God in evolution: the nature of divine power

WHILE CONTROVERSIES over evolution continue to arise in some sectors of American Christianity, most mainline Christians have made their peace with Darwin. We may not grasp all the nuances of the scientific debate, but we have concluded that evolutionary theory is good science and therefore must be compatible with good theology. Darwin's name doesn't send chills up our spines. We are theistic evolutionists: we believe that natural selection is evidently part of God's method of shaping the natural world.

But I suspect that the compatibility of evolutionary science with Christian theology is more often asserted than explored. I, for one, do most of my thinking about science out of one mental box and my thinking about religion out of another. On questions about evolution, the origin of life and the future of the planet, I look into the science box. On questions about God, salvation, theology and ethics, I turn to the religion box. While I think that the contents of the two boxes are compatible, I rarely try to work out the terms of their relationship.

Perhaps that's because the contents of the two boxes are, when mixed, still combustible. When theology faces off against the account of the world set forth by evolutionary biology, God's goodness and power and God's plans for the future seem to be called into question with new force.

For instance, knowledge of evolutionary history raises questions of theodicy in an especially disconcerting way. Evolution reveals a vast history of unfathomable waste, loss, extinction, suffering and death in the natural world. What has God been up to all these millennia? And what is God up to now? If we believe that God oversees creation, then God's way of doing it through evolution seems strange and even appalling.

Over the 4.5 billion years of our planet's existence, 98 percent of species have become extinct. Extinction is written into the pattern of life. What does it mean, then, to talk about a God who cares for "each sparrow that falls"? How can we think of God's care for the world in light of the millions of years of suffering and death that have been a feature of evolution in the natural world?

While traditional theology separated "human evil" from "natural evil," I would venture to guess that for most Americans, the category of natural evil is a strange one. We understand nature as perhaps neutral or even good. Human evil is obvious, but is a tsunami or an earthquake, even while causing terrible effects, evil?

Evolutionary biology intensifies this problem because it connects humans to the natural world. We stand not outside of nature observing it but inside of it, an extension of the tree of life. Biologically speaking, we are animals, and our development as animals comes out of a slow process and deep connection to all of life. The field of evolutionary psychology is demonstrating great-ape behavior so similar to human behavior that even some of our cherished "human" attributes like peacemaking and expressions of selflessness might be attributed to our animal selves. We may be, as the psalmist says, "a little lower than the angels," but we are also, literally, beasts. Understanding humans as connected inextricably to nature makes it very hard to distinguish human evil from natural evil, because we cannot distinguish the human from the natural. Human evil is natural evil. As Lutheran theologian Ted Peters puts is, "We inherit evil from the tree of life."

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If that's the case, I would be tempted to set aside the category of evil altogether, as observers such as Richard Dawkins have done.

It might seem strange to use the term evil to describe the struggle for survival among animals that we see in evolutionary history, but Peters thinks such a label is necessary if we are to hold the human and animal worlds together--which is something we must do given the insights of evolutionary science. And if we refrain from using the category of evil in talking about the natural world, Peters says, we will end up in the intellectual position of having to view horrendous events in the human world--genocide, for example--as the natural product of evolutionary struggle and natural selection.

The notion that God oversees creation and is leading it toward redemption is deeply embedded in Christian language. Some modern defenders of Darwin--like Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and professor of philosophy at Tufts University--argue that it is just such a notion of God that has to be discarded in view of evolutionary science. The processes of evolutionary development are simply too random, too intertwined with natural circumstances, for us to believe that an outside force, like God, is directing them.

But Robert Jenson, Lutheran theologian at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton Seminary, suggests that such arguments are off target in that they operate with a view of God as external to the cosmos, acting on it from outside. This idea of God derives more from the Enlightenment than from Christianity. Christians, Jenson says, have traditionally conceived of the cosmos as contained in God. Holding to this conception of God, one can view natural selection not as a process separate from God but as a process that takes place in God.