Dear Peter,
I followed with interest your recent participation in the 'atheist' debate. One remark that you made in that debate caught my attention.
You said:
Thus, it is not with evolution as science that I have a problem; it is with evolution as an idolatrous explanation of all things; it confuses mechanism with agency; science with theology.
It seems from this that you regard ‘evolution’ as being restricted to mere biological machinery descriptive of, for instance, the development of new species, or indeed, all life from just one cell. I get the impression that you conceptualise this within a basically creationist frame of reference: that is, you hold that God created, although, possibly not as the Bible sets out (how one could know that God did create, or that it was God who did the creating, when what is currently claimed about the universe's origin, and seemingly accepted by many Christians does not line up with scripture is not entirely clear, but that is another matter).
The fearful thing is that your position allows the unravelling of any proclamatory opportunity by its acceptance of the materialist framing of being when discussion of origins arises (as it did in the speech by Russell Blackford). As soon as it is denied that Genesis gives any information about the history of the cosmos, the biblical conceptualisation of the compass of God and our existential ground is unseated, the point of contact between a real God taking real action in making then redeeming the world, for real effect is gone and the way to repentance is effectively closed. This is denial, in short, that there is any possible objective concrete reference in Genesis 1 to real events or the world we stand in and where God’s covenant is operative.
As soon as we say that Genesis conveys truth, but not in the only information that it presents, we invite the materialist to maintain his conceptualisation of the world and find no place for God. This comes about because we say that the world can at once be created with the only representation of this in the detail set out in Genesis 1, by a God who is love, and for loving reasons, and be the aimless product of random material interactions, and full of un-love, at the same time.
This hardly brings glory to God. Modern evolutionary atheism is clear on this: it sees no place for the glory of God in an evolved world, only ‘facts’ that show there is no god (a stark example of this is provided by Sommers and Rosenberg in “Darwin’s nihilistic idea: evolution and the meaninglessness of life” Biology and Philosophy 18: 2003)!
And it doesn’t help to grasp at analogical views of Genesis 1 to hope to change this. These end up not explaining the text, but explaining it away. Thus, ‘framework’ type views are ‘anti-exegetical’: in that they deny the intersection of the text and the real world of sin and relationship, rather than prophetically position us within it.
So, what is happening here?
I think we must reach back into the Enlightenment “project” to tease this out.
In your remark you seem to have bought the Enlightenment story, without acknowledging that it starts with a complete disjunct between rationality inherited from its biblically inspired forebears, and the Bible itself, attempting instead to find a rational ground in humanist terms: the biblical basis is removed, but its effects are forlornly held on to.
To save its scheme, the Enlightenment needed to find a substitute basis for the real and us in it that was independent of a creator, or at least a creator-person. It found this, after not to much searching, in rehabilitating the ancient Greek notion of a universe that is truly ontologically independent and that necessarily, made itself. Thus is the evolutionary principle around which the modern world turns.
For you to then express a concern that the modern world wants evolution to be more than a minor mechanical detail of biological change and adaptation could only evoke puzzled looks from its proponents: that’s the very point of it! Evolution is a totalising world view that explains, and is relied upon to explain, the origin and nature of the universe purely in terms of the universe itself. It has reduced God, if he is to be given any place at all, to a result of matter (brain activity), completely captured within the bounds of the cosmos and entailed by it, at best. Certainly not separate from it, not holy, not to be glorified and worshipped, from whom there can have been no separation, against whom death is neither a breach nor the last enemy, and to whom is owed nothing at all.
In the end, your remarks betray two mistakes about evolution.
Firstly, you think that it is just the mechanical detail of life within a basically Christian conception of the world. Not so, as it proposes completely different things about the real world from those in Genesis 1, in the main.
Secondly, you seem to confine evolution to science alone, cutting it off from wider questions. In fact, it starts as a metaphysical principle and ends, not as science, which it never was, but as a metaphysical setting for all experience that pursues the material (“now, let’s suppose that the universe is not the result of intention, but is completely explained by naturalistic processes”), and rejects the personal, let alone the supernatural, as basic to being. Evolution is an overarching materialist conceptualisation of the world, counter at every point to the Christian one.
Post the Enlightenment; it is a methodologically pagan program that is, as Mary Midgley, the British philosopher, pointed out in ‘Evolution as a Religion’, the creation myth of the modern Western mind. It is the idea that now provides the cultural and intellectual reference point for art, literature, intellectual enquiry (including theology, I must add; yours being an example), and human relations. It has nothing to do with anything that the creator God reveals about himself, the world or our redemption.
Also on creation and the Christian starting point.
