Return to the Sacramental View of Nature / Brent Henderson

Hi, everyone. I thought I’d follow through with the report I promised and let you know the talk I recently gave on ‘Can Theology and Science Make Peace in the Age of Darwin?’ went really well (despite a rough start with equipment difficulties) with about 60 or so people in attendance. Overall, people were very receptive, challenging me on some points, but mostly in a very seeker-oriented way. After the talk, I even retired to a local pub with a half dozen or so very thoughtful students and got my brain thoroughly picked!

The main point of my talk was to explore exactly why it is that Darwinian evolution seems to make us choose between believing in a purposeful world where science is bunk or a purposeless world in which science is correct. I argued that this has less to do with Darwin than it has to do with our modern worldview. For the past 500 years or so, we Westerners have tended to think of God as being wholly Other and outside of Creation, a view espoused by William of Ockham, the major Reformers, and reinforced by the Scientific Revolution and its strong drive toward natural explanation. Since then, we’ve tended to think of nature as a machine and God as the Designer. Now, that kind of God works well when we consider astronomy and physics and the fine-tuned mathematical laws that govern them, but when we encounter Darwin and his theory of natural selection, we run into a huge problem: natural selection is not law-governed and there’s no design to be found there. It rather depends upon chance events and random facts of history (things like food supply, environmental conditions, and (we now know) random errors in DNA replication). Because we’ve made God the Designer and because Darwinism has no inherent design, we are forced to make a choice between science and God.

But, I argued, there is another choice: we could change our modern mechanistic worldview and (at least partially) return to a more sacramental view of nature – the one Christians have held for most of history. In Augustine, St. Francis, and especially Aquinas one finds the thought that, though God transcends nature, creator and creation share a deep kind of unity through which God can be present in nature and nature can reflect God’s character. Aquinas expressed this through the neo-Platonic ‘Hierarchy of Being,’ a sort of pyramid with God at the top, humans just below, animals below them, etc. This was not a hierarchy of power or will, but a hierarchy of participation in God’s Being. The idea was that though God is infinite and ultimate Being, finite creates share in God’s Being as part of his creation.

This approach goes beyond design to make God an intimate part of everything that goes on in creation, including the seemingly random, undirected processes of evolution. Rather than being evidence for purposelessness, evolution can be said to reflect God’s gift of freedom to the universe to come into being on its own, much as he gives us the freedom to choose or reject him. It also reflects his continual creative nature as God works to make ‘all things new’ and bring into being a ‘new creation.’ In this way we can affirm that Darwinism is full of purpose while at the same time affirming science’s understanding of it. We might also continue to search for the locus of God’s activities in nature, but perhaps thinking of those actions as continual creative actions rather than distinct, fitful ones that break nature’s laws.

Another point of the talk was to point out that though this (quasi-)sacramental view of God and nature is very common in the theological literature, it has only just started trickling down into the public discussion through the popular writings of many Christians who are scientists like Francis Collins, Ken Miller, and others. The reactions these writers have elicited, with both Intelligent Design theorists like William Dembski and atheist biologists like PZ Myers condemning their efforts as foolish, tells me that they are striking just the right tone and that they’re having a real impact on the way people see the problem.

The talk will be online at some point on the Christian Study Center website (www.christianstudycenter.org), though I can’t when exactly. I really appreciated the comments and support many of you offered before the talk. You allowed me to hope that most of those in attendance would be thoughtful people interested in a real conversation on this topic, and that’s exactly what turned out to be the case. Thanks!

Comments

[steven hamilton]

i'm encouraged by the response, brent...and i'll look for the posting of the audio...peace

[Otto]

Thanks Brent, glad it went well! This was really illuminating, for me especially this section:

"In Augustine, St. Francis, and especially Aquinas one finds the thought that, though God transcends nature, creator and creation share a deep kind of unity through which God can be present in nature and nature can reflect God’s character. Aquinas expressed this through the neo-Platonic ‘Hierarchy of Being,’ a sort of pyramid with God at the top, humans just below, animals below them, etc. This was not a hierarchy of power or will, but a hierarchy of participation in God’s Being. The idea was that though God is infinite and ultimate Being, finite creates share in God’s Being as part of his creation."

Although I knew a little about St. Francis and perhaps the sacramental view of nature in earlier Christianity, I didn't know about the concept of a hierarchy of being, which I think makes sense intuitively. Humans as the most highly evolved form of consciousness, but anyone who has had a relationship with a pet intuitively knows that all creatures share to some degree in that universal consciousness, God's Being. It's a lot harder to kill other creatures if we recognize that they are not all that different from us, that we are all in some way children of God. It's an inconvenient truth, especially in a world that greatly depends on subjugating nature for the benefit of economic "growth".

[Jeff]

Great stuff Brent. Glad you started hanging around here.

How does the issue of human consciousness fit in here? Particularly with your knowledge of linguistics- is it possible that another species could gain the kind of self-awareness and control over environment that we have? Is there place for a kind of imago dei there? I suppose this opens up the question of "soul".

We had a Korean Neurobiologist, not a Christians, come to Seek because he had concluded that there must be a soul and he wanted to learn something about it.

[Brent]

It's a very interesting question to think about what it means to be made 'in God's image' in the light of evolutionary biology. After all, if Darwinism is right (and I think it mostly is), then things could very well have turned out differently As Gould used to say, evolution is such that if you rewound and movie and replayed it, you might get a totally different result or (even more likely) nothing at all

I'm not quite sure that's correct, though. In a recent book 'Life's Solution,' accomplished biologist Conway Morris argues that there is a kind of Anthropic principle of biology that is built into the nature of life. Given the size and make-up of the universe, he argues, life is bound to arise somewhere at least once. And given life, it is inevitable that evolution would eventually give rise to some species with our basic intellectual and emotional abilities (things like symbolic language, recursive thought, and altruistic love). Now that doesn't mean you could run the movie backwards and get humans every time, but you'd get SOME species like humans in the intellectually and emotionally important ways.

If we identify those unique abilities with what it means to be made in God's image (which makes a lot of sense to me, since those abilities are how we participate in God's grace, love, etc.), then it is entirely possible some other species could evolve them. That's unlikely to ever happen here on earth (unless there's another mass extinction event to level the playing field), though maybe it happened before (recent sequencing of the Neanderthal DNA suggests they may have had language abilities like ours - they have the same form of FOXP2 we do, a gene involved in language that looks different in other primates). It's also possible there could be other planets out there somewhere with life and Darwinian evolution and maybe something like us (though this is much less likely than one might thing, as Morris argues).

To be honest, I don't know exactly what to think about the idea of the 'soul' when it comes to science. But it is clear that the problem of consciousness is the biggest extant challenge for reductionist, purely natural accounts of human evolution. While we continue to gain more and more knowledge about how the mind works, we don't have the slightly idea of what the mind IS or how the brain creates it in a mechanical level. I'm not sure we ever will.

OK, I'll stop there and go back to being stuck in the Memphis airport trying to get to Columbia, MO!!

[Brent]

Good point, Otto. I do think that another effect of Okhamistic thinking was not only to separate God from nature, but to separate us from nature, turning nature into something to be subjugated and used utilitarianly.

Just a side note: some evolutionary biologists have argued that, while dogs and cats are not the smartest animals around, they may be the most emotionally complex, perhaps even experiencing suffering somewhat like humans do. The idea is that their species have cohabited with humans for so long as companions that they have evolved toward being more empathetic with us (this would be an evolutionary advantage for them since they depend on us for their care). There's a neat little book by Daniel Dennett called 'Kinds of Minds' which looks at some of these issues.