With the discovery of a 47 million year old transitional ancestor, Darwin has just been fully confirmed, and as a documentary will soon claim, this changes everything.
“'Whither is God?' he cried; 'I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?...Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.'” These are the ominous words of Frederick Nietzsche's madman, who stumbled into a circle of unbelievers and pierced them with his eyes. Such words have a significant new meaning with the discovery of the “missing link” and the subsequent confirmation of Darwinian evolution, something creationist/author Lee Strobel has said “puts God out of a job”1.
Nicknamed “Ida”, a once fabled transitional ancestor between mammals and primates has been found and will soon be displayed for the world to see in an A&E documentary called “The Link”, which aires this memorial day. Over 47 million years old, Ida has already made international headlines as the “8th wonder of the world”2, and is considered to be the final blow to the creationist campaign against Darwin's theory of evolution.
But have we killed God? Has our search for truth yielded freedom from even the gravity of God's love? Have we finally, as Dawkins would hope, evolved into atheists? What room is there for a Christian in the wake of such a stark and vibrant confirmation of the dreaded theory of evolution? Is God truly dead?
Dr. Karl Giberson doesn't think so. In his book Saving Darwin he writes, “I think evolution is true, its an expression of God's creativity...[but] in deep and important ways we have not dispelled the mystery of our existence at all—we have simply established it with greater clarity.” For Giberson and a growing number of Christians, evolution is our generation's helio-centric universe. Darwin is Galileo, and sooner or later we are all going to have to adapt our theologies to the tidal wave of information that comes as a result of the progress of science. It isn't that God is being ousted by science, its that science is reshaping the way we see God.
Enter the evolution of Christianity. It isn't that God has died, but rather our understanding of Him. As the church in the 17h century struggled to reconsider their faith in the wake of empirical science and its placement of Earth in orbit around the Sun, so also the contemporary form of Christianity must adjust to the now obvious truth of evolution. It doesn't displace God, it merely causes us to wonder all the more at His mystery.
What has died is our hubris. Our babelic tower of over-confidence topples just as we were sure it had reached the heavens. We are forced to remember how small our knowledge is, and how little we actually know. For many this is a hard truth. God is best imagined as a conspicuous, domineering, whiz-bang creator; not as a subtle and indirect guide. Though truth be told we know him better as the latter, somewhere along the way we came to prefer the idea of the former. But this concept has not always been in vogue.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century scientist and mathematician, believed that Christianity uniquely respected the obscurity of God. "If this religion” wrote Pascal in Pensees, “boasted of having a clear view of God, and of possessing it open and unveiled, it would be attacking it to say that we see nothing in the world which shows it with this clearness. But, on the contrary, it says that men are in darkness and estranged from God, that He has hidden Himself from their knowledge, that this is in fact the name which He gives Himself in the Scriptures, Deus absconditus (God Hidden).” It was the opinion of this intellectual giant that Christians can be trusted precisely because they don't try to rigorously explain what God is, or how he does things. Christians being comfortable with mystery makes them better representatives of the mystery that is God.
Of course, with the tectonic shift of accepting evolution, our systematic theologies are left dismantled. We must again ponder the mysteries of the cross, the atonement, the creation, and now even the fall. But this reconstruction is nothing new. “Theology can usefully be thought of as a science”, Says Dr. Nancey Murphy in Reconciling Theology and Science, “We can think of doctrines as being comparable to theories in the sciences, rationally justified by their ongoing ability to explain the data....However the traffic between theology and science goes both ways, we sometimes have to correct our theology as science advances.” Correcting our theology is something Murphy claims Christians do every day in the wake of their experiences. If a grandmother dies despite prayer and petition, a Christian learns how to interpret the verse “ask anything and it shall be given to you”. This hypothetico-deductive side of Theology is the mechanism we use to conclude doctrines, and at varying times in history it has been used to determine all sorts of spiritual truths.
When the Pope's crusades failed miserably Christianity reconsidered exactly how much say the Pope had as the head of the church, which changed our theology of authority. When Martin Luther decried grace by works it changed our entire theology of salvation. When John Wycliffe ended priest corruption of scripture by printing the Bible in common english our theology of the bible was never the same. Our theology of worship has changed from austere chants to decadent guitar solos; our theology of marriage has changed to consider both wedded clergy as well as pious homosexuals; our theology of purpose has changed from conquering the world under Christendom to engaging the world's pain and fear with the teachings of the Kingdom of God. Not 200 years ago our theology of humanity changed as we realized slave ownership was evil. In the last 10 years we have seen our theology of environment change as we consider industry's poisonous effects on the world around us. It is the way of Christianity's narrow path to twist and turn into directions we could never have imagined, our job is merely to follow that path, not determine where it will go next.
God is not dead, but some of the ideas we have used to describe Him are. For us, creationism now goes the way of the geocentric universe, we must accept evolution as a revelation from nature and adjust ourselves accordingly. But even with Darwin navigating the old church van, God is still in the driver's seat. As G. K. Chesterton once said, “Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying 'in the beginning God created heaven and earth' even if you only mean 'in the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.' For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could himself create one.”
Christian theology is not meant to declare God's truths, it is meant to discover them. In this sense it is the truest nature of Christianity to evolve.
3 comments:
Penitent, I want to invite you to reconsider the impact Ida will have a little. Even those within the scientific community are recognizing the overwhelming rush to prove something that just isn't being proved.
http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2009/05/poor_poor_ida_or_overselling_a.php
My favorite quote form that post is:
As John Wilkins has pointed out the phrase "missing link" is woefully inaccurate, conjuring up images of life ranked in an unbreakable Great Chain of Being put in place by God, but that has not stopped media outlets from running with the idea. Even though the authors of the paper deny making any such statement, the promotional materials they are associated with (most notably the "Revealing The Link" website) play up this angle to a ridiculous degree.
From my perspective the church does need to recognize the reality of evolution as a non-threatening concept that exists but how you draw the conclusion that creationism is dead is a little far-fetched to me.
Thanks John for your input, and I'll be careful to double check the media reports.
While I'm sure that some hyperbole has gone into the advertising, what we see about Ida is still a far cry from sensationalism. The simple fact is that Ida is the long sought transitional fossil that I (as an apologist and a creationist) have long dared science to produce. While flagrant terms like "missing link" may produce more folklore than fact, the imminent truth is that Darwins final verdict just came in. There is little left I can say in the face of such evidence without feeling like I'm just arguing for the sake of my pride.
Now it seems vital that we minimize the damage this news will do to peoples faith by explaining the long downplayed theological options that make room for evolution. So many have anchored their faith (needlessly) to creationism that now with it's dissolving strength these people will float out into the open waters of confusion.
It's necessary that we begin the process of rebuilding faith structures so these people have somewhere to go.
Except among fundamentalists, evolution and Christianity have been peacefully coexisting for over a century now. Evolution need not be any kind of threat to Christianity. I don't see how one more little bit of evidence for it changes much if one didn't see them in conflict in the first place.
Also, I don't think Nietzsche was talking about science so much as morality. We haven't killed God through increased knowledge. We've killed him by not living as if our supposed belief in him makes any practical difference at all. (Of course Nietzsche sees this as generally a good thing.)
But besides those two quibbles, I do agree with your overall point in the post. Christianity is evolving; it always has been.
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