So in the silence of the soul I listen for the still small voice, which is God’s call to each of us to engage in the work of love and creativity, to bring new life into the world, and to care for it and nurture it during its years of vulnerability. And whenever I see people engaged in that work of love, I sense the divine presence brushing us with a touch so gentle you can miss it, and yet know beyond all possibility of doubt that this is what we are called on to live for, to ease the pain of those who suffer and become an agent of hope in the world.
That is a meaningful life. That is what life is when lived in the light of God’s presence, in answer to his call.
PART THREE
Faith and Its Challenges
11
Darwin
To claim the world as creation is not to denounce evolution and debunk science. To the contrary, it is to join in covenant with science in acknowledging creation’s integrity, as well as its giftedness and worth. To see the world as creation is to re-commit ourselves to its care, not as the fittest, most powerful creatures on the animal planet but as a species held uniquely responsible for creation’s flourishing.
William P. Brown1
We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being … Newton’s intelligence, therefore, comes from another intelligence.
Voltaire2
So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centres of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world.
Michael Polanyi3
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Max Planck4
There are three major challenges to religion. The first and deepest, addressed in the next chapter, arises from the very heart of monotheism itself and was first uttered by Abraham: ‘Shall the judge of all the Earth not do justice?’ (Genesis 18:25). How can the goodness of God coexist with the presence of evil and the suffering of the innocent? The second is a kind of mirror image of the first. It is, as it were, not our question of God but God’s question of us: How can religious people commit evil in the name of God? That is the subject of chapter 13. The third challenge – call it the clash between religion and science – varies from age to age, but it usually has the same form, first set out in the Bible in the story of the Tower of Babel.
Human beings discover a new science or technology: in the case of Babel, the art of making bricks. Breaking free from the limitations of the past, they feel as if they have become gods and they set about storming the heavens. Every new accession of knowledge or power has tempted humans into hubris. ‘Must we ourselves not become gods?’ asked Nietzsche.5
Perhaps Freud was right in a way he did not anticipate. He argued that the myth of Oedipus explained much of human behaviour including religion. We, especially sons, have a desire to murder our parents, especially fathers. We then feel guilty for this – Freud called it ‘the return of the repressed’ – and this guilt becomes the source of religion: the demanding, unEarthly voice of the murdered father.6
As a theory of religion, this may work for Greek myth; it cannot work for Abrahamic monotheism. In Greek myth the gods were hostile to humans. In Abrahamic monotheism, God loves humans, sets his image on them and creates space for them to exercise their freedom. The myth of Oedipus works much better as an explanation not of religious belief but of its opposite: atheism. People feel the need to pursue knowledge uninterruptedly and without constraint, and they can experience religion – the Church’s attitude to Galileo then, or to evolutionary theory now – as a constraint on that freedom. They can then feel the need to murder the beliefs and traditions of the past to create space for a future that is both human and free.7 Hence the anger of atheism and the intense desire to displace the Father-God. It can be atheism, not religion, that becomes a comforting illusion. We are free because there is no one to tell us what we may or may not do.
The idea that there is a conflict between religion and science draws heavily on Greek myth, specifically the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus was a figure unique among Greek deities, a god who liked human beings. For their sake he stole the secret of fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals. For this he was punished by Zeus. He was chained to a rock where each day an eagle ate his liver, which grew back each night so that it could be eaten again.
Embedded in this myth is a profound conviction that the universe is hostile to humankind, that knowledge and its pursuit are dangerous, even sinful, and that it is a zero-sum conflict in which either the gods or humankind win. Hence either religion or science, but not both. A trace of the myth of Prometheus survives in the form of one Christian reading of the first humans eating from the tree of knowledge, a sin for which they were exiled from paradise. On this reading, God does not want us to know.
But that is not the only way of understanding the story. Maimonides, for example, says that the tree of knowledge represented the wrong kind of knowledge: aesthetics, not physics or metaphysics. The fruit of the tree was ‘pleasing to the eye’. It represented appearance, not reality.8 Recall that when Adam and Eve ate it they did not suddenly understand a set of truths. Instead, they saw they were naked and they felt shame. Their sensibility shifted from the ear to the eye. They became more concerned with how things seemed than with the voice of God within the mind that we call the moral sense.
In Jewish tradition God wants us to pursue knowledge. The first thing Solomon asked for, and the first thing we ask for in our three-times-daily prayers, is wisdom, understanding and knowledge, and that includes science. Recall that the rabbis instituted a blessing over scientists, whether they shared Jewish faith or not. They also told a story precisely designed to negate the myth of Prometheus.
In Judaism, each week the Sabbath ends and secular time begins with a ceremony known as havdalah, literally ‘making distinctions’. It includes the lighting of a special candle. Explaining this candle, the rabbis said that Adam and Eve were created, and sinned, on the sixth day, Friday. They were sentenced to exile, but God deferred the punishment by twenty-four hours so that they could stay one full day – Sabbath – in paradise. As the Sabbath ended and night fell, they were afraid of their journey into the dark. So God taught them how to make fire and kindle a light.9 It is in memory of this that we light the havdalah candle. This is the counternarrative to Prometheus. We do not have to steal secrets from God. God wants us to know, and to use that knowledge responsibly.
The process of displacing God in the modern age began in 1796 with Laplace and his statement, in reply to Napoleon’s question as to where God was in his scientific system, Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse, ‘I have no need for that hypothesis.’ The mechanistic universe needed no ongoing interventions on the part of God; it seemed indeed to rule them out. Hence the attraction of Deism, the idea that, as it were, God designed the machine and set it in motion, and then retired from the scene. As a graffito I saw in my undergraduate years said, ‘God exists, it’s just that he doesn’t want to get involved.’
The challenge of Darwinism has seemed altogether deeper than this because it suggested that, at least as far as biology is concerned, life has not been mechanistic and thus designed. It has emerged as the result of a process that is random, fortuitous and blind. The existence of life, sentience, consciousness and Homo sapiens itself are all purely accidental. ‘Man’, wrote George Gaylord Simpson in The Meaning of Evolution, ‘is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.’10
If my argument in chapter 1 is correct, it becomes immediately clear why Darwinism has proved to be the single greatest challenge to religious faith, more unsettling to believers than, say, the assault of Marx or Freud or plain common-or-garden atheism. For I have argued that the fundamental is
sue of religious faith, specifically of Abrahamic monotheism, is the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of the human condition.
Darwinism, or at least the use made of Darwin by his latter-day followers, the new atheists, seemed to provide a compelling scientific demonstration of the meaninglessness of life. It happened by chance. No one planned it. There was no design, no purpose, no intended and foreseen outcome. There was no intentional act of creation, at least not of life. We are here because we are here, because that is how the random operations of chance and necessity – genetic mutation and natural selection – happened to occur. We might not have been. No wonder that Richard Dawkins said that Darwin for the first time made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.11 Darwinism seems to be proof of the meaninglessness of life.
But if my argument is correct, then the new atheists must also be wrong, for I have argued that the presence or absence of meaning is not, in and of itself, something that can be established by science. Meaning or meaninglessness is in the eye of the beholder. To give two obvious examples, the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, including works by Monet and Cézanne, created outrage among many traditionalists. This was not art as they knew it. So did the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which led to a riot. This was not music or dance as it had been before. But there was nothing chaotic or meaningless about either the paintings or the rhythms. They were precisely planned to achieve specific ends. It simply took time before people learned to see and hear in new ways.
So it is with Darwinism at many levels. At first it seemed to render life meaningless. This was not creation, design or, for that matter, Homo sapiens as people had been accustomed to thinking about them. It was shocking, unsettling, paradigm-shifting. To some, it still is. But it may just be that we have to think about creation, design and the emergence of order in new ways, not that they no longer exist.
The literature about Darwinism and creationism is vast, and overwhelmingly it consists of scientists arguing against religion and religious believers arguing against this or that finding of science. But again, if I am right, both literatures are misconceived. Science is not religion; religion is not science. Each has its own logic, its own way of asking questions and searching for the answers. The way of testing a scientific hypothesis is to do science, not read Scripture. The way of testing religion is to do religion – to ask, in total honesty and full understanding, is this really what God wants of us? It is not to make assertions about the truth or falsity of some scientific theory.
This is not an argument for compartmentalisation, seeing science and religion as did Steven J. Gould as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, two entirely separate worlds.12 They do indeed overlap because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being. It is instead an argument for conversation, hopefully even integration. For if science is about the world that is, and religion about the world that ought to be, then religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism. We will rely on miracles – and the rabbis ruled, ‘Don’t rely on miracles.’13
By the same token, science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking. As Einstein put it:
For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary … representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.14
It is precisely the space between the world that is and the world that ought to be that is, or should be, the arena of conversation between science and religion, and each should be open to the perceptions of the other. The question is neither, ‘Does Darwinism refute religion?’ nor, ‘Does religion refute Darwinism?’ Rather: ‘How does each shed light on the other?’ and, ‘What new insights does Darwinism offer religion?’ and, ‘What insights does religion offer to Darwinism?’ Those are the questions to which I want briefly to offer some thoughts.
Darwinism has immense religious implications.
First, it tells us that God delights in diversity. There are, for example, forty thousand different varieties of beetle, an impressive number by any standards. The God who created life in its staggering variety is clearly not a Platonist, uninterested in particulars. The rabbis sensed it better when they said, ‘Even those creatures you hold superfluous in the world, such as the flies and fleas and gnats, they too are part of the creation of the world. Through all does the Holy One, blessed be he, make manifest his mission, even through the serpent, even through the gnat, even through the frog.’15 Biodiversity is a source of wonder to the psalmist:
How many are your works, O God.
You have made them all in wisdom.
The Earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and wide.
There the creeping things beyond count,
Living things great and small.
(Psalm 104:24–5)
God loves diversity, not uniformity. That is a fact of theological as well as ecological significance. Every attempt to impose uniformity on diversity is, in some sense, a betrayal of God’s purposes. One definition of fundamentalism, and an explanation of why it is religiously wrong, is that it is the attempt to impose a single truth on a diverse world.
Second, and this is Darwin’s wondrous discovery: the Creator made creation creative. We already knew that he made man creative. Now, thanks to Darwin, we know that this applies to nature too. He did not make a static universe, a mere machine endlessly revolving through cycles of birth, growth, decline and death. He introduced into the very mechanism by which life reproduces itself, the genome, the tiny possibility of copying errors that results in variety and new biological possibilities. The God who chose to create our universe is one who delights in creativity. A universe in which life evolves is more creative than one in which life forms never change.
God as we see him in Genesis 2 is a gardener, not a mechanic, one who plants systems that grow. The constantly evolving, ever-changing nature of life revealed by biology after Darwin fits the theological vision far more than did the controlled, predictable, mechanical universe of eighteenth-century science.
The science writer Timothy Ferris argues that what we know scientifically suggests ‘that God created the universe out of an interest in spontaneous creativity’. What would such a universe look like? It would be a universe impossible to predict in detail, just as ours is. It would give rise to agencies that are themselves creative. ‘There is in our universe such an agency, spectacularly successful in reversing the dreary slide of entropy and making surprising things happen. We call it life.’16
There is even a hint of this in the biblical narrative of creation. The Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1–2:3 has a remarkable feature. It is precisely structured around the number seven, in ways not apparent in translation. The narrative speaks of creation in seven days. But the text itself is precisely patterned on this number. So the word ‘good’ appears seven times. The word ‘God’ appears thirty-five times. The words ‘heaven’ and ‘Earth’ each appear twenty-one times. The words ‘light’ and ‘day’ occur seven times in the first paragraph. The first verse contains seven words, the second fourteen words. The paragraph describing the seventh day contains thirty-five words, and so on. The passage as a whole contains 67x7 words. The entire passage is constructed like a fractal, so that the sevenfold motif of the text as a whole is mirrored at lower levels of magnitude.
When a text is written in this way, apparently superfluous words become highly conspicuous. There is one obv
iously superfluous word: the last of the entire passage. The verse says, ‘God sanctified the seventh day for on it he rested from all the work he had created’ (2:3). The sentence should finish there. In fact, though, there is one extra word in the Hebrew, la’asot, which means ‘to do, to make, to function’. What is its significance?
Two classic commentators, Ibn Ezra and Abrabanel, interpret it to mean, ‘[he had created it] in such a way that it would continue to create itself.’ Without stretching the text too far, we might say that la’asot means, quite simply, ‘to evolve’. Evolution would then be hinted at in the very last word of the Genesis creation story.
It was this creative potential of creation that moved Darwin, in the last sentence of The Origin of Species, to almost religious awe:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
The twin operations of genetic mutation and natural selection are the simplest way of creating diversity out of unity, breathtaking simplicity resulting in almost unimaginable diversity.
Third, we now know that all life derives from a single source. That is the remarkable, unexpected fact. Here is Matt Ridley on the subject:
The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature. CGA means arginine and GCG means alanine – in bats, in beetles, in bacteria. They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures in sulphurous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses. Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one. The genetic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language. This means – and religious people might find this a useful argument – that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born.17
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 22