Florensky on evolutionism -- "What is the differential equation?"

From At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism, Lecture Four:

Renaissance culture also gave attention to the other principal form of being--time. The examination of the concept of time occurred later, and the fragmentation of being in time was performed later than the fragmentation in space: evolutionism came after mechanism.

Evolutionism does have a healthy seed--gentism, according to which an essence does not unfold in some single moment, and the spiritual meaning of an object is not exhausted by some single state, but exists in the totality of its states. But evolutionism errs when it states that this genesis is made up of infinitely small additions, so small that each separately can be considered not a creative act. ...

For example, let us consider the question of the origin of man. Evolutionism denies that there is a qualitative and fundamental difference between man and animals. But if this process occurs discontinuously, if man is descended from the apes, this theory loses its anti-religious character, since a qualitative change suddenly occurs. And if man was created from the dust of the earth by a special creative act, why not then allow in principle--only in principle--that man was created by a momentary addition of spiritual qualities to the ape?

What I am pretty sure Florensky is saying is that one need not take the creation story in the Bible literally to have a Christian worldview, but on the other hand he does insist on a "discontinuous" development of spiritual qualities. On the one hand, I suppose that science can't now and perhaps never will be able to address the important qualitative differences between man and the apes. For example, there will never be a fossil record of spoken language, so we will never know definitively when or how speech developed. On the other hand, Florensky (writing in 1920, mind you) could be taken as throwing his lot in with what might be called the "intelligent design" crowd. How else to interpret this statement, particularly with its wording about "creative acts"?

There's a very thought-provoking passage on how the differential calculus was absorbed into modern science:

For the immediate consciousness rest is opposite to motion, while the essence of science is the fact that we can study motion only by separating it into states as if of rest, with the result being the differential equation. The latter becomes the universal instrument of mathematics, and then of all science and the whole Renaissance epoch, since, to quote Kant, every science is a science insofar as it incorporates mathematics.

 He goes on:

What is the differential equation? Some sort of process is occurring, and we stop it and break it up into a series of instants and see it as if in sectional view. The differential equation is a general formula suitable for the sectioning and study of any process. With this method we are not concerned with the past, with what occurred earlier in time, with whether these are people or whether they are statues who suddenly started moving again after we had stopped them. Only the present is important for us here, not the past; but for many phenomena it is precisely the past that is important.

Writing in 1920, I suppose Florensky could simply not have known about all the modern developments in differential equations. Now it is commonplace to deal with integro-differential equations which were developed to take into account nonlocal interactions across both time and space. I wonder what he would say if he could have lived to see the era in which most differential equations do not involve continuous functions and Taylor series, but rather wild, mysterious functions and generalizations thereof.

Even today, one might think at first glance that Florensky is basically right in his description of differential equations, in that they are meant to break down a process into infinitesimal moments, each of which may be viewed as "not a creative act" but rather a blind obedience to some universal law. But even creative acts or subjective experiences can be modeled quantitatively. The whole use of optimal control theory to predict social behavior comes from the idea not that human beings follow mechanical laws but rather that they exhibit optimizing behavior, i.e. genuine acts of will. Florensky simply could not have seen this, since its development came only after his death.

Still, Florensky challenges me like no other thinker, perhaps because so few theologians know or write anything about differential equations! It would be naive to assume that mathematical objects appeared in a philosophical vaccuum. I should pay closer attention to how today's concepts are used (or could be used) to shape our world view.

To me, there will always be one fundamental discontinuity that cannot be ignored by any scientific theory, and that is the mere fact of existence. Between existence and non-existence there is no continuum. There can be no "probability" that the universe would come into being. Rather, its existence is pure impenetrable mystery. For me, this is basically the same thing as to say that God spoke the universe into being.

Evolution, tradition, reason, faith

To me the Bible is the greatest book never written. Its contents were collected and edited over centuries until finally becoming the self-contained cornerstone of Judeo-Christian tradition that it is today. Like any great institution, the Bible was grown, not designed.

As a result of its history, the Bible carries around it now a sort of magical fence which, Catholic-Protestant debates notwithstanding, prevents any serious changes to be made to its contents. There is a marvelous double effect of the Bible on the community of Christian believers: on the one hand, conservative Bible believers are forced to confront a wealth of confusing, frustrating, and downright bizarre stories and passages which, by their own standard, cannot be erased; and on the other hand, liberals are forced to confront the reality that faith is not the result of pure reason, that rationalistic belief can only be something other than Christianity, and that it is in ancient tradition rather than current that the mind continues to receive its greatest stimulation and challenge.

It's a delicious irony. Conservatives, who hate evolution because they love the idea of God the designer of all things, are in reality relying on an evolved tradition, while liberals, who love evolution because they love the process of reason which discovered evolutionary theory, have in reality found the very principle which destroys their own rationalism.

If you really want to be a rationalist, the logical belief is not that the creation story was too short (thousands of years vs. billions of years) but rather too long, as Origen pointed out. Everyone knows God the great architect really created everything at once. Those seven days are all just metaphors.

Indeed, it's hard to accept that God might just like watching things grow. Evolution requires both patience and spontaneity; that is, one must go into it knowing it will take a very long time but not at all knowing the final outcome. And the really strange thing is that the conservative hates this because he is too impatient, while the liberal hates it because he isn't spontaneous--when it should really be the other way around.

Why you are not your brain

That's part of the subtitle of a book by Alva Noë, who argues against the conventional belief that our consciousness can be located inside of us. Here's the short version:
For further information, here is his web site.

Here's my takeaway from what Noë is saying:

First, if consciousness is not located in our brain, then it is not intrinsic, but learned. From watching this video, I gathered that the basic gist of Noë's argument is that consciousness is a matter of learning to engage our surroundings, of "knowing what to look for," and of knowing how to respond appropriately. That is a strikingly counter-intuitive idea, but there are a number of possible explanations for this. Developing a consciousness presumably begins with being told that you have one, as when parents repeatedly refer to their children by their given names, using pronouns like "I" and "you" to signal boundaries of identity and shaping their children into individuals capable of distinguishing their own experiences from those of others. It's striking to me the way in which children often get the pronouns "I" and "you" wrong. When they're first learning to talk, they will sometimes say things like "you want to go to the park" when they mean they want to go to the park. Of course they would--they've always been called "you." To me this suggests that individual identity is not so clear at first. We didn't always understand what "I" means.

Second, what the brain actually does "at the ground level" is extraordinarily complex and vastly different from the sort of order that emerges from it. As Noë says, probably the only way to understand this is in an evolutionary way. Molecular biology, for instance, can tell us the micro-processes by which organisms develop, but in order to perceive that any sort of order has been developed in the process of evolution one simply must look at the whole. In the same way, the brain consists of a lot of different neurons accomplishing different things, but in order to perceive that anything like "consciousness" has actually been produced requires looking at the way in which that brain interacts with the world. If a person were completely shut off in some dark room for his entire life, his brain left to hum right along doing what it naturally does, there would (presumably) be no consciousness, in spite of the fact that the neural circuitry would be just as it is in any normal brain.

Following up on this second point, one might even be willing to eliminate the concept of "consciousness" if one were to stick to a strictly "scientistic" point of view. Because consciousness is not the direct result of any mechanical processes in the brain, consciousness may turn out to be not such a fundamental part of the human organism as an organism. It is only when the human is made to be aware of himself that he becomes "conscious," in the sense of having introspective thoughts, the ability to assess his own beliefs, and a sense of his own desires and purposes.

Rather than suggesting that we actually ignore consciousness as a reality, however, I would suggest that we learn to ignore scientism. If we viewed the world solely in terms of concrete mechanical processes that we could fully understand and predict, we would hardly be able to move.

Thinking rightly about ourselves seems to me a self-evidently important task, but I think there are also important "application" questions we could ask. For instance, what does one do about a loved one who has fallen into an "unconscious" coma? What about Terri Schiavo? What about the mentally disabled? How do we tell whether any of these have genuine consciousness, and what do we do about it? One could also ask about animal rights, based on the observation that many animals appear to be quite conscious of the world around them.

For my part, I want to suggest that if consciousness is indeed not intrinsic to human beings as organisms, then it is also not a line by which to divide those who have rights from those who don't. Of course, that just makes the problem more difficult in cases where a person is in a coma and unable to take care of herself. We will have to think carefully about spheres of responsibility in those cases, but one thing we can't do is assume that anyone who lacks a certain kind of brain activity is therefore dead. Similar considerations apply to the mentally disabled who, though they may be unable to say so much as a few words, are still human beings. In general, I am unwilling to relieve the human race from its responsibility to protect the lives of those who lack the abilities of the rest of us. Being human is more like being born into a family rather than being admitted into a program: we are not to be judged on our abilities, but rather on our shared ancestry.

I will mostly skip over animal rights, except to say that while I do not feel the same kind of responsibility to other animals as to humans, surely that doesn't relieve us of all responsibility. We may kill to eat, but that doesn't mean that there are not humane ways of doing so. This has been well-understood throughout human history.

There are some slightly more obscure application questions to be asked, such as the question about artificial intelligence: could a computer be conscious? Perhaps this question is becoming less obscure all the time, as we progress further toward genuine computer intelligence. One insight that Noë can give us is that artificial intelligence would require an artificial life, i.e. an environment in which to freely engage the world. Perhaps such an idea will one day lead to breakthroughs we have not foreseen except in science fiction. Or perhaps the way forward is far more difficult than we now realize.

Lots of interesting questions, so little time. Suffice it to say, I think this is an incredibly important topic for all of us.

Now I understand Richard Dawkins

Recently I was enjoying this really cool story about how slime mold can be used to construct efficient networks, which used the example of the interstate highway system as a model. If you haven't seen this, check it out:

I read the NY Times op-ed written by Andrew Adamatzky and Andrew Ilachinski, the scientists who pioneered the use of slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) for various sorts of computing tasks. Read this excerpt:

But it’s worth remembering that the highway system was created by mere humans, using only human intelligence. To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold.

What follows is a fascinating explanation of how such a bizarre creature can be used to solve complex problems like path optimization. Super-cool, right?

Well, later I saw a link someone posted to a blog article written by a conservative Christian entitled, "Who Needs Engineers?" The blog post makes the following complaint against Adamatzky and Ilachinski:

In short they argue that we really did not need all those engineers and planners who gave us the Interstate Highway system because we could have just let some slime do the work instead. I am not kidding, and I hope you will read this story to your children and help them see why the Bible says that those who hate God are fools.

Upon reading that, I realized why people like Richard Dawkins have such a missionary zeal about trying to promote science in the public realm. At some point Christians ought to realize that this kind of anti-scientific statement doesn't just make them look stupid. It's also, dare I say it, sinful. For one thing, it's false. Adamatzky and Ilachinski are clearly not saying that designing interstate highway systems is as simple as watching a slime mold. At the very least, have enough respect to understand what these men are actually saying.

For another thing, think about how hateful this is. "I hope you will read this story to your children and help them see why the Bible says that those who hate God are fools." So two creative, passionate scientists who have given the world a fascinating perspective on an interesting problem are being blasted, not for anything they said against God, but simply for sharing their research. I'm not going to look it up, but for all I know reading their article, these two scientists could be Christians. Whatever the case may be, it is wrong to judge people like that.

What provoked such an insult from this Christian blogger? Apparently, it was the mere mention of "evolution," as in this statement from the Times article: "the slime mold was designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal transport network (for its nutrients)." Thus, if you continue reading the aforementioned blog post, you will read yet another explanation why it is absurd to believe in evolution. I am almost 100% sure that Adamatzky and Ilachinski never even thought about the controversy over evolution when they were writing their op-ed for the NYT. If a single word can provoke such ire, perhaps I shouldn't tell my fellow church-goers that I study evolutionary differential equations.

I see these attacks on science as symptomatic of a couple of serious moral issues in the church, which Christians have yet to deal with. First, let's be clear: anti-intellectualism is a moral problem. Christians need to be reminded that intellectual pedigree does and should demand a certain amount of respect in this world. To treat scientists as if the very foundations of their research can be refuted in a short blog post is not only stupid, it is incredibly disrespectful. This is what I mean by anti-intellectualism.

But by far the more important moral problem in the church is a simple lack of respect for truth. For all this talk about standing firm against the cultural tides of relativism and skepticism and boldly proclaiming the truth, Christians are often profoundly lazy about trying to discover the truth. Thus they refuse to cope with the reality that some things we discover about the world are going to conflict with what the church has traditionally believed. Life is hard that way. Sometimes our beliefs don't withstand rigorous scrutiny. Failing to accept this is both an intellectual problem and a moral one.

There is another thing I find sad about this, and that's the apparent lack of imagination displayed by Christians who refuse to accept that the theory of evolution might really be true. All of their arguments come down to the same thing: I can't imagine how such complex systems came into being without any sort of design involved. Essentially, this is a bias born of conceit. Think about the title of that blog post: "Who Needs Engineers?" We humans seem to be of the biased opinion that any sort of order in the universe comes from the work of human hands, so when we discover that in fact there is a beautiful and complex order in nature, it makes sense that we tend to attribute that order to God the engineer. Not God the artist, not God the gardener, not God the lover of things spontaneous and free. No, it must have been God the designer, because we all know that really cool things can't just come into being on their own.

Yet probably the opposite is true: the more complex a system is, the more essential it is that it be allowed to freely evolve. Our complex economic and political systems came into being through a process of cultural evolution, and not thanks to "social engineers" (notice how many of these same Christians hate socialism--to me this boggles the mind). In the same way, this rich world of complex organisms and ecosystems could not have come about any way other than a process of evolution building spontaneous order.

When we say "designed by evolution," we of course mean "selected," but perhaps in a higher sense there is a sort of design to it all. Evolution is not "random" just because it is free. On the contrary, it has the remarkable tendency to produce improvements in living things, which we never could have produced using our feeble mental capabilities. And this is exactly what Adamatzky and Ilachinski were saying from the beginning: "To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold." We have much to thank God for and much to learn from this beautiful world he has given us, but we will never understand it if we insist that God is an engineer.

More importantly, we will never understand it if we demonize those whose life's work it is to bring us creative insight into the wonderful and mysterious world around us. I hope the church can feel some sense of shame about this, before it forces out all of us who take scientific truth seriously.

In related news, the General Assembly of the PCA will soon vote on whether or not to reject all evolutionary views on the origin of man.

Charles Darwin on the Creator

Occasionally in Origin of Species Darwin mentions God, in ways that seem in some sense to defend his character. For instance, there's this quote from Chapter V:

He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature an under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like the other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe, with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells living on the seashore.

And then there's this (rather lengthy) quote from Chatper VI, which comes in the middle of explaining how the eye may be the product of incremental changes:

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection of the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or in any degree, tends to produce a dinstincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

Adam Smith showed how the market may be the product of human action, but not of human design. Darwin showed how biological evolution may be the product of divine action, but not of divine design.

Charles Darwin on "Chance"

Although the theory of evolution is now progressed far beyond Darwin's original work On the Origin of Species, I thought it would be interesting to read through it, for historical perspective, and to round out my education (I never did learn very much biology). I'm not finished, but a couple of things have caught my eye that I wanted to write down.

Many people take issue with Darwinism based on the general idea that it promotes chance over design, thus making the universe out to be chaotic and purposeless. But that's not how Darwin himself wrote about it. Chapter V is framed by the following statements:

I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations--so common and multiform with organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree with those under nature--were due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.

...

Our ignorance of the laws of variations is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied. But whenever we have the means of instituting a comparison, the same laws appear to have acted in producing the lesser differences between varieties of the same species, and the greater differences between species of the same genus.

In other words, we only perceive natural selection as due to "chance" because it occurs in systems of so many constituent parts that we cannot possibly know how they all relate to one another. Or better, "chance" is simply an expression of our ignorance, not nature's chaos.

Darwin's assumption is a very modern one: there must be some underlying principles which are both comprehensible to humans and universally applicable to what humans perceive in nature as distinct objects. Creationism, by contrast, asserts that the existence of the several species is fundamentally inexplicable: God spoke, and the species came into being, and that's as far as we can go. I consider both of these ways of thinking to be in tension throughout the history of Judeo-Christian thought. On the one hand, God's inexplicable intervention into history is central to the message of Scripture, particularly on Mount Sinai and at the resurrection of Christ. On the other hand, God's faithfulness, sovereignty, and wisdom are also essential parts of his character, and creation is thus characterized as fundamentally driven by principles which are comprehensible to human beings.

Can we therefore say that Darwin's idea is thoroughly unbiblical? True, it goes beyond the creation account in Genesis, as some would say attempting to see the "story behind the story." But if one were to completely forbid this kind of attempt from Christian thought, would we not have to give up all talk of the Triune existence of God, seeing that we do not ever see this explicitly spelled out in Scripture? Indeed, most Christians see the Trinity in the first few lines of Genesis: the Spirit is present in the "wind," and the Son is present as the Word of God speaking all things into existence (cf. John 1). Is this not also an example of seeing the "story behind the story"?

One final point: discovering the underlying principle does by no means remove all mystery from the universe. Even in light of modern genetics, there is no way we will ever be able to predict the long-run outcomes of evolution, as it is driven by countless tiny variations of which we will never be fully aware; much less can we possibly conceive of their future use. Because the process is so far beyond our control, we may thus call it a matter of "chance," but only if we are so inclined for reasons other than the facts themselves.

More on the evolution of cooperation

It's fascinating how fascinating scientists find cooperation these days. A recent article in the Economist explains recent attempts to give an evolutionary explanation for basic human civility and generosity toward strangers:

Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the species’s psychology. Existing theories of the evolution of trust depend either on the participants being relatives (and thus sharing genes) or on their relationship being long-term, with each keeping count to make sure the overall benefits of collaboration exceed the costs. Neither applies in the case of passing strangers, and that has led to speculation that something extraordinary, such as a need for extreme collaboration prompted by the emergence of warfare that uses weapons, has happened in recent human evolution to promote the emergence of an instinct for unconditional generosity.

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two doyens of the field, who work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, do not agree. They see no need for extraordinary mechanisms and the latest study to come from their group (the actual work was done by Andrew Delton and Max Krasnow, who have just published the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) suggests they are right. It also shows the value of applying common sense to psychological analyses—but then of backing that common sense with some solid mathematical modelling. [emphasis added]

The conclusion that Cosmides and Tooby come to is explained in these words:

For most plausible sets of costs, benefits and chances of future encounters the simulation found that it pays to be trusting, even though you will sometimes be cheated. Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. Previous attempts to study the evolution of trust using games have been arranged to make it clear to the participants whether their encounter was a one-off, and drawn their conclusions accordingly. That, though, is hardly realistic. In the real world, although you might guess, based on the circumstances, whether or not you will meet someone again, you cannot know for sure. Moreover, in the ancient world of hunter-gatherers, limited movement meant a second encounter would be much more likely than it is in the populous, modern urban world.

No need, then, for special mechanisms to explain generosity. An open hand to the stranger makes evolutionary as well as moral sense. Except, of course, that those two senses are probably, biologically speaking, the same thing. But that would be the subject of a different article.

Here you see the bias on the part of scientists, that our morals must somehow be ingrained in us biologically. I don't see any proof that this is the case. What about the role of traditions? Arguing that morals evolve biologically is like arguing that language is preconditioned in our DNA--which some argue is true, but I believe is false. Our morals, like our language, would not exist without structures that exist on top of our biology, structures created not purely biologically but also socially. In other words, you have to be taught in order to speak a language, and you have to be taught to have morals.

I don't think we should discount the biological account of certain moral traits; perhaps in some sense it could be enlightening. On the other hand, a computer model does not explain everything. Examining the moral development of actual human beings would be more enlightening.

And then, there is this remark: "Except, of course, that those two senses [evolutionary and moral] are probably, biologically speaking, the same thing." This is one modern assumption I just can't buy: that moral questions are all reducible to empirical questions. Even if, as secular thinkers presume, there is no transcendent purpose for our morals other than that they allow the human species to survive and thrive, this is no way guarantees that we will be able to reduce our moral sense to "evolutionary sense"--that is, we cannot necessarily understand what will, in the long run, lead to the survival and thriving of the human species. In the interest of keeping this post relatively short, I'll refrain from addressing all the questions I see looming over this reduction from moral to empirical.

My final question is this: what will be the philosophical and societal implications of these empirical studies? It would be naive to think that these "findings" are playing on ideologically neutral ground. Are these studies going to be used to attack capitalism? Or perhaps bolster it? I could see the arguments going either way. One might say, "Capitalism makes a false empirical assumption that people are naturally self-interested, so it ought to be dismantled." Or one might say, "See? People left to make their own decisions naturally tend to cooperate, so we ought to give them more economic freedom." Personally, I find both interpretations naive, but naive interpretations tend to drive ideological battles. It will be interesting to see what interpretations emerge from the evolutionary study of morals.

The Unselfish Gene?

Today as I was reading an article by Yochai Benkler on the Harvard Business Review entitled, "The Unselfish Gene" (by way of The Browser) I began to get depressed. Not because, as the article forcefully argues, it turns out our selfishness is not the key to understanding all human behavior. This should be rather uplifting, I suppose. Rather, it was because I found it contained so many pernicious errors in reasoning that I began to wonder how our cultural elite can be so blind.

To begin with, let's summarize the major premise. For years now we've been operating under the assumption that humans are fundamentally driven by the selfish desire to advance one's own interests, the so-called "rational actor theory." Thus we have to determine which personal incentives to use in order to drive people toward good behavior. But now, thanks to modern science, we can successfully say that in general, people actually like to cooperate with one another!

My first critique, which is almost my most overarching critique, can be stated as follows: how can we possibly think we needed modern science to figure this out?

Evolution of Science and Religion

Some people argue that science has its place, and religion has its place. But this perspective fails to take into account evolution, specifically in culture and language. Consider the concept of (not to mention the word) "science." Once theology was the queen of the sciences, since "science" in this sense meant simply the acquisition of knowledge. "Natural science" is what most people now think of as "science," but even then it is not so easy to think of a definition. Is it a method? Is it a body of knowledge? Is it knowledge about particular kinds of things? Which things? Can it imply a certain kind of "worldview"? Or consider the word "religion." How does one define it? Does it have to involve belief in the supernatural? Does it have to involve participation in an institution of the faithful? Is it a philosophy? Is it a collection of morals? The difficulty of these questions is symptomatic of a deeper fact, namely that the word "religion," like the word "science," has a long cultural and linguistic history which is still moving forward. I find it highly absurd to think that we could predict the outcome of this evolution for a period of time longer than a few years.

Application: Anyone interested in providing a view on the relationship between religion and science must in some sense offer definitions of those terms. Yet these definitions must compete with one another for popular usage, and thus they are hardly definitive. For instance, science as a worldview has gained some ground in the intelligentsia at certain points in recent history, but it probably will not have huge success in the long run. It feels to me as if the most popular definition of science these days is strictly utilitarian: we like it because of what it does for us. For that reason our culture has little reason to precisely sort out the relationship between science and religion; as long as science just keeps giving us cool stuff, can't we all just believe what we want? There are probably much worse ways our culture could handle the situation. In any case, we cannot simply decide what the two words "science" and "religion" mean, and then logically deduce their compatibility. If we did that, then all of language would just be mathematics.

This misnomer of "self organizing" systems

The study of self organizing is extremely important in modern science, whether in evolutionary biology, economics, or even the physical sciences. I once went to a talk on the study of self-organizing systems in the context of crime syndicates in Los Angeles. There are even some interesting applications at the basic level of image segmentation: mathematicians working in nonlinear analysis are now able to devise computer algorithms to detect different parts of a photograph using evolutionary partial differential equations. There is a key idea encompassing all of these fields of research: complex systems can "organize themselves" not according to a preset plan, but according to certain rules, with certain types of organization being "selected" over others. For instance, in image segmentation, it would be pointless to try to give a computer all the necessary preset criteria for identifying a piece of an image in a photograph. (How do you know where a mountain ends and a sky begins? Try writing down the exact criteria just to see how impossible this is.) Instead, if you give a computer general rules (dictated by a PDE) by which to allow its image segmentation to evolve, eventually an appropriate segmentation will be selected.

So why do I say "self organizing" is a misnomer? The argument can be put pretty simply in a mathematical framework. A self organizing system is nothing more and nothing less than a dynamic system. Let x(t) by the state of a system at time t, with the state space given by H, and let f be a function. Then we can write x'(t) = f(x(t)) for given initial data x(0) in H, where x' is the time derivative of x. This defines a dynamic system. For discrete time, we can simply write x(n+1) = f(x(n)). The long-time behavior of a dynamic system is, in a completely literal sense, the result of evolution. The crucial point is this: this behavior is governed by the function f. It would be absurd mathematically and otherwise to say that x(t) determines itself. On the contrary, it is clearly determined by f, over which it has no control. (I could mention stochastic dynamic systems, but the same principles apply there as well; randomness does not mean the system is somehow freer.)

What is "intelligent"? What is "design"?

If you read my posts on a regular basis (I really have to wonder how many of you there are) you may have noticed that I keep coming back to two seemingly abstract subjects: epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. These seem to creep up on me as an unavoidable subtext to just about every debate I care about: between Christianity and atheism, concerning the origins of life and the material world, and even on bioethics. Nowhere has this been more true than in the debate concerning evolution that seems to go on relentlessly. I've been part of a reading group on Francis Collins' book, The Language of God, in which he lays out a case for Christianity with a special emphasis on harmony between faith and science. The reading group involves Christians and atheists/agnostics of various backgrounds, and I've appreciated the chance to clarify some of the key issues. The key issues are, in my opinion, all matters of epistemology.

Evolution: Smith before Darwin

In Appendix A of The Fatal Conceit, Hayek has this to say about the development of evolutionary theory:

Though in Hume, and also in the works of Bernard Mandeville, we can watch the gradual emergence of the twin concepts of the formations of spontaneous orders and of selective evolution..., it was Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson who first made systematic use of this approach. Smith's work marks the breakthrough of an evolutionary approach which has progressively displaced the stationary Aristotelian view. The nineteenth-century enthusiast who claimed that the Wealth of Nations was in importance second only to the Bible has often been ridiculed; but he may not have exaggerated so much....

While Smith has been recognised by several writers as the originator of cybernetics (Emmet, 1958, Hardin, 1961), recent examinations of Charles Darwin's notebooks (Vorzimmer, 1977; Gruber, 1974) suggest that his reading of Adam Smith in the crucial year 1838 led Darwin to his decisive breakthrough.

Thus from the Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century stem the chief impulses toward a theory of evolution, the variety of disciplines now known as cybernetics, general systems theory, synergetics, autopoiesis, etc., as well as the understanding of the superior self-ordering power of the market system, and of the evolution also of language, morals, and law (Ullman-Margalit, 1978, and Keller, 1982).

Moral of the story: Read Wealth of Nations.

Free Markets, Evolution, and Design

I've noticed that a lot of atheists and Christians share the same basic premise about evolution: Surely a loving God would not have allowed spontaneous, unplanned growth to be the mechanism by which new species came into being. Christians who take this point of view hold onto God and reject evolution; atheists hold onto evolution and reject God.

That's kind of interesting. It's almost the exact same impulse that leads people to be skeptical of free markets. How can free, spontaneous growth lead to economic prosperity? Surely anyone who cares about the poor, our environment, and the betterment of society will have a better idea than to leave the economy up to free, unplanned exchanges between individuals.

Thus I shouldn't be surprised if secular liberals reject the free market. Spontaneous evolution is, for them, the result of the absence of sovereign grace; if we want to run the economy right, we need to figure out how to do what a loving God would have done had he bothered to show up.

One might then ask why it appears that so many Christians who reject Darwinian evolution appear to accept free market ideology. My response would be that it is doubtful that these Christians have any sort of genuine commitment to the principles of economic freedom. Voting Republican is certainly no sign of believing in the free market. And if many Christians do seem skeptical of big government, this surely has many explanations unrelated to economics, such as the tradition of individualism in American Protestantism.

And we should not be surprised if we see many Christians rejecting the principles of free markets. I believe I heard a comment from N. T. Wright once to this effect: "Many of the same Christians who reject Darwinian evolution also embrace social Darwinism."

Let me make one thing clear: social Darwinism is a caricature of the free market. The free market is not about "survival of the fittest." It is simply about unplanned, free exchanges between individuals. Indeed, this requires as its foundation a respect for human life, without which free trade will never happen.

But the idea that something unplanned can lead to the best result seems to bother us all on some level. Christians, because surely God's design of the world means he actually designed it; the plans must be lying around in His attic somewhere. Secularists, because surely we rational humans can do better than nature's horrific disorder.

On that provocative note, I think I'll stop here, and leave the details for another time.

Explanation vs. Appreciation

This blog post by Karl Giberson is a nice, moderate article about the relationship between science and faith. I especially enjoyed the following comment:

Scientific explanations exist for all that I see and hear outside my window. And explanations can be proposed for why humans enjoy nature so much. But faith is God is not about explanations. We do not believe in God because we need to explain this or that feature of the world. That is what science is for. We believe in God because we see something deeper in the world, something that transcends the scientific explanations.

This may be pushing in the direction of "religion and science are two separate spheres that have nothing to do with each other," but I don't think it has to. It's just a fact: believing in God neither begins nor ends a person's pursuit of questions about how the world works.

For me, personally, believing in God inspires me to ask questions about how the world works. Knowing that God created all things, what could be more natural than to ask how he did it? But there are many believers who aren't really that curious about such things, and that's inevitable. It seems God has distributed curiosity to the human race in a somewhat uneven fashion.

I take offense at claims made by atheists that "God did it" is the answer Christians give to questions about the origins of matter, life, and ourselves. It's not that the statement "God did it" is unsatisfactory; it's simply that our curiosity doesn't have to end there. Questions of why and how are perfectly natural for those who have faith, and need not be the product of skepticism.

On the other hand, I admit that in order to answer questions of why and how one usually has to be discontent with traditional answers. This requires an attitude of skepticism toward the status quo, but not necessarily toward God. If God is truly transcendent, it makes sense that traditional understandings would continually fall short of explaining his work.

All in all, I think we need to be humble in our approach to nature and God. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, but it often leads to arrogance, in the same way that traditionalism can foster pride.

So while we will never be able to explain everything, we can continue to explain more and more by returning to an attitude of humility, rethinking our assumptions, and turning with a heart of appreciation toward the created world we love so dearly.

Evolution, Ethics, and Theodicy

Michael Le Page at CultureLab wrote a review of a book entitled Inside the Human Genome: A case for non-intelligent design by John C. Avise. The title of the review expresses succinctly what I find to be the most profound link between the debate over evolution and the debate over religion.

The title Le Page chose was, "A caring god would not have designed us like this."

Essentially what modern atheists do is restate the problem of evil in terms of evolutionary science. Look at how much DNA is wasted, they say. Look at what a mess it all is if you really look at it. Look at how much better it could have been if it really had been designed.

Thus the fascination that scientists have toward the human body and its incredible complexity is tempered by a sober realism about the horrible things that can occur naturally, all because our biology is so screwed up.

As N. T. Wright wisely points out, the problem of evil cuts both ways. For the religious, the problem is, "If God is good and God is in control, how can bad things happen?" For the atheist, the problem is, "In light of the immense evil that surrounds us, is all of the good that we experience just a big cosmic joke? Is there any meaning to it at all, or is it essentially random?"

Any self-aware scientist has to feel the tension. We study the world around us because it truly is so fascinating, so beautiful, in all of its complexity. But yet that very complexity leads to many things that cause incredible misery. Should we love or hate the world we live in?

Christians are far from working out this question. Although scripture insists that the world was good, even very good when God created it, the current state of the world difficult to measure from a Christian perspective. Is the universe in all of its complexity still essentially good, or has it experienced fundamental corruption?

And different denominations of Christianity profoundly disagree on their doctrine of the end times, which has significant implications for how we view the universe now. Is God going to completely obliterate all created matter and bring in something totally new, or are we going to see some continuity between the old and the new? Should we spend time caring about this world, or should we be so other-worldly that we think only of the next?

This question, which I maintain is equally unclear for both atheist and Christian, really comes to bear when considering ethical questions we face today. For Le Page, it comes down to this:

Why do we still allow children to be born with hideous diseases that could be prevented? Why do we rightly glorify efforts to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's, but still regard tackling the root cause - our dismal, degenerating DNA - as taboo?

Our ethics have been so hideously distorted by superstitious nonsense that we cannot see the clear moral imperative: we need to start sorting out the mess of a genome evolution has left us as soon as we can.

I'm not unwilling to sympathize with Le Page on this point. For him, the problem of evil can be solved by endeavoring to fix it ourselves. I think it would take a certain hardness of heart, from a Christian perspective, to completely shut him down on this point.

Yet I do think it's worth reflecting on where our power to do good is coming from. If all of the universe has been formed out of the oblivion by totally impersonal forces, what makes us think that we have actually accomplished anything by attempting to alleviate human suffering? Will not all of our attempts to solve the problem of evil be swallowed up by death and decay?

If, on the other hand, we believe the testimony of ancient Christians, who claimed that the Messiah was truly raised from the dead, and that God's new creation has begun, there is something to hope for in fighting against the problem of evil. There is power in every attempt to alleviate human suffering, because we have hope that the power of God really is for us, not ultimately against us.

Now if we do rely on such power, then in fact it would be wise to use caution when approaching ethical problems. The urge to just "do something" when faced with problems of suffering in the world has to be tempered by wisdom. That is where religion derives its moral authority in society; it preserves the memory that the best intentions often pave the road to hell.

But if we say that ultimately our hearts our set on the next world and not this one, then I don't really know what we do about the problem of evil. We can hope to escape it, but we can never hope to really solve it. I can see how a scientist would have a real problem with this.

Ultimately I think the way we, both Christians and atheists, need to approach the question of theodicy is by asking the question, "Should we love or should we hate the world around us?" I think this will put us all on more common ground as we consider important ethical questions facing our world.

It's easy for atheists to think, "There just can't be a loving all-powerful God out there because there is evil," and it's easy for Christians to think, "I know why God allows evil, and atheists are just so hard-hearted that they won't accept it."

But if we consider together the more complicated question (all of us admitting that it is complicated) that I have just put forward, we will realize that we have a lot of different values to weigh against each other. One value is of our curiosity about this beautiful and fascinating universe; another is our desire not to see people suffer.

How we measure those values against one another will make an enormous difference for our future. The problem of evil is not some philosopher's game; it is a real, practical matter for all people.

Augustine on reading Genesis

From Confessions, Book XII, Chapter XVIII:

What harm is it to me, I ask again, if I think the writer had one meaning, someone else thinks he had another? All of us who read are trying to see and to grasp the meaning of the man we are reading: and given that we believe him a speaker of the truth, we should obviously not think that he was saying something that we know or think to be false. While therefore each one of us is trying to understand in the sacred writings what the writer meant by them, what harm if one accepts a meaning which You, Light of all true minds, show him to be in itself a true meaning, even if the author we are reading did not actually mean that by it: since his meaning also though different from mine, is true.

What's so fascinating to me about this quote is the kind of approach to scripture that it presents. Augustine was an educated man, and as he read scripture he wasn't about to throw all of that education aside as he read. On the contrary, it was precisely out of reverence for the scriptures that he read them against what he already knew or believed to be true.

I don't know if this means that if Augustine had lived in this era he would have found Darwinian evolution an acceptable theory. There are, after all, a number of philosophical issues to be worked out on that front. But it does suggest to me a general approach that ought to encourage more openness in the Church on the issue.

For a scientifically minded reader of Genesis, it would not be hard to see the pattern of seven days actually mirroring modern scientific theories: first light comes into existence (signifying an original burst of energy, a "big bang"), then stars and planets begin to form, then simple creatures and vegetation, then animals, and finally humans.

(One thing that's slightly off is that the sun doesn't appear until after the sky has formed and after plants have been placed on the ground. But this detail has been accounted for on numerous occasions: it is meant to inform surrounding pagan cultures that the Sun and stars are, in fact, no gods at all, but are completely subordinate to the true Creator God.)

Applying Augustine's point of view, this is perfectly legitimate. A scientist who wants to take both his own knowledge and the Bible seriously is free to do so. In fact, Augustine says, the question of what Moses actually thought is not strictly relevant (though it is helpful to try to figure out what exactly Moses meant). What matters is what's true, and what's true, Augustine says, should be counted as public property:

For what they say, they say not because they are godly men and have seen it in the mind of Your servant Moses, but because they are proud men: it is not that they know the opinion of Moses but that they love their own opinion, and this not because it is true but because it is their own. Otherwise they would have as much love for the truth uttered by another: just as I love what they say when they say truth--not because it is theirs but because it is truth: from the mere fact that it is true it ceases to be theirs. But if they love it because it is true, then it is not only theirs but mine too, it is the common property of all lovers of truth. (Book XII, Chapter XXV)

What's most fascinating to me about Augustine is how many different points of view he can entertain on just the first chapter of Genesis. Keep in mind that he was writing in the 4th century! Yet he deals with questions that most of us modern Christians don't even begin to ask, much less answer. I suspect there are both good and bad reasons for that, but my point is that things aren't nearly as simple with Genesis as they appear.

In modern dialogue about science and religion, Christians need a healthy way forward, and Augustine, writing 16 centuries ago, has already given it to us. Read scripture with reverence, but be open to different interpretations as we gain more understanding of the world around us. And always, always follow the rule of charity:

Let one be not puffed up against the other for another, above that which is written. Let us love the Lord our God with our whole heart and our whole soul and our whole mind and our neighbor as ourself. Whatever Moses meant in his books, he meant according to these two commandments of charity.... Now we see how foolish it is, in such a flood of true meanings which can come from those words, rashly to assert that Moses especially intended one or another of them, and in sinful contention to offend that charity by reason of which he, whose words we are seeking to explain, said all that he said. (Book XII, Chapter XXV)

If I were God...

Reading yet another criticism of Intelligent Design (by a Christian) reminded me of how tricky the evolution "debate" can be.

It has long been argued that it should be possible to tell whether this world has been designed by some sort of intelligence (cf. Paley's argument for the existence of God). It shouldn't be hard to see why this argument is so appealing--if this world was designed by an intelligent being, then there really is a transcendent purpose for this life. That's good news.

The central complaint made against this argument is the same, whether it's in the context of an argument about the existence of God or in a debate between evolution and "intelligent design": there are plenty of things that an intelligent designer clearly would've done differently.

Dr. Ayala makes this exact argument:

"I do think that people of faith may find in the world many reasons that support their belief in God. But I don’t think that intelligent design is one of them. Quite the contrary. Indeed, there are good reasons to reject ID on religious grounds, in addition to scientific grounds. The biological information encased in the genome determines the traits that the developing organism will have, in humans as well as in other organisms. But humans are chock-full of design defects. We have a jaw that is not sufficiently large to accommodate all of our teeth, so that wisdom teeth have to be removed and other teeth straightened by an orthodontist. Our backbone is less than well designed for our bipedal gait, resulting in back pain and other problems in late life. The birth canal is too narrow for the head of the newborn to pass easily through it, so that millions of innocent babies—and their mothers—have died in childbirth throughout human history."

It sounds as if we're not debating science at all, but rather theodicy--how can God exist if there are bad things in the world?

Believers in God almost all do the same thing in this debate: they find some way to make bad things not God's fault. Ironically, that goes for both believers in intelligent design (or creationism) and opponents of intelligent design. While creationists say God designed the world good and humans introduced evil, theistic evolutionists say God allowed evil by way of a "hands-off" policy. (Perhaps "deistic evolution" is more accurate.)

I think what's really going on here is a tricky balance between two important desires. One desire is to find beauty in the world. It is natural that studying the world should leave the impression that it is designed, because there is so much out there to inspire awe and wonder in the human heart.

But the other desire in this balance is to rid the world of suffering and death. Just as it is natural to think the world is designed because it is beautiful, so it is equally natural to think the world is not designed (or unintelligently designed) because there is so much suffering and death. As much as this world can be awe-inspiring, it can be equally heart-breaking.

Many people tend to cling to both desires equally, and yet on the question of whether the world was designed, they seem forced to choose yes or no. In either case, something has to be rationalized away. Those who insist that the world was designed find a way to rationalize the existence of suffering and death (this is theodicy).

Those who believe the world was not designed have their own rationalizing to do. On the question of why the world is beautiful, usually the answer is that it comes down to arbitrary human preferences ingrained in us as a result of millions of years of evolution. I find this at least as weak as any explanation for why a loving God would allow evil.

I guess I find it hard not to simply keep these two desires--one for enjoyment and the other for justice--in tension. Resolving this tension never satisfies me. Scripture never really resolves this tension, either. Just read Ecclesiastes and the prophets side by side. Maybe it is sheer vanity that we persist in this debate. Given the way we seem to talk past one another, that can't be far from true.

Another evolution story

Brian McLaren keeps bringing up these different Christian interpretations of evolution. While I appreciate his efforts to bring in varying points of view, I've been pretty disappointed with what I've seen.

The interpretation I read tonight was written by Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, which perhaps informed a lot of her reading of past and present views of God. Here is part of what she writes about the old view of God:

The God of creation, the religious world determined, was all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present and all-holy. The problem lay in the fact that a God of these proportions failed, it seemed, to exercise such power when it came to the creation this very God had created.

This God did not save the world from evil, did not exercise blatant power in behalf of the good, did not save the righteous from the unrighteous, did not act in behalf of the oppressed. This was a God whose merit theology, whose rule-driven scorekeeping, trumped care, compassion and love.

It's interesting to view these statements from the point of view of a Protestant, coming from a tradition that rebelled against precisely this view of God.

It makes me think of John Calvin, whose commitment to God's sovereignty was unshakable, and is probably perceived by many as part of this "old" way of viewing God. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Calvin's commitment to God's sovereignty meant that God was acting on behalf of the oppressed, that prayer could change the world, and that God could save the righteous. For Calvin, it was the very sovereignty that Chittister seems to dislike that made these things possible.

Also the undying commitment of Protestants to justification by faith alone prevents any notion of God keeping a score-card. Indeed, such a view of God is exactly what Protestants were trying to reform.

What's so fascinating is that Chittister reacts to a horrifying conception of God by asserting free will at every turn, and diminishing God's sovereignty to do so:

A self-creating universe becomes co-creator with the humble God who shares power and waits for the best from us and provides for what we need to make it happen. We become participants in the process of life and the development of the world that is not so much planned as it is enabled. As nature grows, experiments, unfolds, selects and adapts, so then must we. Growth, not perfection, becomes the purpose of life. Ongoing creation, not predestined fate, becomes the purpose of life.

There's some tension here between Chittister's desire to see the role of the self more highly and to see our final eschatological purpose wrapped up in God. For instance, she writes towards the end of her article:

We learn from the fossils of the ages that development is most often a slow and uncertain process, a precarious and breakneck experience that demands both time and trust in the future that is God, and in the God of the future.

Somehow this desire for God to be the reliable end of life's journey doesn't change, even when you and God are partners, as opposed to the more traditional roles.

Chittister concludes that "Evolution gives us a God big enough to believe in." I'm not sure her story does, though.

I find myself actually much more inclined to go back to the Reformers, and find hope not in the partnership between God and self, but rather in the all-encompassing sovereignty of God.

There are some huge mistakes I think people make when thinking about God's sovereignty. I think the number one mistake is viewing it in primarily in terms of personal salvation. God has foreordained each soul for heaven or hell, end of story. That is an ugly picture, I think.

Instead I think the sovereignty of God, if it covers anything, should cover everything. One should not miss how this is a vital source of hope. It means that this world matters--God is involved in everything. It means God's power is here and now just as much as in eternity.

At the same time, of course, it is a frustrating view of God, but there's a certain kind of frustration that I find essential to spiritual health.

I am constantly fascinated by how the Old Testament deals with God's sovereignty. You get all kinds of passages more or less blaming God for bad things, even Israel's disobedience (cf. Isaiah 63:17).

Hebrew theology didn't allow for any dualistic explanations of the world--God was behind everything. But it did allow for full expression of disappointment with God, and a desire for God to change things. I think there's great wisdom in that.

The thing I think is most damaging in all of these discussions is how individualistic we are in our thinking. Modern thinking gives us two choices: either God is in charge, or the autonomous self is in charge.

How sad it is that we find it somehow original to think of this meager third option, that God and the self are working together.

What we really ought to learn from evolution, among many other things, is that we are part of something much bigger. It is not just between God and me. There is God, and there is all of creation!

I find it tragically ironic that in her post featuring beautiful pictures of outer space, Sister Chattister failed to meditate on the sheer vastness of the universe, and our smallness in it. Whereas Chattister wants to "imagine a greater sense of self," I feel compelled by scientific knowledge to imagine a much smaller sense of self, and a greater sense of my surroundings.

And yet, in a way, if I can imagine just how small I am compared to the world, I can become much bigger, in the sense that I will be part of something much bigger--something God made me to be by making all things according to His wisdom.

Well, one thing is clear: there is no one spiritual interpretation of scientific theories. This debate could certainly be enlightened by having more varying perspectives heard.

Of evolution and the created order

This op-ed I just read by Robert Wright reminded me that while I seek to have a faith in God that is compatible with modern science, there are certain compromises that leave me empty.
At first I had hopes that this article would bring something exciting to the table. What drew me in was this line:

Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

But then I realized that all this "creative power" amounts to for Wright is that of Spinoza's clock-maker:

The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection...

Unfortunately, this theology is not at all new. It's just Deism, straight out of the Enlightenment. This might be an appealing religion for some people, but it's not Christianity--it's not a story about a God who comes into the world to redeem it and make all things new.

In the end, though, the punchline of the article was just another statement of hopeful modernism:

A more evolved religion could do what religion has often done in the past: use an awe-inspiring story to foster social cohesion — except this time on a global scale.

Something inside me trembles when I hear the words "social cohesion." Doesn't anybody read Brave New World and get freaked out? Human beings do not become what they're supposed to be simply by living "cohesively" with one another.

I just think a part of being human is seeking for something that doesn't make sense, that is so Other that it can only be called holy, or perhaps awesome, terrifying, bizarre, absurd, or mystical.

People will beat themselves, starve themselves, pray day and night to find it; they'll use drugs, or experiment sexually; they'll go to concerts to be blown away by music of all kinds, or they'll create art ranging from absurdly beautiful to absurdly depressing; they'll go to church to get an emotional high from music and preaching; they'll read any book they can get their hands on, searching for deeper ideas; sometimes they'll just sit alone in their room contemplating.

All of these hope desperately to find that there's something beyond the curtain of reality. I just can't stand any system of thought that makes this aspect of humanity out to be an unfortunate byproduct of our evolution. Harmony is good, but all great music has dissonance. To paraphrase Einstein, God does not play the same four chords with the universe.

Wright's article ends with this:

William James said that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

I just don't agree. I am compelled by my religious faith to believe not merely in unseen order, but in unseen fury, the kind that can so easily be caricatured into this quaint little image of a God distributing people into heaven and hell.

The kind of fury I'm talking about is evident in that utter speechlessness that you experience on the edge of reason, when you finally realize that what you really want in life is far too big for you to handle. It's evident in Jesus of Nazareth, who in his wrath died on a cross for his people.

A lot of people don't seem to experience this, and so much the worse for them. They will probably be swept up in the tide of whatever system that comes around to ensure them harmony with the "unseen order" that today's intellectuals want to imagine for them.

As for me, I don't think Jesus asks us to simply harmonize with some invisible order. I think he asks us rather to tremble at the fury of the kingdom of heaven, a fury so incomprehensible that violence does not fully describe its power.

Maybe after all what I want is not so much a vision of God that harmonizes with science, so much as a vision of Him that renders all opinions on the matter irrelevant.

Evolution as Creation Narrative

I was talking to my uncle tonight about the issues of science and faith, and how scientific knowledge influences how we think about ourselves.

That conversation naturally shifted toward the realm of the whole "evolution debate," which is really a debate about a lot more than evolution, as we all know.

As usual, I found myself sort of defending the side of the Christian evolutionist--one who believes in Jesus Christ, but also believes evolution happened. This is not a new position for me.

But I realized something deeper this time around. To a certain extent, I want evolution to be true.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how narratives about the world influence how we act in the world. Beliefs about how we fit into this universe affect what part we seek to play in its existence.

One curious thing about this whole debate is that when we read the creation story now, we often read it only for what it says about God's role in nature, and not for what it says about us. If you think about it, there would be absolutely no point to having a creation story in the Bible if it didn't say anything about human beings.

I mean, really, it might be nice to know a bit about how things came into existence, but on the other hand, it's not really all that important if it doesn't say anything about how you should then live. It may even be impossible to imagine a story about how things came into being that doesn't affect how we should live.

The Genesis creation account says a lot about how humans should live, not least of which is how to form a work routine: six days of work, and a seventh day of rest. Our work is to mirror the creative act of God in the creation of the universe, and we should rest just as He rested. It's a beautiful idea, that our work should actually mirror the creative work of God.

When I think of evolution as a story of God's creative work in the world, I think, what a beautiful way to learn how we should live. For one thing, God's creative process was gradual, extended throughout eons of time. Maybe at each point along the way God stopped to enjoy each gradual step in the process, perhaps gazing at its strengths and weaknesses.

This gives me hope when I think about the fact that Christ came 2000 years ago and so far has not come again. We have seen the church go through 2000 years of change. Has it been for the better? I don't know, but perhaps we just need to be more patient with it. Maybe God really does take His time, and maybe that's okay. See 2 Peter 3:8.

For another thing, if evolution is the story of God's creative process, then God likes things to increase in complexity. I don't know if this is very appealing to a lot of people. Increasing complexity means that old answers become less and less helpful. It means less certainty. It means that old structures constantly get overwhelmed by the increase in diversity of nature.

The idea that God likes increasing complexity might help us navigate this ever more complicated world we live in. In the realm of ideas, we need to constantly be tearing down old categories in order to interact with increasingly diverse thought. This sort of "creative destruction" mirrors the actual creative process of God observed by scientists in nature.

Are humans meaningful and precious in this narrative? Oh, absolutely. Just as in the Genesis account, we are made to be part of the creative work of God. I think that's totally amazing, and it's part of the main reason I get up every day. In thinking about this purpose of ours, we might want to ask, how does God's creativity actually look in the world?

Just some thoughts, really. Just adding to the complexity of the debate, I guess.