Introduction | 5 | Creation and Evolution | Lenn E. Goodman

ABSTRACT

There’s a quiet battle going on in toy stores and on bumper stickers. Plush or plastic dinosaurs jostle for shelf space with Noah’s Arks, pull toys with colorful carved animals peeking out the windows. Stick-on Christian ﬁsh, in silver plastic, decorate car trunk lids, mocked, on other cars, by ﬁsh with feet. The evolution ﬁsh bear the name DARWIN. They’re mocked in turn, by Darwin ﬁsh turned upside down, feet in the air, or gobbled by a bigger ﬁsh, labeled TRUTH, as they try to waddle oﬀ. Reading the literature on creation and evolution, I ﬁnd emotions high,

patience short, clarity often lacking. Would be literalists cant the biblical text, or the world in defense of human dignity as they see it. Doctrinaire mechanists make a similar travesty of their faith in nature by projecting onto science dogmatic denials of unwelcome spiritual views. My hope is that conceptual candor might help lower the temperature a bit, at least for some who are concerned about the ﬁt of Darwinian discoveries with religious values and beliefs. The wise don’t confuse rigor with purism. They use their analytic and synthetic skills to bridge false dichotomies where polemicists see only an abyss. Powerful motives drive today’s controversy. But the extremes feed oﬀ one

another, even as they darken the hard outlines of rejected views. I can’t ﬂatter myself that this book will convert extremists. But for those who seek a middle ground, it may prove helpful. The aim is not to convince readers simply to adopt my own solutions but to encourage others to build alternatives of their own. I think I can show that religion is no threat to evolution and perhaps calm the triumphalism, or defeatism, of those who assume God is dead in Darwin’s world. Neither theism nor biology, I believe, is as full and rich as it can be until cognizant of the other. That claim goes beyond a plea for respect and openness. Defenders of science should give up their positivist pretensions and acknowledge that adaptation is a value concept; and biology, inexorably, a teleological science. Defenders of creation need to recognize that randomness has been and remains critical in the emergence of life and the higher life forms that we hold precious. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Eric Voegelin, Arthur Peacocke, and Mary

Douglas, I believe one shouldn’t hide one’s spiritual candle under a barrel. Religious values can be articulated conﬁdently, in the scientiﬁc light. Science

doesn’t need the invidious tones of scientism to sustain its credibility. Nor will its ﬁndings erode the realities religion aims for. Indeed, the conative character of being at large is part of what we learn from the sciences. Nature is always reaching beyond itself, pointing toward transcendence. Amicable relations between science and religion, and speciﬁcally between

evolution and creation, demand more than mutual toleration. There needs to be a ﬁrmer weld. For both science and religion are core repositories of value, and both are diminished when either is in denial of the other. As Einstein said, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” I hope this book can help scientists overcome their fear of Godtalk and theists overcome their fear of evolution. The questions guiding the ﬁve chapters of Creation and Evolution are also

ﬁve. Each draws several others in train: 1) What motivates religious opposition to Darwinism? How have evolutionists couched their response? Where have past eﬀorts at reconciliation failed? 2) How should we read the biblical creation narrative? What claims and values are embedded here? What issues are extraneous? 3) What is the evidence for evolution by natural selection? What was Darwin’s argument? How did he answer the objections he faced? How do more recent ﬁndings bolster the case? 4) What are today’s core objections to evolution? Is Darwinism mere speculation, founded on circumstantial evidence? Is it tautologous? unfalsiﬁable? Does the complexity of organisms pose insurmountable diﬃculties? Does methodological naturalism warrant metaphysical naturalism? 5) How does evolution complement theism? What can we make of the robust presence of teleology at the heart of biology? Can randomness be a facet of God’s work? The book opens by surveying the backgrounds of today’s conﬂict, tracing

the battles back to a time when creation and evolution were allied against eternalism, the view that nature’s rhythms have never changed. This view, that the world has always been essentially as we see it, was long presumed a bastion of scientiﬁc thinking. But Genesis in ancient times, like Darwin in more recent days, helped us see the world more historically, showing how we can understand things more fully when we know their origins and their histories of development and change. Does the world have an origin; do species really change? Classically, it

seemed natural to answer no to both questions. But our evidence today runs the other way. What we know about the red shift and the expanding universe points back to a beginning. As for living beings, the deeper we dig in the earth’s strata, the simpler and fewer are the fossil types. That conﬁrms Darwin’s ideas about species change. DNA now joins the older evidences for the kinship of all living beings. What we see is not explained by the ancient notion that all living types have simply cycled on forever, or by the notion often fathered on scripture, of separate creation. Science likes constancy, especially in basic principles. Scriptural monotheism

sees each ﬁnite being as contingent. It says, of all things in the world, and of

the world itself: This need not have been. So science seems to favor necessity; and religion, possibility. But science also needs contingency: We seek explanations of what need not have been as it is. Religion too looks for causes, but its search is broader and deeper. It pursues an ultimate cause, and values are what it wants to explain: Why is there goodness, or beauty, or that deceptively simple value, being itself, which never seems to stand still but is always moving, pulsating, aﬃrming and expressing itself ? Where does all this energy come from? Is there a cause behind the order and liveliness of things? Why is there consciousness, or caring? Theists believe the ultimate cause is divine. In ﬁnite value we see signs of an inﬁnite Source. Proximate and ultimate causes need not be rivals. So when we seek the ultimate cause of all that is precious, evolution is no stumbling block. On the contrary it can stand out as a critical modality in God’s creative work. Before the current evidence was available for the world’s origination,

divine wisdom was regularly sought in constancy. Individual organisms were not eternal, of course. But to Aristotelians it seemed clear that each species, in its own way, reﬂects some facet of divine wisdom, eternally. The cycle of generations and the interdependence of living beings assured that invariance. Eternalism, long resisted by believers in the world’s utter and ultimate dependence on God, was in time absorbed by many a monotheist. Unchanging species were the secularized, biological precipitate of that ancient idea. Fossils of extinct types belie the idea of eternal species. But many a preDarwinian naturalist found in the discreteness of species an enduring hallmark of the perfection of each type. The immutability once urged against creation was called to testify in its defense. Evolutionists, for their part, often saw in species change clear disproof of creation. Species constancy was called into court on behalf of creation. Evolution was made witness for the prosecution, against a supposed biblical dogma of species ﬁxity – despite scripture’s testimony that plants sprang from the earth and that human beings were fashioned from the soil they would one day till. Special creation was not thematized in Genesis, nor by most traditional

exegetes. They pursue interests of their own. Genesis, for example, avoids naming the sun and moon, calling them the greater and lesser light, slighting their pagan worship. The serpent, biblically, was just another of God’s creatures. Likewise, the stars, mentioned as if in an afterthought. Scripture has lessons to impart, about the relations of men and women, about fratricide and guilt. It has spiritual teachings, about humanity’s aﬃnity to God, and God’s love for creation. Speculative biology is not the focus. But some readers, seeing a threat in secular values, seek armor for their moral tenets and spiritual precepts in biblical inerrantism. Salvation, they assume, depends on our isolation from the evolutionary tree. As science became a shibboleth of secularity, Darwin was made the

apologist (and whipping boy) of every sort of abuse, from colonialism to racism, to communism and socialism. The age of reform, the spread of

education, emancipation, better hygiene and social services, raised hopes of a coming golden age. Darwinian ideas were often linked with those visions, whether welcomed or feared. But when industry and ﬁnance in the West took the bit between their teeth, the golden age became a gilded age. In the wake of World War I, the gilt, for many, turned tinsel. Darwinism was again the herald, and whipping boy of secularity – of eugenics, cutthroat competition, and cruel exploitation. Fascists, communists, and racists coated their violence and rapacity in the patina of science. Darwin became the natural target of those who sought shelter in the gentler persona of Christ. Today’s debates echo the older polemics. The bones of contention have

rather little to do with biology. Rival moral and social claims, presumed implications of evolution, strike closer to the bone. America’s pragmatist bent exacerbates the problem: We hold ourselves free to believe what we like and often let our preferences drive our judgments. So we’re ready prey to rhetoric. Darwin becomes a brand name in debates about abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the dimensions and meanings of love and language, the sources of aggression, the destiny of individuals and peoples, the relevance of sin and death, the possibility of freedom – and behind all these, the continued relevance of God. Part of what I want to do, after exploring the stakes in today’s con-

troversy, is consider how we ought to read the Genesis creation story. Its distinctive themes are far too readily buried under standard issue brickbats. Darwin’s defenders know that evolution needs little help from them within biology. It’s the mainstay of every biological inquiry. But in addressing a broader public, some take on a more sweeping agenda. They know that not everyone reads the Bible literally. But they zero in on volunteer strawmen, pilloried to help them make the case that anyone who takes Genesis seriously today must be a hick or a hack, a boob or deceiver. Anti-Darwinists are often all too cooperative. Many avoid openly citing

the texts that inspire them, lest they seem mere Bible thumpers, or jeopardize their chances of injecting presumed biblical teachings into public school classrooms. Those who do reference the Bible tend to quarry it for prooftexts supporting their preconcerted views: Adam fell, the earth is cursed, Eve was formed from Adam’s rib; the earth, drowned by Noah’s ﬂood; the world, ready in just six days. Strikingly, they ignore many an explicit theme: that God found his creation good, that he sanctiﬁed the seventh day, that life is a blessing, that a man’s ﬁrst loyalty belongs not to his parents but to his wife, that nature keeps its course even in the face of human evil. Soi disant literalism bypasses such points, hunting for the source of Noah’s ﬂoodwaters or a way of packing every animal species into the ark. Traditional exegetes often say that living creatures emerged from the natural

potentials God’s creation imparted. That thought follows up on the biblical idea that God works through nature. This doesn’t mean that scripture somehow anticipates Darwin. But it does mean that today’s conﬂict between

naturalism and “supernaturalism” rests on a false dichotomy. What scientists explain by way of natural causes is not what scripture sets out to explain. And Genesis puts much more in play than explanation. The Bible’s creation narrative introduces a genealogy and history, as a prelude to its law and way of life. The underlying norms are preﬁgured here, establishing their context. Theists need to take evolution seriously. That means reckoning with the

scope and power of the evidence. So, after examining the Genesis account and some of the richest readings of that text, I lay out the chief supports of the Darwinian idea: that all living species stem from a handful of simpler types, the main agency of their evolution being natural selection, the diﬀerential survival of types that bear some useful heritable trait. Reading Malthus awakened Darwin to the seriousness of the struggle for survival. The work of Lamarck and the reﬂections of his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had urged the idea of species change. Lyell’s geology convinced Darwin that the steady processes of the earth’s history allowed time for the transformations that evolution would require. Darwin broke with classical biology when he saw that the natural variations found in every population are not negligible. Heritable variations that aﬀord the slightest advantage in life’s struggle prove critical in time. An exception can become the rule. Species are not ﬁxed types but ﬂuid populations whose gradual changes reﬂect the shifting challenges and opportunities posed by a dynamic environment. Darwin found his evidence in morphology and taxonomy, embryology and

development, vestigial organs, fossils, of course, and the geographical distribution of distinct and kindred forms. The striking structural aﬃnities in the bones of a human hand to those in a bat’s wing or dolphin’s ﬂipper, the clustering of types in the taxonomic tree, have an explanation if species are related by descent. Alternative accounts oﬀer only feeble, ad hoc rationales. Darwin could explain the resemblance of developmental forms to their presumptive ancestors on the assumption that the conditions faced by larvae or embryos diﬀer critically from those confronted by a mature adult. He could explain vestigial organs as lasting reminders of an earlier organ, now repurposed or disused. He could ﬁnd among the fossils lost types that pointed to the common ancestry of living species, and evidence of the severity of natural selection and the permanence of its culling of once ﬂourishing populations. In the ﬂora and fauna splayed across continents and archipelagos he could follow the spread of living species and chart their gradual transformation, as if the changes of many generations were frozen in time. Today’s Darwinian synthesis drops the Lamarckian inheritance of

acquired traits, an idea discredited even in Darwin’s time. He remained too long attached to it, even intensifying his reliance on it in hopes of speeding the pace of evolutionary change, when challenged by claims that there was not world enough and time for natural selection to do its work, unless variation itself was adaptive. Darwin was innocent of the laws of inheritance. But rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 led rapidly to the rise of modern

genetics; and (after a period of internecine rivalry between Darwinians and Mendelians), to the replacement of Lamarckian assumptions with the ﬁndings of population genetics and cellular biology, forging the new synthesis of neoDarwinism. Where anti-Darwinists had challenged evolutionists to produce a missing link, biology found its conceptual missing link, clinching Darwin’s argument, in the new understanding of heredity. Population geneticists calculated the parameters in which a new gene

could spread and become ﬁxed in a population if it conferred even the slightest reproductive advantage. Ethologists followed “ring species” about the polar regions, ﬁnding reproductive compatibility between adjacent species, but not, in the end, between species meeting at the far ends of the spectrum. Ecologists traced adaptive radiation in island and continental species, and ethologists observed the darkening of pepper moths in England as the landscape was coated in industrial soot – and the return to prominence of the lighter variants when environmental controls returned the blackened woods to their natural colorations. New fossils fulﬁll the Darwinian promise of tracing the continuity of ancestral kinds, and DNA sequencing now allows geneticists to track natural selection in wild and laboratory populations, conﬁrming Darwin’s claim, that classiﬁcation maps a family tree, a pedigree of living beings, down to and including our own species. Of course there are objections. Adam Sedgwick, once Darwin’s admiring

teacher at Cambridge, was among the ﬁrst objecters, deeply troubled by his former student’s seeming erasure of the very idea of purpose – and the immortal soul. The Origin, Sedgwick complained, had no inductive foundation. It was one conjecture piled on another: “You cannot,” he wrote, “make a good rope out of air bubbles.” Natural selection was no more a real cause than the passage of time. Those criticisms persist today, vulgarly when evolution is called a theory, “not a fact”; more subtly, when Alvin Plantinga contrasts evolution with, say, chemistry. Karl Popper, aversatile twentieth-century philosopher, ran a more distinctive

critique – despite the impact of evolution on his own thinking. The theory, he argued (in an analysis often exploited by anti-Darwinists), is ultimately unfalsiﬁable. No conceivable evidence seems to count against it. That puts it beyond the pale as science. Empiric theories take risks. If they’re really making claims about the world, there should be conceivable conditions that would refute them. Otherwise, they’re not making factual claims but just spelling out the logic of their own terms; they’re tautologies or nearly so. Isn’t it arguing in a circle to say that species survive because they’re ﬁt, but then deﬁne ﬁtness as diﬀerential survival? A third line of criticism comes from the Intelligent Design movement.

Eschewing the young earth doxology of Creation Science, ID advocates argue that even the tiniest organelle or the most intimate biochemical process is irreducibly complex, inoperative without the full complement of its

components – and so, unreachable by natural selection: The parts would have no adaptive value without the whole. These critiques persist. They don’t succeed in unraveling the Darwinian

synthesis. But they are instructive nonetheless. Sedgwick’s charges help lay bare the structure of Darwin’s reasoning: The

power of Darwinism rests on its capacity to explain a wide variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena. The epistemic critique, echoed by Plantinga, also reveals how powerful are the motives that lead otherwise responsible thinkers to tilt the evidentiary table when they fear the veracity of scripture and the dignity and destiny of humanity are at stake. Turning to Popper. Plainly, what keeps evolution from collapsing into cir-

cularity are the theory’s existential claims: There are heritable variations, there are helpful and unhelpful traits. Tautologies don’t make existential claims. Darwin himself stated conditions that could in principle defeat his theory. Notably, he staked his all on gradualism. He also said it would “annihilate” his theory if any part of an organism “had been formed for the exclusive good of another species.” That last speaks eloquently to the localization of interests so critical to natural selection. Darwin’s gradualism remains controversial. Some evolutionists continue to wonder whether minute steps are enough to account for speciation. As for Intelligent Design, I see it as a classic reductio ad ignorantiam,

trying to make one’s point by challenging adversaries to answer supposed unanswerable questions – in this case, to explain holistic systems piecemeal, without appeal to the divine designer waiting in the wings. The risk is that someone may ﬁnd just the answer that was presumed impossible – may, indeed, already have one. In that sense, I think the approach is unhelpful to its exponents. It turns to a God of the gaps. That, I argue, is bad tactics for theists, because it puts God on the defensive. God shrinks as science grows. Bad strategy, too then, because theism should see God’s act everywhere, not just in the seemingly uncanny. Still, the ID critique reveals two key points about today’s controversy. One

is implicit in the rhetoric of the reductio, the other in the riposte to it. The rhetoric of irreducible complexity is celebratory. The ID challenge does not reveal that no natural origin can be found for phenomena like the clotting of blood or the origins of the ﬂagellum. The impact, rather, is to highlight the intricacy and elegance of living systems – values prized by scientists and theists alike. ID advocates readily call organs, organelles, and whole organisms machines. They should hardly balk at acknowledging natural selection as a natural cause – a congeries of causes. Many of their favorite cases are even now increasingly well understood in evolutionary terms. But what rightly draws their gaze is not mechanism but something still unspoken when naturalistic explanations are complete. This is hinted at when Phillip Johnson raises his ID critique of a dynamic

common in today’s scientistic polemics: They start out from a methodological

naturalism entirely appropriate to natural science. Scientists, as such, should stick to natural principles and what can be studied empirically. They should not resort to pixies in explaining their results. But the polemicists push on to much stronger claims, a metaphysical or ontological naturalism: We’re expected to commit to the proposition that nothing exists, no explanation can be made beyond the terms a scientist can control. That’s dogmatism. Daniel Dennett typiﬁes the claim, demanding “cranes,” and not “skyhooks” as explanations – No heavy lifting without mechanism. Before inquiries have even begun, that rules out any question that would not be asked by a scientist. Yet there are such questions. We do sometimes walk where science cannot

tread, although even here science gives us food for thought. Our questions about value, and its ultimate origins, are examples. Such questions don’t have mechanisms as their answers. Which brings us to our ﬁfth chapter. Proposing that God works in and through nature, not in opposition to it, I argue that value is endemic in nature, manifest in living beings, self-aware and in some measure self-directed in the human case. Darwin does not dissolve purpose, as Sedgwick feared. He does localize it. Natural selection does not eliminate teleology. It’s presumed in the Darwinian concept of adaptation, which natural selection is meant to explain. Without purposes, Darwin would have no story to tell. Evolution presumes an interest on the part of organisms – an interest in survival, one might say. But the lineages that realize that interest are not invariant. They change, and so do their interests. The purposes of an organism, what it means for it to ﬂourish, are not those of its remote ancestors. Purposes, like species, are emergent. Autonomy and community emerge as evolution unfolds, yielding consciousness and caring. It’s this kind of event that Genesis looks to. Reductionists sometimes say that evolution is the work of chance. That’s a

partial truth. But there’s more to nature than chance. And chance itself – randomness, more precisely – in the genetic lottery, becomes a resource, not a threat. Viewed in evolutionary perspective, sexual reproduction makes randomness a tool of adaptation and a means to adaptability. Here evolution and creation meet, allowing theists to see the hand of God, not as a tinkerer whose mind and method are just another mechanism but as a creator whose poetry is written in and between the lines of natural causes. For there is brilliant creativity not just in the crafting of living systems but also in the joyous, reckless dance of every jewel-like molecule, cell, and star.