Theology and Darwin

All serious talk (and thinking) about God--all serious theo-logos--is either negative (via negativa) or analogical.  (See David Tracy's classic, The Analogical Imagination (1981).)  Although a theist who is apophatic can therefore engage in God-talk ("God is love"), she will be, qua apophatic, profoundly wary about God-talk--not least, about anthropocentric God-talk.  She will be, in that sense, a theological minimalist.

All serious theology presupposes and works with, rather than rejects, established, bedrock scientific knowledge.  Alas, too much contemporary theology is pre-Darwinian.  No living theologian has done more to cultivate a post-Darwinian theology than the Jesuit priest and Georgetown prof John F. Haught.  In the current issue of America, Ilia Delio, O.S.F., reviews Haught's new book, Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life (2010).  Anyone interested in theology--that is, in serious theology--should read the review, here.

An excerpt:

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In his provocative book Christianity and Evolution, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., raised the question, “Who will at last give evolution its own God?” Teilhard grappled with this question throughout his life, as he sought a new understanding of God at work in an evolutionary universe. Similarly, the theologian John Haught confronts the question of God and evolution, and one might see in Haught’s work an answer to Teilhard’s question. Unlike Teilhard, who pursued a new synthesis of God in the world, Haught assumes a conversation “between Charles Darwin and Christian theology on the question of what evolution means for our understanding of God and what we take to be God’s creation.”

His latest book continues a series of books based on Darwin’s “dangerous idea,” evolution’s unsuspected liberation of a truly biblical God. Haught states that “Darwin dropped a religiously explosive bomb into the Victorian culture of his contemporaries, and Christians ever since, including some but not all theologians, have been scrambling to defuse it or toss it out of harm’s way.” We can no more get rid of evolution, however, than we can rid ourselves of the universe. Darwin’s major work, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, “launched an intellectual and cultural revolution more sensational than any since Galileo.” The problem, however, is that many religious people refuse to accept this new understanding of life in the universe, and many scientists see evolution as a self-sufficient explanation of life. Thus religious fundamentalists remain entrenched in a literal reading of the Bible and an outmoded cosmos, and scientific materialists dismiss religion as puerile. . . .

In the last chapter Haught discusses the God of evolution in light of Teilhard de Chardin, and rightly so. No other modern thinker has done more to unite evolution and the Christian God than Teilhard. To this day Teilhard’s theology is not well understood and even less accepted within the mainstream of academic theology. He remains a marginal thinker in the same way that evolution remains a marginal theory for Christian theology. And this is Haught’s persistent plea: that theology wake up to the reality of evolution. “What is needed theologically,” he writes, “is a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of Christian teaching about God, Christ, creation, incarnation, redemption, and eschatology in keeping with Darwin’s unveiling of life’s long evolution and contemporary cosmology’s disclosure of the ongoing expansion of the heavens.” This is not, in Haught’s view, just a reality check; this is revelation. He invites us to encounter anew the God of incomprehensible love, the God of the future who lures us to new levels of life, to new possibilities and to a new way of being in the world. John Haught is not simply one of the best theologians of our time; he, like Teilhard, is a prophet.

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Hawking takes an agnostic position on matters of religion, He has repeatedly used the word "God" to illustrate points made in his books and public speeches. His ex-wife Jane however said he was an atheist during their divorce proceedings, Hawking has stated that he is "not religious in the normal sense" and he believes that "the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws."

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

My last comment: There are several intriguing places one might find support for a post-Darwinian theology. In Islam, the Qur'an says, "We put Our signs into the horizons and into themselves." In Annemarie Schimmel's words, "For the Muslim, everything could serve as an aya, as sign from God, and the Koran repeats this truth over and over again, warning those who do not believe in God's signs or who belie them" [and these signs are not in the first place or necessarily in reference to miracles, but to the natural world, the creation of which might be construed as a 'miracle']. The creatures are signs; the change between night and day is a sign; as is the loving encounter between husband and wife; and miracles are signs.... These signs are not only in the 'horizons,' that is, in the created universe, but also in the human souls, that is, in the human capacity to understand and admire; in love and human inquisitiveness; in whatever one may feel, think, and experience. The world is, as it were, an immense book [or a 'chain novel'!] in which those who have eyes to see and ears to hear can recognize God's signs and thus be guided by their contemplation to the Creator Himself." All of the natural world is said to sing the praise of God, in silence or otherwise.

The Sufi mystic and philosopher, Muhammad Ibn 'Arabi (Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī al-Hāṭimī al-Tā'ī), spoke of the "tree of existence" (shajarat al-kawn), "a tree on which man is the last, most precious fruit."

One might also see the Psalmist's experience of God's presence in the natural world as encouraging such a theology.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

By the way, a philospher of science has also well explained how Christians can at the same time be Darwinians (ergo, it is wrong for Alvin Plantinga to reject the theory of evolution): please see Michael Ruse's book, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion (2001). As to the question in the book's title, Ruse writes, in short, that

"The answer is very obviously...that one can be, whether one be a Catholic or a Protestant. In fact, most Darwinians--and here I speak of ultras like Dawkins through qualifiers like Gould--would argue that the evidence for evolution and for some significant role for selection is sufficiently strong that Christians ought to be Darwinians. Our powers of sense and of reason are given to us by God--they are crucially involved in what it means to say that humans are made in God's image--and to turn our back on such firmly established science is theologically unacceptable."

Of course Ruse does not elaborate a "post-Darwinian theology" but he does enable us to see precisely why such a thing is possible in the first place.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Perhaps it’s the reviewer and not Haught’s book, but it would have been nice to see some acknowledgment that there are different philosophies of science with quite different axiomatic assumptions and some of these are not in fact hostile to religion or dismissive of religion as “puerile.” In other words, the picture painted of science, at least in this review, is a rather crude caricature. Just as there is more than “bad theology,” so too there is more than “bad science,” but the review portrays science in largely negative terms: “many scientists see evolution as a self-sufficient explanation of life,” “scientific materialists dismiss religion as puerile,” “the cryptotheology of materialists,” “scientific reductionism…fails to see the big picture,” “the misplaced concreteness of scientific materialism.”

When naturalism or materialism is indicative of a methodological approach in the sciences, the metaphysical assumptions can be pluralistic (different assumptions with different theories), provisional and agnostic (in a sense, open-ended), with little or no infringement upon what Stephen Jay Gould termed the “magesterium” of religion. There may be more conflict and even similarities of a kind (cf. Ian G. Barbour’s work) on occasion between the respective “magesteria” of religion and science than Gould allowed, but I think he was in the main correct. So, on this model and for example, science does not ask questions about the “meaning of life” or rule out the possibility that there may be domains of Reality beyond its purview, that is, beyond the natural world. And as John Cottingham has shown, even the philosophical projects of such disparate thinkers as Hume, Kant and (the early) Wittgenstein “do not, and indeed could not with any plausibility propose to eliminate the very possibility of a domain of reality lying beyond the phenomenal world.”

Consider too the fact that the practice of science itself evidences “a cognitive manifold that involves an ever more extensive specialization and division of labor” (Nicholas Rescher) such that it is increasingly unlikely if not unavailing to find scientists, physicists or not, speak with any cognitive authority or scientific confidence to the “big picture” with regard to the natural world. In other words, scientists like Stephen Hawking (especially after Gödel’s incompleteness proof of 1931) have come to appreciate that science cannot offer a “theory of everything” (TOE). (Nicholas Rescher has provided a related by slightly different reason for the inability of science to proffer a TOE, one owing to the ‘ancient paradox of reflectivity and self-substantiation,’ namely, ‘How can any theory adequately substantiate itself?’) In any case, even the TOE excludes such things as moral and aesthetic values, which are “just as real as physical data and biological facts” (John Ziman).

Relatedly, not all science is reductionist, even if, again, this frequently makes for a perfectly sensible if not necessary methodological imperative in many of the sciences. Biology, for instance, is frequently not reductionist, and the imperialist pretensions of physics as the queen of the sciences, that is, where physics alone will someday definitively or finally describe to us the workings of the material or natural world, seems less and less attractive from within the varied provinces of science itself. And it is increasingly appreciated by those who, like John Ziman, have spent a lifetime studying the methods of scientists in and outside the laboratory, that there is no one method unique to science, in which case scientific inquiry in some measure overlaps with other fields of intellectual inquiry, such as those found in the humanities:

“It is popularly supposed that science can be distinguished from other modes of systematic inquiry by a distinctive method. This is not what is observed. The techniques used in scientific research are extraordinarily diverse, from counting sheep and watching birds to detecting quasars and creating quarks. The epistemic methodologies of research are equally varied, from mental introspection to electronic computation, from quantitative measurement to speculative inference.”

What we might call “soft” scientific realism (a la Philip Kitcher, among others) understands scientific representation on the order of “models” and “maps” which are, in turn, often critically dependent on analogies and metaphors. As Ronald Giere explains,

“Maps have many of the representational features we need for understanding how scientists represent the world. There is no such thing as a universal map [one reason why Kitcher says we cannot have a 'Theory of Everything,' for an 'ideal atlas is a myth']. Neither does it make sense to question whether a map is true or false. The representational virtues of maps are different. A map may, for example, be more or less accurate, more or less detailed, of smaller or larger scale. Maps require a large background of human convention for their production and use. Without such they are no more than lines on paper. Nevertheless, maps do manage to correspond in various ways with the real world. Their representational powers can be attested by anyone who has used a map when traveling in unfamiliar territory.”

In principle at least, soft scientific realism should not be seen as threatening or hostile to religion and scientists need not succumb to “scientism.” Science does not offer us a definitive picture of even natural or material reality if only because its “picture” is continually undergoing modification, as one theory after another is seen as inadequate to the task at hand, only to be replaced by another theory that itself will someday be superseded (and this is true even if we believe in scientific progress in the sense that science accumulates over time ever more accurate accounts of how the natural world works). There is thus always a gap between our scientific conception of reality and reality as it really is (or Reality). The matter or objects of science cannot be said to actually exist exactly as the frontiers of science conceive them to be. Or, as Helen Longino puts it, “one can be a realist in the sense of holding that there is a world independently of our thinking that there is one, without being a scientific realist in the sense of holding that the successes of our best theories consists in the world having exactly the features attributed to it by those theories.” Hasok Chang has even argued that Truth should not be considered the ultimate aim of scientific activity because it in fact cannot “serve as a usable criterion for evaluating systems of knowledge. If scientific progress is something we actually want to be able to assess, it cannot mean a closer approach to the Truth.”

Perhaps Haught makes his argument without the aforementioned caricature of science. If so, the review fails to capture this richer conception of science, one in which science is not intrinsically about “cryptotheology,” “reductionism," crude metaphysical claims regarding scientific materialism, and so forth and so on. That science and scientists occasionally exhibit or be may be prone to such liablities is fairly commonplace, but we might at least acknowledge the theory and practice of another kind of science, one in which science turns out to be perfectly compatible with religion.