4 Short Philosophy Reflections...

neology Today 62 (2006): 476-83

RECLAIMING CREATION IN A DARWINIAN WORLD MICHAEL HANBY

The protestations of fundamentalists notwithstanding, most Chris-tians, and certainly those who fancy themselves intellectuals, have made their peace with Darwinism. And, while most Christians no longer think a theological engagement with Darwin is necessary, a great many people do not even think a real theological engagement with Darwinism is possible. The Darwinian worldview has become cultural orthodoxy in Anglo-American society, enforced by a scientific, legal, and media apparatus whose presuppositions define for all participants the terms of a now meager and stupefying debate. To contend against this orthodoxy, on these terms, is only to confirm it. To contradict this ortho- doxy is to risk the invitation of public ridicule.

It is worth the risk to say that this is a dangerous peace, which leaves hanging in the balance not simply a proper understanding of God as that full and superlative act of being—the I AM of Exodus and the Fourth Gospel—who grants existence to the world out of the sheer, pointless gratuity of his love, as if that were not serious enough. This "peace" also wagers the very intelligibility of the world and of human life. Pope John Paul II recognized this in Evangelium vitae (1995), for instance, noting as a condition for this "culture of death," that, when we forget God, "man not only loses sight of the mystery of God, but also the very mystery of his own being."1 And he is right. A world known and loved into existence by God and for our enjoyment of God is, in its very meaning and essence, a different place from an intrinsically meaningless, machine-like world that is merely the accidental product of blind forces, governed by scarcity and force, and that patiently awaits our free and arbitrary assignment of quality and values to it. Militant Darwinians understand this; hence, the predict- able and often hysterical public outcry that erupts, often enough by

Michael Hanby is Assistant Professor of Theology in the Honors College at Baylor University and Associate Director of the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning. He is author of several journal articles and of Augustine and Modernity (2003). 1http://www.vatican.va/holy_fati^ evangelium-vitae__en.html (27 June 2005).

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At issue . . . is control of the stories that are going to define, guide, and orient our lives, a preoccupation that well exceeds the bounds of scientific concern.

popularizers of science, every time creationism rears its ugly head. These protests show us that there is much more at stake here than the dispas- sionate pursuit of scientific truth. At issue, rather, is control of the stories that are going to define, guide, and orient our lives, a preoccupation that well exceeds the bounds of scientific concern. The meaninglessness that grips virtually every aspect of contemporary culture should serve as an index of just how successful Darwinism, and the capitalist theory from which it sprang, have been in asserting themselves as normative.

What would it mean, against the backdrop of this success, for Christian theology to rigorously engage, even contest, the Darwinian world picture? First, it would mean confronting Darwinism with its own metaphysical and even theological presuppositions, whose inherent problems arguably threaten to undercut its explanatory power. That Darwinism does imply a metaphysical or theological position is evident simply in the way its apologists frame their quarrel with Christianity: natural processes not divine intervention, evolution instead of creation—distinctions that pre- suppose complex metaphysical predecisions about "nature" and a corre- sponding theological decision about the kind of "God" this view of nature permits. These are not the conclusions of their science; rather, they are its presuppositions.

To recognize latent metaphysical presuppositions in Darwinism is to raise the possibility of a different kind of criticism of Darwinian theory. Still, this is complicated business, partly because it is unclear just where the real quarrel lies, and partly because "Darwinism," having been pro- foundly altered by the development of modern genetics, is a long and variegated tradition that now often bears only the most general resem- blance to Darwin's own theories. As a consequence, the meaning and "essence" of contemporary Darwinism is contested, even among its ad- herents. And many both internal and external to this tradition agree that some versions of these arguments threaten to take evolutionary theory outside the bounds of "Darwinism" altogether. Some, such as Richard Lewontin, accentuate the transmutation of species as Darwin's core in- sight.2 Christian theology has no real stake in contesting this feature of

2See, for example, Richard C. Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000); Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper, 1992); Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Richard C. Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

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Darwinian thought and can accommodate this point without lapsing into a hybrid "theistic evolution" or "Intelligent Design" mode. Even proponents of this accentuation will concede, however, that the dominant strain of the Darwinian tradition has emphasized Darwin's mechanism for evolutionary change, which he took over and renamed from the English political- economists Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus: natural selection. Like Smith's "invisible hand" and Malthus's "positive checks," "natural selec- tion" presupposes the constancy of scarcity and competition as the nec- essary conditions making natural selection universally effective—ensur- ing, in Darwin's words, that it is "daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations, rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; whenever and wherever opportunity offers."3 Notice here the echo of Malthusian theodicy, the attempt to make good use of suffering, starvation, and evil. The "adaptationism" so char- acteristic of evolutionary explanation carries these theodical tendencies even further, accounting for the persistence of every species and of its most functional traits by virtue of their adaptive advantage. Whether in evolutionary biology or the political economy from which it originated, this is an ominous doctrine when carried to its logical conclusion. For adaptationism by definition entails that everything that dies "deserves" to die by virtue of its inferiority to what survives. Hence, Darwinism's long implication in the eugenics movement, and Darwin's own blithe, but embarrassing reflections in his mature work, The Descent of Man (1871), about the inevitable extinction of "inferior races" by the more civilized and advanced.4

Like Smith's invisible hand, natural selection perpetually restores to the ecosystem as a whole (or to geographically isolated ecosystems) a kind of equilibrium analogous to the balance between supply and demand in a competitive market. The inherited biological variations "selected" are those that succeed in occupying a specific niche within the "economy of nature," just as agents in a market-economy survive by colonizing a niche within the overall "division of labor"—both terms Darwin uses in Origin: "If any one species does not become modified in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will be exterminated."5 The result of such culling over many centuries is a widening degree of biological variation and,

3Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6t h ed. (Amherst: Prometheus, 1991), 62. Compare Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html (27 June 2005); Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, 1st ed. (1798), available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/ Malthus/malPop.html (27 June 2005), and An Essay on the Principle of Population: A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, 6 ed. (1826), available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html (27 June 2005). 4http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/descent_of_man/index.shtml (27 June 2005). 5Darwin, The Origin of Species, 76, 85.

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ultimately, given an adequate number of generations, branching generic taxa and divergent species—a divergence accentuated because the win- nowing process eliminates those rivals biologically closest to the survi- vors.

One need not latch on to the anthropomorphic connotations of Darwin's "selection" metaphor, nor even follow some of Darwin's critics in ascrib- ing purpose to natural selection in order to raise serious questions about all of this. As heir to Smith and Malthus, Darwin's theory belongs, along with those of German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and of Karl Marx (1818-83), among the great eighteenth- and nineteenth- century attempts to provide a logic for contingent history, a kind of secular providence accounting for all cultural and biological life as the outworking of a single process transcending those events. Inasmuch as it does supply a transcendental logic for history, "natural selection" belongs in the realm of metaphysics, for, precisely as transcendental, it defies empirical or experimental verification.

Nevertheless, if Darwinism is science and has thus foresworn meta- physical speculation in favor of such methods, how can Darwinism justify, in its own terms, its appeal to a transcendental mechanism? On what strictly scientific grounds can we justify designating disparate events in the lives of trees, beetles, fish, and nations as instances in the operation of a single transcendent process? Perhaps a Darwinian will reply, as David Depew and Bruce Weber do in their brilliant Darwinism Evolving, that natural selection is, not a "single mechanism," but rather a "single name" generically unifying a vast array of causal mechanisms.6 This, presumably, would stave off the metaphysical charge. But what makes this unity more than arbitrary? And why, in this case, does "natural selection" not really mean just "everything that happens"? This may be a great way to win every argument in advance, but it is hardly an explanation—much less a scientific one.

Darwinism's concept of "fitness" is fatally circular^ defining fitness by survival and survival by fitness.

Perhaps this emptiness explains the continuing dominance of "adapta- tionist" explanations and a persistent charge against Darwinism that, to my mind, it has never entirely shaken: Its concept of "fitness" is fatally circular, defining fitness by survival and survival by fitness. Perhaps these are gross simplifications, but, if this is so, then Darwinism owes us an answer to a very simple question: Which species do not owe their exis-

6Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

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tence to natural selection's gracious hand? Of course, if Darwinism can answer this question, then natural selection is dethroned as a controlling mechanism, panadaptationist Darwinism ceases to be a "theory of every- thing," and the origin of species becomes, once again, a mystery.

Such questions, which are legion, are rampant within the guild of evolutionary biologists, and they threaten in some cases to undermine the characterization of this tradition as "Darwinian." Obviously, they must be pressed with far more rigor and detail than I can adequately accomplish here. Regardless of the outcome of that inquiry, there is a second, still more important, facet of a real Christian engagement with Darwinism: a rigorous recovery and articulation of the doctrine of creation, which means rescuing this doctrine from the distortions imposed by the shape of the current debate on evolution. Since this debate is conducted entirely within the presuppositions set by a Darwinian worldview, it imposes a gross theological illiteracy on all the participants, which a culture that defines religion as private and irrational is only too ready to endorse. In other words, a rigorous Christian account of creation will be just as critical of creation/sm as it is of Darwinism, whether the creationists in question be those who read Genesis as a natural science textbook, those "compati- bilists" who fuse creation and Darwinian evolution, or those heirs of eighteenth-century "natural theology," the adherents of the so-called In- telligent Design school.

Such approaches are surely bad science, but they are even worse theology. Each, in its own way, seeks to accommodate the Christian doctrine of creation to a scientific worldview and to submit it to the scientific demand for an alternative "explanation," failing to challenge either the metaphysics often latent in this worldview or the adequacy of scientific models of explanation to the mystery that is the world. And worse still, lacking a rigorous theological understanding of the relation between creation and God, they fail to discern just what kind of "expla- nation" the doctrine of creation is, and end up substituting for the tran- scendent Christian God something less than God—usually the first in a long sequence of causes and effects—that stands "outside" the closed system of nature and may or may not exist. In other words, a hypothetical finite object of science's own invention.

Marilynne Robinson has written that creationism is the best thing that could have happened to Darwinism, as it allows the latter to underwrite its legitimacy as the vanguard of dispassionate inquiry. Darwinians indeed need creationists, and, in a display of (theological) illiteracy they would find scandalous among those who dare comment on the scientific domain, they repeatedly invoke as a foil for their reflections the ghost of William Paley, as if his Natural Theology (1802),7 which seeks to infer a divine

7Available online at http://www.hti.umich.edU/cgi/p/pd-modeng/pd-modeng-idx7type= HTML&rgn=TEI.2&byte=53049319 (27 June 2005).

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Designer from the functional "contrivances" of organisms, represented the apex of Christian thought on creation.

Funny, then, that Thomas Aquinas, a much more authoritative figure within Christian tradition, despite being best-known for his alleged at- tempts to offer rationalistic proofs of God's existence, insists that the creation of the world is an article of faith: "By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist."8 Likewise, "the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself."9 Thomas's insistence here does not derive from a fideistic retreat from reason into the secure confines of faith, but rather from a positive chastening of theological speech that stems from rigorous understanding of the meaning of the word "God" and, conse- quently, of what we must mean, in a strict sense, by God's "creating."

Aquinas takes great care to distinguish creation from other modes of causing. Creation, in this strict sense, does not refer to a mere transmu- tation of form, and so does not answer the question that preoccupies evolutionary theory: "Why this instead of thatV Rather, the Christian doctrine of creation refers to passage from potentiality in the mind of God to actuality and answers an altogether different question: "Why something rather than nothing?'10

Except that the doctrine of creation, strictly speaking, does not really answer even this question. The difference between nothing and something is infinite; hence, the movement from nonexistence to existence is the one motion that only God can account for: Its "mechanism" remains inacces- sible to us by definition, for the simple reason that prior to the movement there is nothing for this mechanism to act upon. This is why creation cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself and why Aquinas says that "Creation places something in the thing created according to relation only; because what is created, is not made by movement or by change."11 Creation simply names a relationship of dependence between effect and cause that occurs when anything genuinely new appears, which happens with everything that is neither reducible to the sum of its parts nor to the sum of causes that produced it—which is, of course, every single thing in existence.

There is a second reason that the Christian doctrine of creation cannot answer science's "why" question: The relationship of dependence that "creation" names is not symmetrical. Creation needs God; but Aquinas understands that "God," properly understood, cannot need the world. Hence, he concludes that God does not act for an end (a goal) in creating the world, for this would imply that God somehow gains from the world's existence something he previously lacked.12 We can, therefore, posit no

8Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1.46.2. 9Ibid. 10See ibid., 1.45.1. nIbid., 1.45.3. 12Ibid., 1.44.4.

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other "motive" for the creation of the world, than the sheer, extravagant generosity that God is, in his essence as trinitarian love.

The first function of the Christian doctrine of creation, then, is simply to protect the infinite qualitative difference between God and all that is not God, something that both Darwinian and creationist "explanations" fail to do. Creation thus understood is not an alternative theory or explanation of the world of the sort Darwinians or other scientists demand, but rather a denial in principle that any such "theory of everything" is finally possible, and a suspicion that any such comprehensive theory will necessarily exercise a reductive tyranny over the things it purports to "explain." To precisely this extent, the Christian doctrine of creation is more "agnostic," less ideological, and thus—dare we say?—more scientific than Darwin- ism. The Christian doctrine of creation refuses to posit a causal mechanism for the being of the world, but only a misunderstanding of the word "God" could register this refusal as a failure. For God is no "sky hook," a straw man of Darwinism's own invention that likens God's creative act to a piece of stage-machinery that "intervenes" from "beyond," like Aphrodite restoring Paris to his bedchamber. Rather, God is that simple, immutable act of being and love so transcendently other to creation as to be at once external and internal to it, mysteriously indwelling it while calling it into the novelty of existence in the mystery of the divine love.

To recognize the world as creation—to recognize that the mystery of sheer, extravagant love is at the innermost heart of reality—is to recognize something important about the nature of the world: that each created thing is also a mystery, that there is intrinsic to each thing a novelty and an excess of form that defies reduction to the sum of the causes that produced it and that each whole, precisely as a whole, is irreducible to the sum or function of its parts, even as it is inconceivable apart from them. To dissect and track how electrical impulses in the brain manifest themselves in physical actions that cause vibrations impacting upon the ear of another is not to "explain" a conversation, any more than exhaustive mapping of my DNA "explains" me. Indeed, this is manifestly not to have explained them,

Aesthetic and moral judgments are absolutely integral to true knowledge of reality.

for no reduction of these transactions to extension, motion, force, mass, energy flows, or any of the other standard modern ways of depicting matter is adequate to the phenomena these terms purport to describe. In fact, the most interesting elements of conversation—personality and iden- tity—drop out of the equation altogether. Thus, aesthetic and moral judgments are absolutely integral to true knowledge of reality. We need a model of knowledge adequate to the mystery of the world. This does not

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require that we invoke some nebulous spirit in opposition to the cold, brute reality of matter (another frequent Darwinian straw man) but, rather, only that we recognize in matter and in the wholes composed of it the true reality of qualities—form, beauty, and purpose, for instance—that are manifestly a part of the world yet inaccessible to science as it is currently composed.

All of this means that a properly understood Christian doctrine of creation, far from shutting down inquiry, creates the space for a form of inquiry that does not falsify itself and its objects by absolutizing the former and tyrannically depriving the latter of their most characteristic content. Thus, it is only within the mysterious space afforded by the doctrine of creation, and not in opposition to this doctrine, that we might yet hope for evolutionary theory—even elements of Darwinism—to be- come genuine science.

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for the necessity and viability of a rigorous theological critique of the Darwinian tradition of evolutionary biology. Contending that Darwinism and the political economy from which it originated have been important agents in creating the contemporary "culture of death," it argues that Darwinism either violates its claim to scientific status by relying upon an illicit metaphysics or that it robs itself of explanatory power by denying its own metaphysical status. More fundamentally, the current debate requires a metaphysically rigorous articulation of the Christian doctrine of creation, free from the theological distortions imposed by the "creationist" debate with Darwinism and thus equally critical of both.

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