Letter I sent to Dr Harbin, regarding his 1997 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society "Thestic-Evolution"
I recently read your 1997 article in JETS on theistic evolution. I acknowledge that this was written some time ago, and that your interests may have shifted over the intervening period, but, on the assumption that you have maintained some connection with the thinking in this paper; I would like to offer some comments.
In a debate as complex and challenging as the one you have addressed, it was refreshing that you distinguished between different usages of the concept ‘evolution’. I also appreciated your canvassing of some of the more obvious theological issues (I say ‘more obvious’ not to downplay them, as I think much work remains to tease out the implications of the points that you made).
The nub of the problem, is, as you identify, that theistic evolution has more of evolution than ‘theism’, at least of the biblical variety, and subsumes biblical considerations under materialist/mechanistic ones.
A couple of aspects of the attempt to blend the biblical doctrine of creation and contemporary framing of the origins ‘story’, I think challenge how we understand God and his relation to us (which of course the salient issue of the fall and its counter in God’s redemption opens).
In brief, to assert evolution as basic to the formation of life as we see it, makes a representation about both God and the cosmos that differs from the representation that God himself makes in the Bible, at many points. It says something about God which God doesn’t say!
At root, it makes God not an author in direct relationship with his creation, contrary to what the Bible sets out, and the creation thus as consistent with who God is, but an author who is hidden, occulted by intervening principles which in themselves not just obscure his hand, but negate it entirely. Hard then to align evolution even if ‘theistic’ with God relying on his being creator as the basis of worship, especially throughout the prophets.
This voids the real dependence of the creation on the creator and allows the deist view to run riot and invert the relationship of creator and creature, to enclose the God within the creation, in effect; this is the critical failing of all the ANE creation myths that I’ve read in that they all presuppose a cosmos at some level.
In the creation account God sets out the marks of his activity (and ReMine, for example would say that the marks remain patent) in his close and immediate involvement with the components of the creation. They are not independent and not the result of mechanism, but all the result of intention at every point, underscoring that person-hood (God’s) is ontologically basic, whereas to push God into an occult role obscures this and proposes some 'principle' as basic, I think.
As a result, the cosmos is ‘de-godded’. God as an effective and involved creator: which one who is love would be expected to be, is removed, and a void is opened up that non-love, exemplified in materialism, fills; but it is a faux filling, because the filling is beyond human/personal engagement and is not relationally accessible (personal relationship, that is). It is an empty filling!
De-godding re-configures the cosmos, ‘reality’, in ontological terms, and the core of reality being God’s wisdom at work through love in relationship is gone, to be replaced by the echo of a plea for significance that seems to be pre-supposed in almost every human activity, and indeed extended to the rest of life that is arrayed for human attendtion (that is, in the presence of man as worshipping creature place over the creation to care for it).
De-godding also makes Adam’s naming the animals a meaningless gesture. With God patent and involved in the creation as we experience it (e.g. made the kinds of animals, not a pathway where chemicals could become cells, could become animals…maybe) the naming is steward’s response to his lord’s lovingly knowing his creation. Adam, therefore also now knows it in terms that are congruent with his being the steward.
A de-godded cosmos is one where God is no longer able to demonstrate his ‘god-ness’ to us for us to know him, but one where the focus of our gaze ends at the creature, and that in its mute form: dirt and energy, and tells us nothing about ourselves. Redemption then drifts to myth instead of re-connecting us with what really is.
Finally, if Genesis 1 doesn’t convey information about the cosmos, in terms that make sense in the cosmos, and correspond to what they claim to describe: that is events occurring in space and time, and predicated on the same categorical arrangement and space-time causality in relationships that we would meaningfully apply; then they tell us nothing, and cannot, by telling us something other than what happened, what in fact happened in summative terms contrary to the well worn irrationality that the creation account doesn’t tell us what God did, but that he is creator; well, he is only ‘creator’ on account of him telling us what he did. If we deny that, we deny that he is creator; which is where theistic-evolution must leave us.
