Abstract
Writing as a non-believer, I find myself remarkably sympathetic to the aims of Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod, the Christian authors of Creator God, Evolving World. They rightly see that modern science, particularly Darwinian biology, poses a major threat to traditional theological thinking about God and the execution of his intentions, particularly the production of humankind. If everything is quite as random or chancy as today’s biology supposes—evolutionists insist that there is no direction to the raw variations (mutations) on which change is based—then how can we be sure that humans would emerge?
They are not the first to worry about this problem, and a number of solutions have been proffered. One can simply put direction into the variations. This was the suggestion of Charles Darwin’s great supporter, the American botanist Asa Gray, and a version of such thinking is favored by today’s so-called Intelligent Design theorists. It is also the solution given by Robert J. Russell, the physicist-theologian, who argues that God does the directing down at the quantum level. However, the problem with this solution is that it takes things right out of science. Modern biology does not allow God to tamper thus with his creation. Alternatively, one can alter the traditional conception of God. No longer is God all-powerful, all-loving, outside time and space. He is now down in the nitty-gritty of things, working alongside us. He’ll help things to turn out as they should. This is the kind of view favored by the followers of Alfred North Whitehead, the process thinkers. The trouble now is that we no longer have Christianity, at least not a Christianity acceptable to traditional thinkers.
Inspired by the thinking of the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, Crysdale and Ormerod argue that the world is so constituted that things like humans might be expected to emerge naturally from the developmental process. There is no fixed move at any one time, but nature is so constituted that things will emerge as they are supposed to, over the course of time. In support of their position, the authors turn to such thinkers as Stuart Kauffman, who argues that nature spontaneously complexifies—“order for free”—and the paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who argues that there are pre-existing niches, including one for culture, and it was only a matter of time before human-like beings found their way into it.
Perhaps it is not surprising that I am not convinced that any of this quite works. I am never quite sure why complexity as such should lead to human beings. Interestingly and perhaps pertinently, with the unraveling of the mysteries of genomes, including the human one, it seems that in many respects we are not as complex as other life forms. I am also not entirely convinced by the argument about niches. Do they really pre-exist or do they get created by organisms as they evolve? Is there perhaps another niche, super-culture, better than ours that could have been occupied but now thanks to our destructiveness will forever remain empty? Is this what God wanted?
I am not convinced but I am appreciative of the discussion. Crysdale and Ormerod are tough-minded about the nature of the issues. This is a short book, which in itself has virtues, but also pitfalls. I find rather hurried some of the subsequent discussion, for instance about evil. I just don’t find at all convincing the idea that natural evil exists because we are better off with it than without it. Perhaps I am better off feeling pain if I am being burnt, but this answer hardly speaks to the kid with the painful and ultimately fatal genetic disability. But I don’t want to end on a negative note. This is a book worth reading, and if you disagree with the authors, and you don’t simply want to use the whole matter as an excuse to reject Christianity, they challenge you to be equally firm in facing the issues and to come up with a better solution.