Notes on Creator God Evolving World, by Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod

Transcription

1 Notes on Creator God Evolving World, by Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod Preface Cynthia Crysdale is a professor at Sewanee, The University of the South, and Neil Ormerod is a professor at the Australian Catholic University. According to the authors, they have set their sights on the ordinary person in the pew, not because they expect us to become an academic in order to believe, but because the issues they raise are very important for how we understand and live within a religious worldview in tune with the contemporary world. I found many of the explanations in this book to be somewhat difficult, but I will try to convey what I think they are saying. Chapter 1. God, Religion, and Science. A Family Circus cartoon shows a young girl asking her father, If we send astronauts to Mars, do they hafta drive past Heaven? While this may strike us as funny, it illustrates the double world in which many of us live. Few educated adults would ask such a simplistic question. Many people accept the results of science and presume a reasonable world of scientific endeavor where everything is open to question and results are only as valid as the evidence that supports them. Yet when it comes to God, both believers and nonbelievers often assume that religious issues can only be settled by reverting to belief that is held in contradiction to reason (we set the science aside). It remains commonplace in our media to present science and religion as opposed, a position promoted by those on both sides of the issue. There are scientists who love to portray religion as based on superstition and ignorance, and there are believers who cling to fundamentalist readings of Scripture, particularly of Genesis. The broader public appreciates the progress made by scientific advances but often seeks to maintain religious commitment. These are the people for which this book is written. The authors will argue that the relationship between God and creation that is best suited to current scientific understanding is the Christian tradition that God is the transcendent cause of the created order, and that contemporary scientific theories and the best of Christian theology dovetail together nicely. The authors begin by tracing the development of science, starting with the view that the Earth was at the center of the cosmos. They discuss the work of various early scientists, particularly Isaac Newton ( ) and Johannes Kepler ( ), who showed that we can observe the world and marry what we see to mathematical formulation that explains what is going on. This is central to our modern conception of science. Newton s work (followed by that of Pierre-Simon Laplace, ) eventually drove the understanding that the world is deterministically driven, that we can describe everything that happens if we just develop the equations that show how causes and effects work. If one knows the position and velocity of all particles in the Universe, then one can know the past and future with absolute certainty. 1

2 God established the Universe to operate according to its fixed laws, to produce a future completely determined and known to God. God is all-powerful, so what God wills to happen necessarily happens. Since the laws of physics determine the unfolding of the Universe completely, there is little left for God to do once he set everything in place. The God of Deism is remote and uninvolved. This deterministic conclusion is at odds with any notion of human free will. Two scientific advances completely overturned this notion in the scientific world. The first was in biology, Darwin s work. How do we account for the rich diversity of life forms that we find on our planet? Darwin developed the theory of evolution by natural selection, which is statistical in nature. The fittest are most likely to survive. He was unaware of modern genetics, which has demonstrated that random mutations of genes cause the changes that drive evolution. There is randomness in the mutations that become part of the overall diversity of life. The second scientific advance that overturned the deterministic worldview was quantum mechanics, which showed that behavior at the level of atoms and light is probabilistic, not deterministic. People tend to focus on the religious impact of Darwin s theory of evolution in relation to a fundamentalist reading of Genesis. For many Christians the problem is easily resolved by moving away from a literal reading of Genesis. St. Augustine ( ) noted that whether heaven, like a sphere, surround the earth on all sides as a mass balanced in the center of the universe, or whether like a dish it merely covers and overcasts the earth is not something that the Scriptures determine. What is more difficult for some if this: If biological evolution involves chance, then is God involved? Is God no longer omnipotent (unlimited power) but rather a benign presence that influences the Universe, or someone who set it up and is no longer involved? In quantum mechanics, the path of individual particles can no longer be predicted. We can no longer measure both the position and velocity of a particle, and so can no longer predict exactly what will happen. The deterministic worldview is no longer possible, for both these reasons. [The chaotic motion of asteroids is another reason for this.] In general, it appears that the unfolding of life and events is undetermined and open-ended. There is an irreducibly statistical component to the way the world operates. What are the implications for our understanding of God and God s relationship to the world? Is there divine purpose in creation? Did God plan for humans to emerge out of the process of creation? According to Richard Dawkins and others, the answer is no: Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, has no purpose in mind. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. Life has no larger purpose and fits into no larger plan. Just adjust to the meaninglessness and get on with your life. Further, what does this say about morality? Dawkins suggests that our sense of morality is simply an outcome of evolution. [For example, groups of pre-humans that cooperated with each other and helped each other had better survival chances.] If God is the sovereign Creator of the Universe, but the world unfolded with a considerable amount of randomness, what are the implications for our understanding of moral action in the world? 2

3 Is randomness opposed to purpose? This appears to be a common assumption of both those who use evolution to rule out God and those who question evolution because of the so-called evidence of design. However, can we not use statistical means to attain well-thought-out goals? The authors state that we do this all the time, and they use anti-smoking campaigns as an example. We can establish statistically that smoking is a risk for lung cancer, and that a campaign that causes fewer people to smoke leads to fewer cases of lung cancer. But we can t point to a specific person and say our campaign saved your life. [Some additional examples: it is statistically random what blobs of gas in space will coalesce into stars. But we know that the physics is such that many stars do form, and that the elements needed for life form inside them. It is statistically random what planets will form, but there are so many that some are well-suited for life. So before we get to evolution at all, totally random processes operate that lead to the conditions necessary for a planet with life.] The authors contrast the views of two scientists with solid international reputations, Paul Davies and Richard Dawkins. Dawkins promotes atheism with an evangelical fervor, and Davies shows openness to God s existence. Davies says: Science is founded on the notion of rationality and logicality of nature. The universe is ordered in a meaningful way If the universe as a whole is pointless, then it exists reasonlessly. In other words, it is ultimately arbitrary and absurd all scientific claims of reasoning are grounded in absurdity the world s breathtaking rationality would have to spring, miraculously, from absurdity. Which Davies is suggesting doesn t make any sense. The very success of science seems to imply that reality is intelligible and reasonable. Dawkins is amazed at the power of science too, but for him the success of science is simply a fact occasioning no further explanation. Davies is not trying to prove the existence of God using science, since science cannot prove the existence of God. But he is saying that a strong commitment to the validity of science is consistent with belief in the existence of an intelligent creator of the universe. A person can be led by science both toward God and away from God, as we see by looking at what both authors have to say. Christians who insist on a fundamentalist reading of the Scriptures in relation to Genesis do a disservice to faith by pitting science against religion. Likewise, those who claim their faith stance is scientific and try to force the empirical evidence to fit their faith stance, as is done in so-called creation science, cannot be accepted. Many people, if forced to choose between the two, will choose science because of the evidence of its correctness. God is the author of all truth, both religious and scientific, so there can be no disagreement between them if we are seeking the truth. Chapter 2. Evolving World: Regularity and Probability A common reaction to experiencing the outdoors (or the wonders of the night sky, or the joys of human life) is to point to all the beauty and say this can t all have been an accident. The underlying assumption is that either the world has come about by accident or God embedded a purpose in the world, and that if randomness has determined much of the world s direction then God was not involved. The point of this chapter is that chance is not opposed to order and regularity. We don t have to choose 3

4 either sheer chance or lawlike certitude. Chance and order interact in an intelligible and complex manner that has contributed to the magnificence of creation. [Not discussed in detail in the book, but part of this discussion, is that a way of setting the Universe up may have been for God to have determined all the physical laws such that intelligent life would arise throughout the Universe and that this intelligent life eventually seeks a relationship with God. God could have then set the Universe free to be creative (through the randomness and eventually through choices) as we discussed in the last chapter. The amazing way that everything works together is supportive of this idea.] We have two kinds of scientific inquiry: classical science that sets out to understand regularities (for example the effects of gravity on a planet), and statistical science that investigates how often something occurs, or how likely it is to occur. While classical science seeks unified explanations that will apply to all similar situations, statistical science aims at finding an average number of occurrences of a specified event for a particular population or a given time. Both make sense of the world but in different ways. Classical science can make sense of individual instances of an event, whereas statistics is always about an aggregate of events. Classical science sets out to determine the nature of phenomena whereas statistical science examines the state of things. Whereas classical science is involved in determining the cause of AIDS, statistical science examines how many people suffer from AIDS. [I would say that this description of statistical science is not entirely accurate. In the physics fields of statistical mechanics, we use statistics to examine the nature of phenomena, for example to determine how much a temperature will change if we combine certain gases. In quantum mechanics, we use mathematics to predict the probability of each state of an atom. The results agree with how much of each type of atom we see. Radioactivity is a good example of this.] The authors use an example of finch beak size. There is a systematic relationship between the size of a finch s beak and the type of food it eats. There is also a relationship between the birds that can survive a drought and those who are lost during a drought. Birds who have narrower beaks are more likely to survive into adulthood. Not every one with narrower beaks survives, and not every one with wider beaks dies, but the small ones are more likely to succeed. It turns out that the ones with smaller beaks need fewer seeds to keep them alive, so being young and big is a liability in the world of finch youth. Research shows that the average beak size decreases during periods of drought. With the beaks, it is not just total randomness. What happened was according to probabilities, with cause and effect part of what occurred. In addition to random occurrences and physical laws, we also have to include recurring cycles to understand what is going on. For example, the basic scheme of energy production in every living cell consists of ten distinct steps. There is randomness in the things that happen, and when they happen, in each step, but all ten have to operate over time for there to be energy production. The cycle of water circulation on Earth (evaporation, precipitation, water flow to the oceans, etc.) is needed for the nitrogen cycle of plant life to occur. Individual chemical reactions that are random in nature form a 4

5 scheme of recurrence that eventually provide for a unified whole. Chance conditions interact with schemes of recurrence to yield more complex integrations. It is a misconception that natural selection is all about random processes. The individuals that are best adapted to their environments are the ones most likely to survive and reproduce. And, natural selection is ultimately all about populations, not individuals. [If one set of adults produces the same number of children as adults, and another set of adults produces twice as many children, then after 20 generations there will be over a million times as many of the second set.] This is not a matter of mere chance, since systematic explanations can be found as to which traits enhance the likelihood of survival and reproduction and which do not. [For example, humans became dominant because of the advantages of being able to move, see, hear, and also have large brains and opposable thumbs that allowed us to make and use tools.] The production of genetic variation is a matter of chance, although many mutations are tried. But for the differential survival and reproduction part of the process, much less is random. To conclude, it is not an either/or of determinism versus chance, but an elaborate interweaving of the two. What does all this have to do with God? We turn there next. Chapter 3. Creator God. Rather than a biblical account of a world made originally complete by God, we now know that the whole Universe has evolved over billions of years, and that the emergence of life is part of the larger picture of development. If the Universe changes so radically, must we also insist that God changes? How does God relate to creation? We shall see that modern science is more supportive of the classical position than are modern attempts to introduce change into God. Let s look at the thinking of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, which has become known as process theology. How can God know things that occur by chance? If the world changes in time, God s knowledge of the world must also change, which would then mean a change in God. Process theology presents an open-ended vision of the Universe and human life in contrast to many traditional theologies that assert that God determines in eternity every event in our lives. Process theologians believe that the reality of divine limitation opens the door to greater human creativity and responsibility. The creature, as an independent subject, can choose to do what it wants. The creature is then morally responsible for the choices that it makes. The world order within this scheme is still unfolding even for God. God must adjust to what the creatures decide and thus God is taking risks in dealing with creatures. It seems that God is then in some sense temporal and subject to change, if he is a genuine subject of experience in interaction with creatures. This is a long way from the transcendent God of classical theism, the eternal cause of all being. The pattern here is clear. To be able to affirm genuine contingency and chance in the Universe, the God of classical theism is incompatible, and God is then not absolutely omnipotent. God suffers and is subject to time. [This is related to the viewpoint of the last chapter. From my point of view, God may have chosen to let the Universe take its course creatively and to let it create, outside his direct control. I am not sure we can say that He did not choose to do it this way, although I agree it 5

6 differs from the omnipotent viewpoint. In some places, the book seems to be saying that God allows the Universe to be creative and random and to choose its own way. The conclusion in the book is that God knows exactly what choices will be made, so that God knows everything about everything all the time, including where it is all headed. The arguments about God being outside time and creating time are supportive of this viewpoint. The case is made most strongly at the end of these notes.] Thomas Aquinas ( ) already addressed this topic. He did not agree with process theology. He said, loosely translated, If all things that occur in the Universe, even chance events, are part of God s will, then, apparently, either God s will is not sovereign or else everything that happens is totally determined. He concludes that what God wills to happen through the unfolding of chance, will occur through the unfolding of chance. [It seems to me that this is close to Intelligent Design, that God decided exactly how He wanted everything to be designed.] Aquinas refers to God as the primary cause, that breathes fire into the physics equations, that makes everything work the way it does. We can figure out what the equations are, but science can t explain why it all works. Science has full reign in explaining the world around us in terms of how things happen (secondary causes). God is never a God of the gaps to be invoked in explaining what science cannot yet explain. If we ask, Did God make it rain today? the answer is both yes and no. No in that God is not the cause of the rain as a scientific explanation, but yes in that God made creation such that meteorological factors can coincide to make rain. God is the primary cause but not the secondary cause. Aquinas would argue that it rained because God chose the secondary causes to be such. For Aquinas, the very fact of creation itself is the act of a loving God. This guarantees the unequivocal goodness of the created order. Creation is utterly dependent on God for its existence. The world that God created is not totally determined but unfolds as an interaction of classical laws and chance probabilities. One can accommodate genuine contingency (chance) without abandoning a classical conception of God as a transcendent and necessary cause of all that is. Proposals that seek to make God into a changing God embed God in the temporal order. But God is not subject to time; God created time along with the Universe. We sense the flow of time, the past, present, and future. But Einstein developed his special theory of relativity after experiments showed that the speed of light is always a constant for any observer. Einstein proposed this thought experiment. Suppose you are on a light beam traveling away from a clock. As you move away, the hands of the clock to not appear to move; the clock stands still. Einstein predicted that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, that time actually behaves like the clock. This phenomenon has been demonstrated many times in physics laboratories. A consequence of this is that there is no common now for different observers. Later, Einstein developed his general theory of relativity that combined an understanding of gravity with that of space and time. For Einstein, space and time are not separable realities, but are intimately related to each other. The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion. They occupy their particular point in spacetime. [Relativity theory does not allow us to see into the future. A result of relativity is that time slows down for a moving observer relative to someone at rest, and events occur at different times for someone who is moving relative to someone at rest. So something that occurs at the same time for a fixed observer would occur at differing times for a moving observer. One of the many ways this has been 6

7 proven is through study of mesons, that decay into electrons in a very short period of time. Ones that are created by cosmic rays in the atmosphere high above Earth s surface should only travel for about 2000 ft before decaying, but time slows down because they are moving so fast and they travel about 10 times as far. We can calculate the effect of this, so we can determine what the events look like for both observers. It s similar to someone sending you a package in the mail, and you know they sent it a certain number of days before you received it. Or, if someone at the other end of a football field yells to you and you know they yelled a second or so earlier than you actually heard it, due to the time it takes the sound to reach you. When astronomers saw the bright supernova in 1987, they knew that it actually had erupted 150,000 years earlier. So we can t see into the future, and while the present and past may be different for different observers, we can calculate how they are different for the different observers. So although I believe that God created time, and is not controlled by it, using relativity to argue that we ve shown that past, present, and future are illusions is not clear to me.] So we have to be very careful about attempting to put God into the flow of time; it runs into scientific problems. If God s existence is not caught up in the flow of time, God is timeless, eternal, and unchanging. God transcends time because time is part of the physical Universe that God created. Augustine noted that For God also made time, and thus there was no time before he made time. Hence, we cannot say there was a time when God had not yet made anything. There is no before creation because there is no measure of time without space and matter. Any attempt to place God within the temporal flow will inevitably place God in space as well. We need to get beyond the notion that God is somehow just like us, only really really really big and really really really old. God is completely other than creation, and the divine mode of existence is completely different from anything we come across in our normal experience. With perfect intelligence, God understands all possible worlds. With perfect wisdom and love, God chooses one possibility in its totality from its beginning to its final ending, from the myriad options presented by divine intelligence, in one creative act. God breathes fire into one of the many mathematically possible worlds on offer. God knows, loves, and creates this Universe with precisely this set of contingencies (chances) built in. God does not need to be placed in time in order to provide for chance in the Universe. God transcends matter, space, and time, and creates a contingent Universe because He chose to do so. The classical understanding of God is more than at home with a world of chance and change. Chapter 4. Evolving World: Purpose and Meaning. We have clarified that the world has emerged and continues to function as an interaction between classical laws and statistical laws. We pointed out that one does not need to subject God to chance or change just because one accepts the role of chance in evolution. We can retain the idea of a thoroughly transcendent God who is not subject to change. Here we refine our notion of purpose in the Universe. Embedded in the false opposition of chance and necessity is the presumption that the world in which chance is operative will necessarily be a world that is directionless, meaningless, and without purpose. 7

8 But in our Universe we see the operation of chance along with a natural orientation toward complexity. [The Universe forms more complicated elements and compounds, starting with only hydrogen and helium, and eventually leading to the complex molecules that allow for life.] There is an inherent tendency among living things to move toward higher and higher life forms. Can we conceive of the world as both open-ended yet in some way directed? How can we explain what drives evolution forward? Is it mere chance without any direction? Is it some implanted design that unfolds according to a preset plan? We have rejected both of these alternatives as based on faulty understandings of how chance operates as well as a poor theology of God. Lonergan defines finality as the upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism of world process. The world is dynamic, changing. This dynamism is directed in that it heads toward higher integrations. What exactly emerges depends not on a predetermined plan but on the chance conditions that happen to exist at any given place and time. What will happen next is not determined, but is directed. Which molecules form at any time are not determined, but simple molecules bond together to form more complex compounds. Built into the dynamism of the world is an orientation toward greater complexity, from atoms to human wonder. But it is open-ended. [In earlier sections of the class, we discussed all the amazing things that happen in the Universe, that have to happen that way in order for us to exist. Here is another one. The neutron consists of three quarks that exchange particles called gluons that hold them together. If the neutron is by itself, the neutron has a half-life of 11 minutes. On the other hand, when the neutron is incorporated into the nucleus of an atom like carbon or oxygen, its lifetime significantly increases. If it did not, none of our basic elements would be stable and life would not be possible.] Investigations into all aspects of science implicitly illustrate that there is in the world a dynamism that is directed toward ever-greater integration and complexity, but that the particular integrations that emerge are not determined a priori. Natural selection is an example of where more diversity and complexity arise naturally. Another example is where complex molecules form under the right conditions. We observe these on Earth as well as in outer space. There is a dynamism toward order that is inherent in physics. We find that humans and apes have genomes that are close to 99% the same, while a counterpart to most of the 25,000 human genes can be found in mice. The closer animals have closer genomes. It seems there is a small subset of genes that control body plan development in the embryo stages of most animals. The same set of genes is shared widely among different kinds of animals, indicating that these gene sets are quite ancient. What accounts for this co-existence of great similarity and grand diversity? The key seems not to be in the genes themselves as much as in the way they are used. The key lies in genetic switches (switches in the genes). The anatomy of animal bodies is encoded and built by constellations of switches, primarily. The switches are hotspots of evolution. Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary paleobiologist at the University of Cambridge, wrote Life s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, which documents many instances of convergence in 8

9 evolution. Convergence is the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same solution to a particular need. There are many examples of this, where the same body parts or traits emerge independently of one another. Morris argues that there is an underlying structure that imposes limits and delineates probabilities of outcomes. He concludes that evolution is purposeful, and offers these arguments: (1) its underlying simplicity, using a few building blocks; (2) its ability to navigate among all the possibilities to find the small fraction that work; (3) the sensitivity of the process, in which almost all alternatives are catastrophic (so that the only approaches that work are the ones that God desired); (4) the inherent tendency of life toward the emergence of complexity through the rearrangement of existing elements; (5) the exuberance of diversity at the same time as the ubiquity of convergence; and (6) the inevitability of the emergence of intelligence among a more widely varied group of animals than we generally recognize. Chapter 5. Human Freedom and God s Providence. The authors relate a story of Mary s spouse John who survives a horrible accident in which a policeman calls his survival a miracle. Mary and John feel that God saved his life. Then the daughter of some close friends is killed in a car accident. If God s providence was at work in saving John, was he not provident when their daughter was killed? We noted how an understanding of God as primary cause gave full scope for science to understand the Universe. God chose our Universe, from all possible universes, to exist. Mary and John s experience raises questions about whether God is good and, if so, how God seemingly fails to act when tragedies occur. Why does God choose a world in which suffering and evil occur? There have been unimaginable horrors, humanly-created ones such as the Holocaust and naturally occurring ones such as the Black Plague. For some people these horrors are proof that God does not exist. Either God is not omnipotent, unable to eliminate suffering and evil, or God is not loving, unwilling to eliminate them. Another set of issues is this: if God creates the whole Universe in a single act of creation, is there still room for God to intervene or act in particular events in our lives? In particular, can God respond to our prayers, or is such activity meaningless? We have noted that the Universe appears to be fine-tuned for life. We should also note that each of us has a very, very small probability of existing. If our parents had not gone to that dance, if their parents had not met at the beach, and so on all the way back to the start of the human race, you and I would not exist. If we wound the clock back to the beginning of the Big Bang and then let the Universe unfold once more, it is most unlikely that we would exist, or even that the Earth would exist. The Universe might be fine tuned for life, but that does not mean this form of life on this particular planet is preprogrammed to exist. There is the strong likelihood that somewhere life in various forms will emerge. This process of life emerging is not all a pretty picture. Death allows for new life to emerge. The same genetic variations that drive evolution can cause abnormalities and genetic diseases which lead to suffering and death. The same genetic variation that causes sickle-cell anemia provides some protection from malaria. Our cosmos is not without its ambiguities. 9

10 With all these difficulties, we can affirm the goodness of creation. Probabilities of emergence allow for the creation of genuine novelty, of startling creativity and invention, new realities not reducible to their component parts. Human beings create societies and cultures; they search for truth; they create works of enduring beauty; they love one another to the point of self-sacrifice. This process of human creation is part of the larger creation of the cosmos; an open-ended orientation to become conscious, intelligent, and free, in the search for meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty. One can argue that this human participation is the goal toward which the Universe is headed. This orientation of humans points to One who is the goal toward which we are ultimately oriented. We affirm that God wills all of this. God wills a Universe of emergent probability, of evolution and all that it entails. God wills the whole and hence every part of the whole. God is not only the source, but the goal or end toward which creation heads. One could protest and say, is all this pain and suffering worth it? Could God have created a world with less suffering? Is suffering sufficient to undermine the judgment of Genesis, that creation is very good? Let us consider the problem of genetic disorders for a moment. Suppose the mechanism of genetic inheritance always worked perfectly. There would then be no genetic variation through mutations, no evolution. The world would look very different in every aspect, with perhaps no novelty at all possible. God would have created every species in its completeness without any evolutionary process. It may have been possible to create a world without suffering, but it would allow no possibility for freedom because we would live in a deterministic universe. God does not intervene in creation since God is never not acting. He does not need to tweak creation to achieve particular outcomes. Rather, God chooses the whole of creation from all possibilities available. This does not reduce us to mere puppets, as secondary causes are real causes, including the secondary cause we call human freedom. God suffuses the whole with meaning and goodness. Our grasp of the whole is limited and incomplete. When we experience the tragic elements of this creation, where the processes that make life possible also lead to painful destruction of life, we can call into question the meaning of the whole. Perhaps the final response to this is that offered to Job ( Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth? ). We have no idea what it means to create a Universe, or what might be possible or impossible in such a creation. While it is easy for us to imagine a world without suffering, such imaginings might not translate into a coherent world order. Jesus notes that God makes the sun shine and the rain fall on the good and bad alike. Suffering is an inescapable part of life that we all must face, to varying degrees. Is there a point to prayer? Can our prayer change God s mind and produce a different outcome than if we had not prayed? Much of the problem lies in our attempt to place God in a temporal frame. If I pray now, can I change God s mind now and achieve some desired outcome? But the question is, can an eternal, unchanging God respond to prayer? One could argue that God has chosen a creation in wisdom and love that responds to our prayers in precisely the way God has willed. We may witness this through a course of events or simply through a change in our own attitudes towards these events. It may be that our prayers bring God into a situation in a way that God would otherwise not be there. But this itself is something God knows eternally in the act of creation. And if we had not so prayed God would not have so responded. So prayer remains meaningful. Every prayer should have within it thy will be done. So 10

11 we put ourselves in God s hands and trust God s loving will for the whole. We invite God into our realities whatever they are, whether, for example, a loved one is spared or taken in a car accident. One problem we have is that we tend to think How is God close to us? When we ask it this way, we are trying to bring God into space and time. Rather we should think: How can I be close to God? By asking how we can be close to God, we can be eternally and intimately close to God, for whom our existence is an integral part of the whole of creation, willed eternally into the one divine act of creation. What about suffering and evil in the world? We should note that there is a major difference between suffering and evil. We all experience pain, as do other animals. It is an important biological mechanism warning us of potential or actual damage to our bodies. The presence of pain alerts us of the need to act, so it has a biological purpose. On the other hand, it can rob us of pleasure and joy in life. It becomes an experience of a lack of meaning. And the pain can be emotional, such as in relationship breakdowns. Then there is moral evil, which is very different. It arises from a decision to turn from the truly good to embrace an apparent or lesser good. Augustine was concerned about evil. If evil has a cause, then either God is the cause which is abhorrent, or God is not the cause of everything, and the alternate cause of evil is a force equal to and opposed to God. He ultimately concluded that evil has no cause and this is why it is evil. It has no reason. He recalled a story where he and a group of friends stole some pears only to throw them against a wall. There was no motive for this except malice. The point about evil (for example the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11), is that it is incomprehensible because it is deficient or lacking in meaning. It defies our attempts to understand. Suffering is a human experience of a lack of meaning in our encounter with pain and life. All we may be able to do is trust in a provident God to make sense of our situation where we cannot. On the other hand, we may suffer because there really is no meaning to grasp. We are then confronted with moral evil, a lack of meaning for which even God can find no meaning. It is important to maintain the distinction. We should not assume that because we cannot find meaning that there is no meaning to be found, since God s ways are so far above our ways. Let us return to the question of human freedom. Freedom is a great good and lies at the heart of human dignity. Our freedom can be viewed as a participation in the divine freedom. We become co-creators with God; our dominion over the world is expressed in our freedom to create not only a wide variety of technologies to manipulate the world but also a large variety of human societies, cultures, art forms, philosophies, and so on. What intelligence can conceive, we can set about achieving. We shape our own experience. But freedom s perversion is sin and the moral evil that flows from sin. Given the amount of evil in the world, is it all worth it? Is the great good of freedom worth all the evil that such freedom allows to occur? In dealing with the question of pain and suffering, we found that there was a purpose or meaningfulness to suffering, protecting us from greater harm. Sin and moral evil do not have such a purpose. It is evil because of this lack. The paradox of human freedom is that we are responsible for our own lack of 11

12 responsibility. God is the cause of all that exists. But moral evil is the gap between what is and what ought to be. This gap results from a failure to seek the good. While God can be thought of as an indirect cause of pain and the suffering that results, as a primary cause of all that is, God cannot be thought of as the cause for evil. Why evil occurs is a fundamental enigma. We could ask Why does God allow evil? After all, God chooses this creation, which happens to contain evil. God forbids evil, but does not force us not to do evil. We could weaken the question and ask Why does God create a world in which moral evil might occur? Human freedom is a great good; with freedom certainly comes the possibility of sin. So is it possible for God to have made a universe in which, in fact, no one ever sinned? God could have made a world without freedom, but freedom is among the highest created values, a great good. And freedom includes the possibility of sin. The fact of evil, unintelligible though it is, makes possible a new type of good, that of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. In the end all we can really assert is that, despite the presence and fact of evil, this creation is still good. We are called to an act of trust in God. Without faith, without the eye of love, the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist. But faith recognizes that God grants men their freedom, that he wills them to be persons and not just his automata, that he calls them to the higher authenticity that overcomes evil with good. If God is indeed good, what if anything is God doing about the problem of evil? There has been remarkable progress from human intelligence and creativity, but there have also been destructive and incomprehensible elements of evil. If God is working on a divine solution to the problem of evil, what would it look like? It would assist human beings by strengthening their basic orientation toward the good, giving them a hope that can overcome the dangers of despair in the face of evil, and help them better understand their place in God s creation. It would take instances of human evil and seek to transform them into opportunities for a greater good, the good of conversion, forgiveness, and mercy. It would require the one who is the victim of evil to transcend the impulse to return evil with evil, to instead love one s enemies. In short, it would look a lot like Jesus life and death. Suffering of this sort can unmask and disempower evil, revealing it in its banality and meaninglessness. This approach is not restricted to Christians; Gandhi had a powerful strategy of active resistance to evil through being willing to suffer. As the life of both Jesus and Gandhi demonstrate, the loving sacrifice of resistance has the power to change history. The problem of evil is a practical problem requiring a practical solution that lies at the heart of the Gospel. Chapter 6. Implications for Human Living: Moral Agency and Emergent Probability. An almost complete human skeleton of a young boy who died 1.6 million years ago was found in Meave Leakey recalled how excited she was to realize how profound this discovery was. Only humans can ponder our own heritage. Only humans have spent entire careers digging in the dirt to uncover clues to what came before us. The ability to sequence nucleotides in human DNA has only been available in the last decade. Humans are the only animals that are self-reflexive enough to ponder their own existence and raise questions about what kind of Creator, if any, might be the source of it all. 12

13 Roughly six million years ago, the human line (hominins) split off from the human/ape line. Our own species has been around for only about 200,000 years. Scholars believe that there were different hominin species, of which we are the only one still existing, once the Neanderthal line died out 30,000 years ago. We have been around for only 3% of the time that hominins have been evolving. We may be special, but our emergence, like that of other species, took many, many generations, with multiple other human species emerging and disappearing in the process. Nearly 3.6 million years ago (MYA), an adult and child walked upright through ash. Large brains are more recent. Brain and body size has increased dramatically since the boy that was 1.6 million years old. We don t know exactly what advantage larger brains gave the genus Homo, but there were several periods of climate change. Those species more able to adapt to changing conditions are the ones who survived and passed their adaptive advantages to further generations. Certainly one of the advantages of larger grains is the development of tool use. Tool use is documented as far back as Homo habilis, 2.5 MYA. Decorative art is found in caves from approximately 75,000 years ago. Human evolution follows the trajectory of evolution of other animals. Over long periods of time, chance mutations in concert with climatic and environmental pressures shifted probabilities in favor of adaptive traits. As human life develops, less and less importance becomes attached to mere circumstance and more and more importance is attached to the operation of human intelligence. The significant probabilities become not those of emerging environments, but those of insight, communication, persuasion, cooperation, and action. Rather than being merely conditioned by our environments, humans become conditioners of our environments. Humans are transforming our world through action. Human life is not merely a matter of biological survival and reproduction, but has to do with the meaning and values we ascribe to our living. When did humans become human in the theological sense of being created in the image and likeness of God? What we witness in the history of human evolution is the emergence of a defining orientation toward meaning, truth, and goodness, that is not evident in nonhuman species. At some stage in human evolution, this orientation became the central defining characteristic of human existence. This orientation is what is meant by the traditional theological language of soul or spirit. The next section is a discussion of how we should approach our actions in the world in light of our position in creation. The authors discuss an ethic of control as compared to an ethic of risk in terms of fixing evil. An ethic of control assumes that we can make a plan, execute the plan, and achieve a desired result. It assumes we can guarantee that our actions will have the desired effects. In contrast, an ethic of risk involves doing what we can, knowing that it may only achieve partial results. It is propelled by the recognition that to stop resisting, even when success is unimaginable, is to die. An ethic of control assumes that one s choices will fix evil in a definitive way, whereas an ethic of risk recognizes the limits of power and the ambiguity of moral choice. The authors discuss how in most concrete cases where we act, there is a combination of direct results and outcomes that are subject to uncertainty. At some point one must make a decision and take action, accepting the risks involved in what might unfold. 13

14 The authors relate a story about a woman who is teaching black children in the southern states during the depression time period. She teaches them about the truth of slavery and the cruelty of it, even though these things are not in the history books that she is given by the local school board. When she is challenged by the board, she chooses her own self-authenticity over the value of employment and refuses to teach the false history that is in the book. The authors point out that sometimes our decisions are based on reliable processes and other times on uncertain consequences. The authors then go on to relate several examples where the people involved thought they were in control and their decision had unintended consequences. The first involves banning deer hunting in an area to the north of the Grand Canyon to protect the deer. Predators were eliminated. As the deer population increased (as desired), they ate favorite shrubs and the range deteriorated. The deer population eventually crashed due to starvation. The authors point out the perils of playing God. The ideal of returning to a pristine wilderness incorporated a misguided assumption of control. Another example they give is the fight against bacteria. Fighting bacteria with antibiotics causes only the toughest bacteria to survive. The bacteria develop immunity to the antibiotics, and they evolve due to our fighting against them. Because bacteria are fought the hardest with antibiotics in hospitals, hospitals are now the most dangerous place to be in terms of contracting an untreatable infectious disease. The authors then relate a story of a woman who works at a local level in Rwanda to help widows to get by. With her help, they have a food bank, a few sewing machines, crafts with beads that they sell, and a small charity in Canada that supports them. She has made it more likely that these women and their children will be able to live and die with dignity and a sense of hope. The authors make the point that we should not behave as if our actions can create direct and simple results, but instead should take small steps that gradually set up new conditions for the possibility of positive changes. How does this relate to the theme of the book? God is the primary cause of all that is, and we as human agents serve as secondary causes. Our actions involve the combination of control and risk. Since God brought us into being, we should see all that we have as a matter of gift. We should accept that our resources are not our own creations to exploit, and we should forswear our attempts to be godlike. In an attitude of thanks for our existence and all that we have and are, we seek to promote God s will in the world. We can develop an intentional relationship with God, we can tune ourselves to the needs of others, and we can choose to create conditions in which we become more sensitive to God s loving action. Just as evolution includes failures and breakdowns as well as new possibilities, at the human level our choices can work against the upward directed movement that God desires. The authors discuss how the solution to putting right a system in which irrational evil is embedded is not direct eradication but the replacement of irrationality with reason, the offering of love in the face of degradation. [The authors are talking about their personal approaches to making the world a better place here. These are good ideas, but don t cover everything. Hitler had to be eradicated.] 14

15 The authors point out how Gandhi, the teacher above (taught the children about slavery), the woman in Rwanda, and Jesus stand up for reason in the face of the irrational and claim dignity and justice in spite of oppression and degradation. Gandhi was assassinated, Jesus was crucified, and the teacher lost her job. Yet these acts of sacrificial love become the possibility for transformation in the world. Jesus followers went into the world in joy and strength convinced that God s power heals even the worst and darkest moments of history. The authors are making the point that the view of God creating the Universe with its open options for the future and its development over time is very compatible with God s interaction with us as we understand from the life of Jesus. God s provident will for the Universe includes restoration from evil as a result of self-sacrificial love, mercy, and forgiveness. This is what God wants as a result of the evil that we have because of our freedom. Conclusion. Can a Transcendent God be a Personal God? The authors have argued that the classical account of God as eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient, is not only compatible with an evolving world and the findings of modern cosmology, but in fact presents a more coherent response to the challenges modern science poses than alternative accounts that seek to make God subject to change. Precisely because God is so far beyond what we can conceive indeed, because terms such as outside space and time themselves break down when we have a robust transcendent view of God we will continually strive to find metaphors and images. Story telling, analogies, liturgical practices: all of these are part of our struggle to both relate to God and yet to make sure that our God is not too small. To review: In agreement with modern science, we can acknowledge genuine chance operating in the cosmos. The Universe has both deterministic and statistical laws and these cause the Universe to have emergent complexity. When we take into account Einstein s theories of relativity, we have to acknowledge the interrelationship of space and time. There is no well-defined now. The assumption that God knows what is happening now but not what will happen in the future is problematic. Contemporary cosmology reinforces this by arguing that time is inextricable from creation itself. If time is part of creation, then God must exist outside time. These perspectives agree very well with classical theism. God is the primary cause of being, bringing space-time into existence. What science uncovers in terms of classical and statistical laws are what we refer to as secondary causes. Gravity causes objects to fall and smoking causes lung cancer, but science cannot explain the existence of the laws. God is the cause of their existence and indeed of the existence of everything. So how can the God who is outside of space and time be close to us? To be close to us, someone must be physically near the same location. We should ask how we can be close to God. God has created us as an act of loving wisdom. We know this because each of us is astronomically unlikely. God knows us and chose us to be who we are in his act of creation of the Universe, when God chose this particular 15