, that the theistic God and the facts of the world cannot be reconciled. Since facts are undeniable, God must be reduced either to a finite being limited in power or to a non-existent fiction.
But is this the only conclusion open to us?
A New Paradigm: God as Artist
What if the attributes of God can be analyzed in a different way—a way that never occurred to the leading philosophers of the 19th century? Perhaps the proper paradigm to use in considering God as the creator is not an engineering model at all.
We might do well to think of God as an artist rather than an engineer. Efficiency may be no more than “a hobgoblin of small minds.” If God is infinite and beyond space and time, why need he be concerned with efficiency? We humans have an eye on efficiency because we have such a short time to realize our goals. We have an expiration date affixed to us. Although we do not know precisely when our time will be up, we know the grains of sand are draining from the hourglass even as we speak. So if we want to accomplish anything, we need to be efficient.
But this does not constrain God. He is eternal. He has all the time in the world. If he created time, he can extend it as long as he wants.
Even in our human experience, there is one activity where the main criterion of success is not efficiency: the realm of art. I suggest that the idea of “God the Artist” may be a useful paradigm to replace “God the Engineer.”
If accomplishing your goal as efficiently as possible were the criterion for artistic excellence, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and some of the novels of Charles Dickens and other great writers from many world cultures would be disappointments. If their authors had been true geniuses, their works of art would not be so long! They would have been more efficient. Surely this is preposterous.
Would a symphony that is but a few minutes in duration be superior to Beethoven’s Ninth? Would a hymn of praise be better if its composer could have shrunk it to three minutes instead of six? Would the Taj Mahal be more beautiful if it had taken only two years to build or if it had been half the size? Would a painting be improved by simplifying baroque detail into a few creative strokes? Surely art is not the same as engineering.
Theists consider God to be an Artist. In his own person as well as in his creation there is an aesthetic perfection that delights. God exhibits the beauty of holiness. His creation not only operates successfully but in many aspects is sublime. God may simply enjoy the process of creating. It may be more like the process of a drama, one that we would hate to see end too soon. Aesthetic experiences are intrinsically valuable. They are not always a means to a further end. Thus time and efficiency are irrelevant. The engineering paradigm assumes that God should get it all over with as quickly as possible. But for God, this is meaningless. He is not constrained by time. Let the play go on. At his right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Supporting the Concept of God the Artist
For the theist there are two major approaches we can use to support the idea that God creates as an artist more than as an engineer: biblical scriptures and philosophy.
Scripture
The Genesis creation account is in the form of Hebrew poetry. Since no one takes the Bible literally (not even those who say they do take literally references to the “four corners of the earth” or that the opponents of Jesus were literally vipers or that someone might have a log in their eye) one must use common sense and consider the literary genre one is dealing with. The Bible contains, history, poetry, allegories, parables, anecdotes, proverbs and more. We must ask what the original hearers would have understood the scripture to mean. Would they recognize it as poetry or prose, for example? In the modern translations of the Bible the three creation chapters (Genesis 1-3) are in a form that English speakers recognize as poetry. Is poetry a suitable medium for telling us about creation? I would answer affirmatively. In instances like this, the poetic medium conveys a more profound insight than would a scientific description. Besides, if God had given us the scientific story, probably not even our greatest cosmologists and physicists and mathematicians would be able to grasp it, since our understanding of the universe is still primitive compared to what it will be a thousand years from now. And the Genesis account has to make sense to semi-literate people many thousands of years ago. The first rule of communication is to use concepts and language your hearers can understand.
In comparison to other contemporary creation myths, the Genesis account is remarkable. No outlandish tales of gods cutting themselves into pieces to form the earth and the sky or to create the castes of human society . Most impressive of all, the order of events is precisely what modern science requires, spoken as though the poet were watching it all from a vantage point on Earth. First, a flash of light (the Big Bang?). Next the oceans and land masses. Vegetation comes before animals and before the clouds covering the earth open to reveal the sun and the moon. Then animal life as we know it (without the aid of microscopes and telescopes), and finally human beings.
But the point I want to emphasize is this. All through the process God is pictured as taking delight in what he is creating. Like an artist who steps back from his painting to view the latest refinements, God says, “That’s cool!” Or like a playwright who has the cast go through a draft of the latest act, God takes joy at how it is progressing.
Many references in the poetry of the Psalms and poetic passages in writings like that of Isaiah show similar signs of God being an artist. Science (as Newton believed) traces the creative ways of God, giving us details about how and when the creative effulgence of God the Artist manifests itself in what we call the natural world. Thus we find biblical support for thinking of God as an artist more than a mere engineer.
What can philosophy add to this thesis?
Philosophy
When we say that the cosmos at large and life in its minutest forms is breathtakingly wondrous, we give testimony to the creative energy of God. In my worldview, everything is being upheld by the infinite imagination of the Divine Playwright.
Think of it this way. We are living within the daydreams of God. Picture us as characters in his daydreams. Should God ever stop thinking of us (creating and sustaining us by the word of his power), we would cease to exist. Just as the characters in our human daydreams exist only in so far as we think about them and keep their creative story going, so God sustains the universe by the power of his imagination. Our universe is an amazing production. God devised special details, such as how there could constantly be a sunrise and a sunset on our planet at every instant of its history (talk about beauty!), as well as grand sweeping motifs, such as the story of redemption. These billboards advertise, “God maintains justice while rescuing his masterpiece from hell and destruction” (talk about drama).
Philosophically, we notice that all people who wonder about the meaning of life and the origin and destiny of the universe stand in awe of its power and sublimity, whether they believe in a creator or not. Some theologians, taking the idea of love as originated by Jesus of Nazareth, sentimentalize it to the degree that they cannot bear the thought of creatures having to prey upon others. We have seen that Darwin thought the idea of God creating a world of nature “red in tooth and claw” was obscene. Yet from an artistic standpoint these messy aspects show that the theme has artistic integrity. The drama requires that God himself become “prey” to effect salvation. Everything that exists does so only by taking from something already existing and incorporating it into its own life cycle. This is true of the formation of galaxies, stars and planetary bodies. It is true of all organic life. Some who are on the squeamish side find it abhorrent to eat the flesh of animals (especially those that they imagine have a soulful look in their eyes). They forget that they exist every day only by ingesting living things. Even carrots and beans “make the supreme sacrifice” at our hands so we can incorporate their vital elements into our bodies. And if Berkeley is correct, we are all maintaining our existence by drawing on the life force of God’s energy—an energy so vast that its “output dial” never registers a surge no matter how great the energy demand. This again shows the consistency of the Artist who is directing the drama. He will pull off a masterpiece in the end, when all the confusing twists and turns of the plot come together in the final act. Some, evidently, do not like the play at all and will spend eternity picking at its faults. Others will yield themselves to their own part in drama of salvation and join the Artist in the “after-party” to revel in its masterful production.
Maybe God is, as most artists are, bored with engineering. He can make stuff that merely “works” without much effort. But artists play with ever-changing possibilities, not mere repetitive functioning. The motive? They do it for the sheer joy of it and to show they can do it. To bring out talents deep within them in a public medium so others can enjoy it and admire it. Similarly, God brings forth his masterpiece to show what he is capable of—what theologians call “for his glory”—and to enable other intelligent beings to enjoy and admire this “Greatest Story Ever Told.”
Evaluation
We have suggested that the reasoning that Darwin used to support his theory of evolution is not as strictly scientific as is often supposed, but incorporates metaphysical and theological opinions that are open to objection. Darwin, and those who still reason as he did, are prey to the perils of an improper metaphysical paradigm and hence to faulty conclusions.
The question of God’s relation to creation is still open, and theists have nothing to fear in pursuing new avenues of understanding.
If it is true, as theists say, that God is a person, then God can be the immediate cause of events, in contrast to the 19th century thinkers whose suppositions Darwin took for granted. We have seen how the dominant paradigm of the 19th century motivated philosophers and theologians to distance God from creation in order to maintain God’s moral perfection relative to moral evil. The same line of thinking required Darwin to distance God from biological creation in order to maintain God’s moral perfection relative to natural evil. But if this attempt to insulate God from events in the world fails—as it does for Darwin—then God must be distanced not merely to a point of irrelevance (deism) or finitude (Mill), but eventually to non-existence (Nietzsche).
In the 20th century these very concepts and the logical consequences that follow from them would birth the ultimate “finite god” movement on the part of those who, unlike Mill, still believed that God is a real being who created the universe, Peter A. Bertocci interpreted the Christian life as a struggle against evil in which we humans must come to God’s aid in order to hasten his eventual triumph over evil. The next step in this line of thinking came with the Death of God movement in which theologians Hamilton and Altizer proposed that the God who created the universe actually annihilated himself upon the cross of Jesus. God is no longer with us, but we live on the inheritance he so heroically bequeathed us.
We have seen that Darwin didn’t believe in the God of Leibniz (the engineer of the best of all possible worlds) or the God of Kant (the final judge whose existence is a moral postulate necessary to make sense of our human quest for justice). But this “God of the Philosophers” is not the only possibility.
There is the God of the Scriptures, whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts. But for many philosophers and for Darwin, it was either the Victorian God (who is, after all, like us) or no God at all. Evidently it never occurred to them to re-examine their understanding of God, to think of alternative explanations. They might even have considered the intelligent Teleological God within Nature as conceived by Aristotle. Or perhaps the ineffable aspects of the God of Scripture, whose ways are revealed only to those who come before Him in humility.
Here Berkeley’s subjective idealism presents an avenue for creative thinking for us. If we take literally the statement of Acts 17:24, “In him (Christ as God) we live and move and have our being,” we have another intriguing possibility. God may be related to the creation in a way that merges his roles of creator and sustainer. It may be that the creation story, conveyed in the sublime poetry of Genesis 1 and 2, is God’s attempt to reveal to us how he provides the natural context for our lives. Genesis was addressed to a society that had a limited understanding of the natural world (scientific knowledge was just emerging) and needed to be understandable to people who had been slaves for centuries and were for the most part illiterate.
So God reveals himself in Genesis using categories they could readily grasp. Just as the Hebrews did their work with a rhythm of six days work and one of rest, so the Creator pictures himself in that familiar framework. Additionally, human beings must preserve what they have made by providing maintenance. So God pictures himself as the God of Providence. God first creates, takes a break, and thereafter shifts to a providential role. But is this how God looks at it from his perspective, or more how we look at it from a human perspective?
It may be that a full disclosure of God’s way with the world, while not contradicting the truth of the Genesis account, may be amenable to the paradigm of God as Artist. Berkeley suggested that the universe is constantly sustained by the power of God. If God were to stop the energy flow of creation, the universe would disappear. This agrees with the Scripture that says, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” God never ceases to create.
According to this theory, a miracle is not adding something to nature that is foreign, coming from “outside” and that violates immutable laws of nature. It is more like an intensification of the energy that holds all things together. God does not make a perfect machine, wind it up and then let it go on—the perfect perpetual motion machine—as 18th century philosophers suggested. God provides for creation constantly. A miracle is when God’s sustaining energy surprises us. It is not an unwarranted disruption of something that should not need tinkering. It is more like a surprise twist in a novel or play that brings delight to the audience. It is like the flow of a musical masterpiece where the continuum of sounds requires the seamless energy of the musicians sounding their instruments and in which an unexpected chord or cadence makes us sit up and take special notice. It satisfies us, even though the Artist (in this case God) chooses something surprising (miracles?), given the ordinary processes we have become used to. God delights in his creation. He is constantly creating new aspects. Creation and providence are inseparable and ongoing.
The God Darwin rejected is not the God who actually exists. He is a straw God. Darwin’s God is a lot like Darwin, who found so many aspects of nature detestable. So Darwin tried, unsuccessfully, to improve God. “Why can’t God be more like us?” he seems to ask. “Why can’t God be more rational, more refined, more Victorian? If I were God I certainly would not do as this God does. I could do a better job at creating and managing the world.” Darwin prefers what I call a “cold God” who produces clockwork.
Yet Darwin is right in one respect: his God would not create a universe like the one we have. This “cold God” is the God Darwin didn’t believe in. While others tried to sanitize nature by glossing over some of its realities, we must credit Darwin with at least maintaining an honest eye for facts. But his conclusion does not follow from those facts. Rather than searching for a more accurate understanding of the living God, Darwin gave up on God altogether.
The true and living God is bigger than any of our formulations of his nature. His ways are not our ways. Just as Job was finally reduced to silent awe in God’s presence, so we do well to humble ourselves. Our understanding of the world of nature is primitive still. Our understanding of the God who designed and now executes the world as his work of art is small. I suggest that a shift in our paradigm for God the Creator may open a fresh avenue of understanding. God may be more like an Artist—a “warm God” who draws us to enjoy the surprises only he can design. He is transcendent but also immanent. He is mysterious in so many ways. He cannot be fully fathomed by the human intellect. If he hadn’t revealed himself, we should never have discovered the warmth of his heart for his creatures—even though he does not shrink from making a world that at times delights us but also frightens and disturbs us. The facts that science so painstakingly uncovers are not incompatible with this God. The conflict between science and God is unnecessary.
Conclusion
Let’s review several theoretical options that present themselves for philosophic consideration.
One is that the universe is the product of random, unguided forces. As Francis Schaeffer put it, “the impersonal + infinite time + chance = the cosmos. Carl Sagan took this position when he opened the 1980 PBS program Cosmos by stating that the universe is all there is, all there ever has been, and all there ever will be. For this sweeping philosophical statement (in a program passed off as pure science) he offered no supporting justification.
A second theoretical option is that the universe is the product of a divine directional system such as the God of Aristotle, whose self-absorbed thinking processes draw or guide all events in the cosmos into an orderly structure. This enables us to detect the laws of nature. This God does not even know the universe exists and does not care, even though the final cause of all things resides in God’s nature, drawing all things toward perfection.
A third is “god-in-nature” as Hegel may have conceived it: an impersonal but rational being objectifying itself in nature and understanding itself in human thought. The process of evolution here would entail conflict—the conflict of opposites—that always moves toward an ultimate and perfect conclusion. In the end, all reality becomes completely rational and hence meaningful.
A fourth is a theistic but finite God whose limitations produce defects that result in imperfections and sufferings in creation. We alluded to this earlier in reference to Mill’s idea of a finite God.
A fifth is the God of biblical theism, an infinite personal supreme being—a God who can create any universe he chooses that is consistent with his nature and his will. Being finite, our understanding of God is extremely limited. But we can grasp the idea that God’s nature includes what we think of as an artist’s skills. Thus we can understand how the universe (what little we know of it) could be as it is—in all its puzzling variety and seemingly “messy” aspects.
Currently known facts about microevolution do not adequately support the first option—evolutionism, the philosophic theory advocated by many scientists who follow the philosophy of Darwin. Thus the others remain as legitimate possibilities.
Of those possibilities, the last option is compatible with orthodox Christian philosophy and is my preference. It is the most satisfactory explanation presently known to us. God is the infinite-personal Supreme Being and also the Grand Artist, who incorporates astounding engineering elements into something far more impressive—the awe-inspiring and beautiful world shown in those breath-taking photographs of the infinitesimal intricacies of micro-organisms and the sweeping grandeur of the galaxies.
While the task of plumbing the mysteries of the world and of God will always be an unfinished business (thus scientists should go forward with their task), the facts (and God knows them all) and belief in an ever-creating God are compatible.
Meanwhile, let us be open-minded as we ponder the wonders of the world. As we honor the God whose eternal power and glory are so evident only humility can accept the premise that, despite the knowledge we are gaining each day, we know very little. Let us open not only our minds but also our whole being to the Creator. Pascal, a notable 17th century scientist, came to the consolation of faith not by his brilliant philosophical mind but by an inner experience of the God of Jesus Christ that both humbled and thrilled him. “The heart” he then said, finds “reasons the mind knows not of.”
“We know in part and we prophesy in part.” But when he reveals himself more fully, we shall see face to face and know as we are known.
And then at last we shall be satisfied.
Resources
The Creation-Evolution Controversy. www.kiva.net/%7Ekls/controversy4.html
Cornelius Hunter: Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazsos Press, 2001
James W. Gustafson: The Quest for Truth: an Introduction to Philosophy, 5th edition. Acton, MA: Copley Custom Publishing, 2004
Nathan Aviezer: In the Beginning…Biblical Creation and Science. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc. 1990 ISBN 0-88125-328-6 The author is professor of physics, Bar-Ilan University
posted by Jim Gustafson | 6:23 AM
1 Comments:
Something to think about.
Saju V
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