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 make 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/surmised
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
go more deeply into 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, or occulted by
intervening principles which in themselves not just obscure his hand, but
negate it entirely. Hard then, it is, to align evolution even if ‘theistic’
with God pointing to 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; the 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, underscoring that person-hood (God’s) is ontologically basic,
whereas to push God into an occult role makes some equally occult 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).
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
the rest of life before human consideration (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 outselves. 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 the events set out as occurring in space and time,
and predicated on the same categorical arrangement 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.
