The God of Cosmic Success and Harmony?

I OFTEN FEEL prompted to write something following an Unbelievable? podcast - this week is no exception, on a topic that I feel leaves my Christian camp still wanting: creation. This week's title is Debating ID – Can evolution explain the bacterial flagellum? Jonathan McLatchie vs Keith Fox. Sounds kinda irrelevant, right? The title is unhelpful, and even these two Christian debators admit that this bacterial flagellum is almost besides the point: there are a near infinite incredible and frankly awe-inspiring (maybe more awe-inspiring than bacterial flagellum) aspects of nature that illustrate their differences of opinion. The question is, what do we do with aspects of nature that science cannot yet adequately account for?

Back in the 1990s, an important book came out by Michael Behe entitled "Darwin's Black Box". I say "important" because for Christian apologetics, Behe's book would put a qualified biochemist's name behind an intelligently-sounding principle of "irreducible complexity" that would substantiate religious claims to a scientific proof for God's (or a god's) direct involvement in the creation of the universe, because some aspects of nature are too complex to be accounted for by today's scientific models. At the time, the human eye was among his examples, which is obviously insanely complex and difficult to explain as a result of gradual mutations over millions of years. Unfortunately, as this debate seemed to concede, that one is no longer on the ID (Intelligent Design) super list, because twenty years of science has led us to better understand the development of the eye (I recently learned for example that the octopus' eye, for instance, has no "blind spot" - there is no nerve bundle-gathering within the octopus eye itself). But the flagellum still is just too whacky to explain, so maybe that is what gave rise to the sampled title. The fact alone that the list is not stable should make Christians super-wary about this kind of argumentation pushed out there by Christian apologists like Jonathan McLatchie. Here's another - google Michael Behe's name, and you should get a top hit of his wikipedia entry, entitled: Michael J. Behe is an American biochemist, author, and advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design. Note that word carefully: "pseudoscientific".

I will soon be reviewing Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? by Dennis Alexander (Alexander was actually hosted on the Unbelievable show shortly after his book came out back in 2010 and more recently interacted with anti-evolutionist Wayne Rossiter in 2017 here), who points out that despite the apparent sophistication of Behe's work and term "irreducible complexity", there have been no biochemist peer-reviewed journal articles even discussing this principle. The scientific community simply does not recognise Intelligent Design under this label.

So what are apologists like Behe and McLatchie arguing for here? Exactly what many closed Christian schools continue to teach: that science fails to explain the impossibly complex and balanced universe, that evolution is basically false, and they can prove it. How? Because of "irreducible complexity". Behe's approach was relegated (or perhaps promoted) to "pseudoscience" when a court in the States actually had to come to a ruling on the issue and if irreducible complexity had a religious or scientific foundation in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. 

Thus far, it seems that irreducible complexity has an unstable foundation and has yet to be recognised by any major peer-reviewed scientific journals. But it gets worse. Christian (or any religious person, but Christians seem to be the most vocal) anti-evolutionists who want to say that because God made us special, the "random" process of evolution cannot be the mechanism of God to bring about humankind, fail to see a major theological flaw in their reasoning. Christian evolutionists want to reconcile God's entire and ongoing creative act with scientific discovery. If you feel a religious urge to deny evolution then you are actually pushing for a biblically-unfounded splitting of God's creative act. Put crudely: God creates in some kind of naturally-observable or predictable way. Then he intervenes miraculously by creating humans. In other words, God intervenes into his own nature to do something that "left to its own course" would never have produced us, or indeed anything spectacular or unexplainable natural phenomenon. Do you see the picture? God is reduced to tweaking, as Keith Fox correctly points out. There's like a barren lifelessness to God's own work unless God intervenes miraculously, again and again and again.

There is a fourth problem: peculiar arrogance. This is actually connected to the unstable foundation of irreducible complexity I mentioned above. Why on earth should we assume that our advanced scientific knowledge of the universe has reached its zenith? Non-individualised knowledge will never reach such a stage, because we are learning more and more all the time, and expanding the knowledge package for each generation to come. Irreducible complexity basically is saying that TODAY something appears irreducibly complex. And that reliance is actually quite bizarre. It is based on the science of today, thus despite dismissive gesturing against science still coming in through the back door. It even trust's today's science more than today's science does, and does a quick mishmash with biblical texts to make sure that my assertions are shielded from view.

More serious biochemists like Alexander, Fox and many others are finding an increasing plausibility among lay thinkers like myself, and an excellent resource is available at biologos, where evolution is accepted as God's mechanism. So why the debate if evolutionary creation dodges the frankly dodgy problems of irreducible complexity? Despite their blindspots, the better apologists against evolution point out a problem of God's true involvement. If God is not involved in specially and directly in the ways they are proposing, then where is God at all in the process? Genetic mutation happens by chance. Biologos and proponents of such an approach like me have to face this, and we are still not doing a very good job at it in my opinion.

When left just to marvel and say, well God's ways are not ours, and to peer into how God intervenes so widely and cosmically is way beyond and outside what science can say, then you can quickly here the atheist tapping on his microphone to check it is working correctly. What difference does God make? This seems like a superficial and unnecessary faith stance, a leftover from an era of human development that did require religious causality, and is now being rehashed to fit around a scientific enterprise that bizarrely cannot factor Him at all. I'm uncomfortable with this.

Maybe I'm just uncomfortable with the fact that faith really does have personal choice and responsibility forever stamped into its DNA (sorry for some poor allusions there!).

But Success is not random. The mutations that succeed are not random. They occur in harmony within a given environment. It is the whole biosphere that emerges with success and harmony at its core, although forever at war within itself wherever internal successes come with defeats, like a cancer "succeeding" over a failed organism's defense mechanisms. But as a highly-complex, inter-related and dependent ecosystem, our planet has thus far succeeded in ways we see nowhere else *yet*.

Evolutionary creation correctly disconnects Adam's great Sin with general suffering and death, recognising that not only do these processes precede the development of humans (and other marvels), they even form the basis of apparently evil processes. Success comes at a cost. The Intelligent Design campers (back to that label in a sec) are left, ridiculously in my view, to imply that The Fall had retrospective consequences, like it works backwards in time or something. The only creationists exempt from such a problem are seven-day creationists, whose prominence in the church seems to be dwindling (these guys hold to a literal seven day creation even about six to ten thousand years ago). But they don't solve the problem of theodicy for us - and neither will I!

Evolution happened. We happened. Natural sufferings and evils are firmly dislocated from our own evil free choices, but why do people like me still seem to require non-human agency? Look at how I stated the problem in the plural.

I said: sufferings and evils, in the plural. Suffering and death are awful and horrendous experientially. I happen to have experienced more suffering recently than at other periods in my life. Although to varying degrees, we all do. The only way through as I can see it is that to be there at all, God must be the God of Cosmic Success and Harmony. He cannot be defined by any one situation, be it a glorious birth or a catalysmic catastrophe, but the overall adaptative life within in it all. That stream is founded on successful harmony.

Closing thought on Intelligent Design: I am unhappy that this title has been taken by such wrong-headed thinking. Evolutionary creation does not reject God as creator but has to steer clear of the word "design" because of what the Behe-s have done to it on the one hand, and the unnecessary specifics of it on the other (eg the statement "God designed us to have four fingers and a thumb on each hand"). However and in actual fact, the scientific community is not against all notions of design - it will resolutely avoid, however, adding the necessity of or reliance on a sentient independent intelligence, aka God, the Intelligent Designer.

Centering Prayer, with Cynthia Bourgeault 1

IT WAS LIBERATING to me to read this book. I am usually very critical in all I read but I find so little to fault here in the deep, practical pages of Cynthia.

A few things that may alarm conservative evangelicals: this book will not be judgemental toward other faiths but will attempt (in my view, successfully) to situate contemplative prayer firmly within the Christian tradition. Secondly, Cynthia manages to anticipate worries about this alternative approach without a defensive tone and without portraying centering prayer as the be-all-and-end-all of prayer. And she will certainly not advocate a babbling word-loaded time of prayer ("pummel my spirit with Truth").

I will shortly provide a summary of her book, itself a summary of her own message summary that she provides at the end of her book. But first, it's really worth pointing out the necessity of this summary. You know how some books basically divulge their message in a nutshell and slowly unpack that nutshell for the rest of the book? I don't know about you, but I don't always feel very motivated to finish that kind of book. Every single chapter of Cynthia's book brings something fresh, is loaded with humorous stories and is instilled via a non-professional and accessible style and vocabulary. The irony is that some of her own summary points at the end do overlap, which gives me a small sense of purpose for my following post on this book: provide an even more condensed summary. Coming Soon, as they say! (here)

Ultimate Purpose and reflections from Genesis 1-3

Justin Brierley's brilliant Unbelievable show resumes its traditional format of atheist versus Christian format after a more in-house discussion on the tricky genocidal aspects of Yahweh's instructions to his invading people to violently invade and dominate the Promised Land (I have blogged a little about the Old Testament violence issue already here).

What do you think about the argument of our life's purpose? Do we even ask these questions correctly? Without going into the Unbelievable debate in any detail (you can check it out Can we find God in a suffering world?), I was once again left to ponder, unsatisfied, on our definitions of such a fundamental issue as "purpose", but also strangely drawn to the apparent inevitability of the connection to suffering. But let's leave suffering for a moment.

My Christian heritage is founded on the biblical idea that originally, we could have inhabited a world without any suffering whatsoever. No death - except maybe that of vegetation. Yet, despite that eventuality of pain, there was a purpose.

Genesis 1

Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’

So God created mankind in his own image,

    in the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’

Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food.’ And it was so.

On this basis, Jews, Christians and Muslims share that there is a purpose that supercedes that of the animal kingdom. Vegetation exists in order to be eaten. Animals exist in order to eat and be eaten. Humans, however are to thrive and rule. Eating is clearly pretty important - it comes up quite a bit, but it is never provided as the reason or purpose. The mandate for humans is to share in a divine mandate, to share in the gods' work of order and rule, all of which ultimately comes under the presidency of Yahweh himself. The delegation is so great that humankind get to name the animals. That's huge and weird if you think about it, not naming what you created, maybe a bit like asking your kid to name their younger sibling. Maybe. 

So what this story has taught us is that there are layers of meaning. We all have "purpose". The question really is just how up the ladder do we want to climb? Do we just want to be physically fulfilled? Do we desire that deeply for our family and close friends too (layer 2)? Or do we feel empathy and a call to act to right wrongs in our society that may not even affect us directly (layer 3?)

One of the problems with the Genesis 1-2 scenario (there are quite a few actually, depending on how you read the text) is the notion of order. The jurisdiction and domination over creation without suffering often overlooks a lurking clue to the source of evil. There was still chaos. Where there is no order, there is not a vacuum, and the Old Testament language continues to revisit and enrich the Israelite understanding of order and disorder. I guess that's even why naming comes in. Give something nameless a name, you reduce its uncertainty, you provide it with blissful parameters.

So our purpose is to rule over our God-appointed spheres of influence. Before "the Fall", this was not to eat, but to weigh in on ruleless "chaos" and provide order. I think that is really where I want to leave it today, so here's a quick summary and then a quick idea about the serpent of Genesis 3:

• "Purpose" is not about ground-level existence, it's minimum one rung up from that since this is essentially the plant and animal level.
• An orderlessness, or a need-to-be-ordered, pre-existed any bad human choices.
• Naming carries big responsibility.

The exchange with the serpent

So what about that crafty serpent of Genesis 3? Was it the one Jesus referred to as Satan? Who knows, but one thing that today's reflection has clarified for me is that both Adam and Even shirked their responsibility, climbed down their ladder of purpose, and allowed the creation to dictate ideas and mandates of its own. The serpent is a created beast here, albeit an admittedly developed one endowed with the faculties of speech. But there has been no mention of it having received any other special privilege such as giving orders or holding responsibility on God's behalf. The great fall merits its capitalised "The Fall" when we realise that mankind has abandoned its remit of good order and been dictated to by the very creature over which rule was supposed to be exercised. This was the greater "sin" in my view - as bad as the fruit-eating episode was. So how should Adam and Eve have responded to the crafty serpent? "No, I won't eat the fruit" - is that really all that they were being tested here? Most certainly not - the serpent was "a beast" and needed severe punishment for threatening the rule. A simple refusal could still be a recognition of upset lines of authority and order.