Many accept the fact of evolution with a sense of unease, not so much at the fact that they share common ancestry with apes, worms and yeast, but that there seems to be little theological benefit in the process. That’s not true. Evolution gives us an insight into a number of troubling theological questions.
- Theodicy. The question of why God allows evil in His world remains one of the more troubling questions for Christians. The free-will defence coupled with the ‘cost of creation’ argument answers many questions but is incomplete without evolution. Predation and parasitism make sense if life has been given the freedom to be fruitful and multiply. If God elects not to intervene in this world in order to preserve free will, it’s not unreasonable to argue that God likewise does not intervene in nature to stop the evolution of predation and parasitism. The cost of allowing the evolutionary process to produce a species capable of reflecting the image of God is the emergence of smallpox, HIV and tapeworms.
- Evidence for the hand of God in natural history. We’re fond of pointing out how improbable the survival of the Jews over the last 2500 years has been and claiming that this shows the hand of God in human history. The same could be said about how improbable the emergence of the human race has been. The Permian mass extinction nearly wiped out the line leading to mammals, while it could be argued that if the dinosaurs were not wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous, the explosion of mammalian life which resulted in the evolution of primates would not have been that likely. It’s hard to avoid thinking that the hand of God has also been at work in natural history, in altering key evolutionary events to allow the emergence of man.
- Support for some of our theological points. In Christendom Astray, Robert Roberts appealed to aspects of neuroanatomy to help refute the idea of innate human immortality. Evolution does the same for other doctrines. Original Sin as taught by the western Church can’t survive evolution, as it really does require humanity to be descended from one man in order to inherit the effects of Adam’s sin. With respect to the concept of innate human immortality, one is entirely justified in asking mainstream Christians who accept evolution at what point in human evolution did God insert immortal soul. These mainstream Christian doctrines will not survive in their present form once the implications of evolution are realised.
The ethologist Richard Dawkins has made no secret of his antipathy towards Christianity, but in The Selfish Gene, arguably his most influential book, Dawkins notes that we have the power to defy the ‘selfish genes of our birth’ and become something other than vehicles for gene propagation:
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. [1]
Noble stuff, but human history tells us that successful rebellions against the tyrannical selfish replicators are rare at best. George Price, another evolutionary biologist, far less well known than Richard Dawkins investigated the theoretical basis of altruism, and found what he thought to be proof that our capacity for altruism was limited, whereas our capacity for evil could never be completely eradicated. Guardian columnist Andrew Brown notes:
When Price had first found them he was so shocked that he set himself to do the work again, sure that there must be a flaw. He ended up reformulating them more generally and more powerfully; when this work was completed, he went mad. For though his equations show that truly self-sacrificing behaviour can exist among animals, and even humans, they also seem to show that there is nothing noble in it. Only behaviour which helps to spread the genes that cause it can survive in the very long term. Since man, too, is an animal, the human capacity for altruism must be strictly limited; and our capacity for cruelty, treachery and selfishness impossible to eradicate. Through algebra, George Price had found proof of original sin.[2]
Price’s despair led in part to his conversion to Christianity, which stands as something of an implied (though unintended) rebuff to the optimism of Dawkins with respect to our ability to defy the selfish replicators that shape our nature. It is not a little rewarding to see that both evolution and Scripture concur in a negative view of human nature apart from God.
This post first appeared on my Facebook page here
References
[1] “I now close the topic of the new replicators, and end the chapter on a note of qualified hope. One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and, if you alllow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious, blind, replicators. The fact that they replicate, together with certain further conditions means, willy nilly, that they will tend towards the evolution of qualities which, in the special sense of this book, can be called selfish. A simple replicator, whether gene or meme, cannot be expected to forgo short-term selfish advantage even if it would really pay it, in the long term, to do so. We saw this in the chapter on aggression. Even though a `conspiracy of doves' would be better for every single individual than the evolutionarily stable strategy [=ESS], natural selection is bound to favour the ESS.
It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism. I hope so, but I am not going to argue the case one way or the other, not speculate over its possible memic evolution. The point I am making now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." Dawkins R "The Selfish Gene" (2006 Ed. OUP) p 200-201”
[2] The deathbed of an altruist can be a terrible place. Both Price and Hamilton were theoretical biologists, a discipline about as mathematical and abstruse as may be imagined; yet it was Price's discoveries in the field which had led to his despair and death. He had reformulated a set of mathematical equation that shows how altruism can prosper in a world where it seems that only selfishness is rewarded. The equations had been discovered ten years before by Hamilton, but Price's reworking was general and more elegant. He had provided a general way in which to measure the direction and speed of any selection process; this makes possible, in principle, a Darwinian analysis of almost anything.
When Price had first found them he was so shocked that he set himself to do the work again, sure that there must be a flaw. He ended up reformulating them more generally and more powerfully; when this work was completed, he went mad. For though his equations show that truly self-sacrificing behaviour can exist among animals, and even humans, they also seem to show that there is nothing noble in it. Only behaviour which helps to spread the genes that cause it can survive in the very long term. Since man, too, is an animal, the human capacity for altruism must be strictly limited; and our capacity for cruelty, treachery and selfishness impossible to eradicate. Through algebra, George Price had found proof of original sin.
Before then, he had been a dogmatic and optimistic atheist; he seems to have hoped that man might become better and wiser, perhaps slowly, fitfully, and with reverses; but with no natural limit to the process. His proof that this could not happen contains, to a mathematically literate biologist, great beauty and elegance, but it also seems to contain the proof that beauty and elegance mean nothing to the universe. Since human motivation is a complex and difficult matter, one cannot say exactly what drove Price mad. But there is no doubt that the discovery of the equations for altruism plunged him into a profound and severe depression, from which he was rescued by a religious experience which led him into a mania for good.(Brown A "The Darwin Wars" (1999, Simon and Schuster) p 1-2)
