Beyond The Realm of Darwinistic Materialism

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This paper, taken from my book, ‘GOD: Evolution, Free-Will & Purpose’, though not addressing the question of whether or not material notions of origins etc., are, now or ever, sufficiently able to offer anything other than hypothetical, if not speculative notions  regarding the future (eschaton) of the known universe; the reasoning here being that it is beyond the realm of evolutionary theory to offer answers to questions’ regarding the likelihood of any teleological purposes—purposes, which are indeed beyond its i.e., Evolutionary Theory, seemingly, ‘sovereign state’.

Theistic Evolutionary attempts at a defence/argument (theodicy) for the Goodness of God avoid any notion of the prevailing state of affairs, in the known biosphere, being the result of any major shift in the Order of Creation i.e., the consequence of the disobedience of the first humans. Few, if any, offer an Adamic Fall as the reason for the existence of Predation, Plague and Parasitism, though some offer an Angelic Fall as an alternative, i.e., a fall that brought about and continues to bring about major negative effects on the Creation—effects for which God is not responsible, but that He allows. Indeed, the majority of Twenty-First-Century defences/theodicies adhere to a Darwinian Perspective, William Dembski’s 2008 book ‘The End of Christianity’ being an exception/variation.

Stephen H. Webb’s view, as given in his book entitled ‘The Dome of Eden’ (2010) is that evolution works under divine permission and that the emergence of Humankind has particular significance within an evolutionary paradigm. Webb notes that evolution leaves a trail in history—marked by blood and anguish. However, Webb avoids saying that God intended that this state of affairs should have such injurious and interminable consequences—such that God allowed from the beginning. My view however is that it is this very state of affairs i.e., the effects of the prevailing physical laws, that allows all of the above; but that it is also because of these prevailing physical laws that the reconciliatory work of God could pertain—that Christ was able to be born of a woman—to suffer and die so that the victory of God over both sin and death could prevail. Indeed, it is the song the faithful will sing and that the creation will echo: The Victory of God over Sin and Death. It will be a continual song declaring the gracious mercy and goodness of the Godhead. It is this world (a world ordained and created by God) that is the only possible world—in which the free will of highly sentient beings can pertain with all of the resultant consequences and, most importantly, the redemptive act of the crucified Son of God.

I concur with Webb’s views on the ‘emergence’ of humankind as being a significant ‘event’: Compos Mentis, intelligent, incredibly creative, morally aware and, most importantly, ‘God Conscious’—within, what may be described as, the physical evolution of carbon-based life-forms. Webb’s views coalesce with the argument given here, i.e., that God [incarnate], at the eschaton, shall dwell with a redeemed creation—having rescued and redeemed the creation from its bondage to corruption.

The question of the whereabouts of this redeemed world—this ‘New Heaven & New Earth’, in which physical laws have a different outcome—is presently unknown, yet we may assume—indeed more than assume that, in the light of the promises of God in Scripture, there shall be a ‘life-experience’ for the redeemed creation in which there shall be no more plague, predation, parasitism or indeed pain—for as Scripture attests, ‘the former things [shall] have passed away.’ (Revelation 21:5). This ‘future world’, however, may not be the world in which the present physical laws obtain—but another world which is yet to be revealed. Yet this present world is a ‘Necessary World’. ‘Humankind’ (imago Dei) is meant to be here as well as in that which is yet to be revealed.

The ‘arrival’ of humans has been a major part of God’s ‘creation project’. This does not devalue the rest of creation or suppose that there is not a future existence in which all sentient creatures co-exist—as if God has little more than a utilitarian purpose for such creatures. This world is the way it is, not as the result of natural processes alone, but as the result of the ‘Telos of God’. NB. It is necessary to note that the God of the Judeo/Christian Scriptures is Benevolent, Omnipotent and, even, Omniscient.

Robert. J. Russell opines that the suffering of creatures cannot ‘alone’ be justified by what he refers to as, ‘…the evolution of Homo sapiens and their destiny with God…’; Instead, Russell advocates, the suffering of creatures is taken up individually by God in the incarnation, suffered by God in the crucifixion, and redeemed by God in the resurrection. Russell states that this eschatological act of God is to be seen as proleptically present to and with each creature at its death. (Russell2012).Russell’s view may be considered speculative, but it is nevertheless plausible. Indeed, the effects of the Cross of Christ need to be viewed in proleptic terms—as it is within the eternal perspective of the Triunity of God—the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ—that we have sight of the ‘big picture’. However, there needs to be an argument that addresses the origin of ‘evil’: God’s reason for allowing it to remain within the created order, and, most importantly, an affirmation of God’s attributes, i.e., God’s Benevolence as associated with God’s Omniscience and God’s Omnipotence.

Stephen Webb (2010) makes the point that, if God chose this particular world with its prevailing set of physical laws as the stage for the ‘arrival of humanity and the incarnation of ‘The Second Person of The Trinity’, then there must be something unique about both planet earth and humanity (i.e., the imago Dei). Indeed, Webb argues that one of the corollaries of Christ’s primacy is that humans have the form (and image) precisely because God intended to give a human form to Christ from the beginning. Webb states (unapologetically) that the Old Testament has not only an anthropomorphic view of God but also a ‘theomorphic’ view of humanity, i.e., that humans take the form they do because God has the form he has—in Christ the Son. Webb makes it clear that sceptics will view his position as anthropomorphism—in the most negative of terms. He understands the reason for the critique well enough but points out that they are mistaken to claim that Christians think of everything from a human perspective, and he opines that “God made the world with mankind in mind, to become friends of the Son and to accompany him in praise forever.”

Webb contends that theologians who argue that this world is the only world that God could have created—in their attempt to justify God’s relationship with natural evil—run the risk of ‘portraying’ the world as thoroughly and necessarily evil; that is, if there is no possible world that God could have created—that would have been without evil—then the very existence of matter is thoroughly saturated in and inseparable from evil. If evil is built into nature, however, it is either ‘nature’ or God who put it there. Webb’s point is that if God is the progenitor of ‘Natural Evil’ this, clearly, rules out the possibility of a third party—or even ‘third parties’ being responsible for, at least, Natural Evil.

In my opinion Stephen Webb is correct, in that God has allowed certain of his creatures the gift of choice and that, consequently, this ‘gift’ has allowed for the inflicting of an inordinate amount of ‘harms’. However, this does not mean that God is guilty by default, rather that God has allowed for the kind of creation that is able to both survive (by all means) and to express itself. This may be considered a good outcome rather than a bad outcome. Webb makes a salient point when he says that evil (in the natural world) is real, whereas entropy is exactly “what one would expect to find at the level of physical processes”. Evil (Webb does not differentiate between natural and moral evil) is, from this perspective, a malevolent factor, whereas entropy is, simply, the consequence of certain physical conditions. Webb, however, points out that even though the temptation to equate evolution with evil is understandable, equating nature with evil runs counter to the Christian tradition, most notably the claim ‘exegeted’ from Genesis chapter one: that nature is good, which for Webb seems to mean ‘moral’ rather than ‘utilitarian’. My view is that creation does not necessarily have the moral dimension that Webb may wish to assign to it; in this sense nature is amoral. Indeed, Webb reminds us that groups that considered nature evil (Manicheans and Cathars in particular) have always been considered heretical. He maintains that any adequate theological account of evolution has to explain how God (as the source of all that is good) bears no responsibility for evil evident within the evolutionary cycle of life. Webb here uses the term ‘evil’, but a more appropriate word would be ‘harms’—as the results of [natural] entropy need not be considered ‘evil’ per se. The argument here is that neither God’s universal laws nor the outcomes of these laws are ‘naturally’ evil, in and of themselves; they are nothing of the sort. That there are ‘harmful outcomes’ to these laws is a de facto given; that these outcomes are, most often, horrendous—even maliciously harmful to life’s outcomes—is accepted. However, this does not prove that this world is not the best possible world for the purposes of God; neither does it prove that the natural laws themselves are morally deficient. The outcomes of the effects of the natural laws on carbon-based life may be reprehensible (from our perspective), but that is all that they can be. It may be acceptable to bring judgement against God with insufficient evidence; to do so is common practice—as C.S. Lewis points out:

God is guilty—as ‘proven’. He (man) is the judge: God is in the dock. He (man) is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the God who ‘permits’. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. However, the important thing is

 man is on the Bench and God in the Dock.

As has previously been alluded to, Webb’s view is that entropy is what one would expect to find at the level of physical processes, whereas the ‘negative’ of physical laws is something other than ‘evil’; this demands an explanation. For Webb, the answer to the problem of evil has to be located outside of the evolutionary paradigm rather than within. This is. Indeed, a sentiment concurred with in the argument here—particularly regarding the ‘labelling of nature as evil; be that it as it may, my conclusions are somewhat different from Webb’s.

Fallen:

Webb’s views are relevant to the argument here: Satan’s fall is a fall from grace and is not to be confused with a ‘fall from heaven to earth. The argument here is that Satan’s fall from grace could be considered a ‘pre-creation-of-the-physical-universe event’; in other words, outside of the space-time-continuum, whereas Satan’s being cast down to the earth was, probably, not. We have no detail of ‘when’ it was that Satan et al. were cast ‘down’ to the earth, but we can presume that the state of affairs on earth would never be the same again.

Eden was a real place though not ‘real’ in the sense that we can plot its coordinates on the space-time-continuum that we experience today. If Eden is a real place, and if Satan tries to battle God in nature from some point in the space-time-continuum, then there has to be some kind of ‘reality’ that divides Eden from the rest of the world. The effects of moral deviancy had to cross into Eden in order to disrupt it and, to corrupt its latest arrivals—as Scripture indicates. The ‘evil’ that Webb refers to is that which can be described as ‘moral’ rather than ‘natural’. This evil comes about as the result of the deviant behaviour of advanced created intelligence: extra-terrestrial and terrestrial alike. The outcomes of this evil, though affecting/infecting certain aspects of the created order, do not necessitate major changes to the laws that God had ordained for his creation ordinances—though it may be argued that there was, as a result of this deviancy, a significant change—not least to the effects of the physical laws on creatures bearing the image of God. The reason for Satan’s Fall to come full circle (i.e., the fall of angels to the fall of the creature bearing the image of God) is the same reason for creation as a whole, i.e., that God created the world because ‘God the Son’ had determined to take on the form of a man—and the form God the Father gave to the Son is the same form that God gave to humankind:

In the beginning, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from The Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:1-5 & 14 (NIV)

Webb opines that, “…the world and all that is in it is a gift to The Son from The Father. If something like the human species, with its intelligence, its eyes and who knows what of other parts and features, is inevitable, then biology must have been conditioned from the very beginning to unfold the human pattern.” (Webb, 2010) Moreover; Webb’s view is that, this is exactly what the Primacy of Christ leads us to expect; “Indeed the Primacy of Christ can be considered the metaphysical precondition made necessary by the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence. ” Robert C. Doyle (1999) argues that it is clear from the contents of Genesis chapters 1 to 3, as well as the way Scripture uses these chapters, that the basis for any understanding of the last things is in the understanding of the first things. Doyle’s observation is that the beginning of the Bible—the beginning of time, the world, humankind, and humankind’s relationship to God and the world—is pregnant with purpose, i.e., the purpose, the end (the eschaton) is implicit in the beginning. Regarding the six days of creation, Doyle proposes that these six days find their significance in the seventh, “…the divine rest on the seventh day indicates the goal of creation.” Along with Doyle, I maintain that ‘the seventh day’ is the goal which shall be maintained, “…despite any rebellious efforts to vitiate it.” The argument here offers the same reasoning as Doyle’s summary, i.e., that God’s plan for the creation is purposeful, that it incorporates the alpha and ‘the’ omega with the telos of creation being finally revealed at the eschaton. Ergo, the purposes and plans of the God of the Judeo/Christian Scriptures are not subordinate to any notion of ‘naturally driven’, directionless processes—or the whims of lesser ‘gods’—amorphous or otherwise.

Derek J. White

Works Cited:

Doyle R…1999 ‘Eschatology and The Shape of Christian Belief’

Lewis C.S. 1960, ‘The Problem of Pain’

Russell Robert J.  2008  ‘Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega’

Webb Stephen H. 2010 ‘The Dome of Eden’