Nature's Dark Side

The Ichneumon (ikˈnyu-men) mother wasp carefully searches the leaves for a juicy, well nourished caterpillar. Upon finding just the right fat, food-processing machine, the wasp will with her long ovipositor deep in the flesh of the unsuspecting caterpillar, leave her eggs, and fly away. But just before inserting her eggs, she will carefully locate the critical bundles of nerves inside her womb-host, stinging those nerves in such a way that the caterpillar is paralyzed, but remains alive. In this way, the wasp larvae will have a constant supply of fresh meat to feed on until they are ready to dig their way out of their hollowed-out host. But there is more! Some innate intelligence working in the wasp larvae instructs them to take care to postpone consuming critical caterpillar organs ... they want their meat alive! So, carefully, they consume the internal parts of the caterpillar in reverse order of importance, leaving the heart until the very end!

An imagined scene from some horror movie? Or the cruel hoax of a sadistic story-teller? No, this is one of a myriad of such regular occurrences in nature. And we who believe in a wise and immutably good God must account for a plethora of seemingly diabolical schemes strewn across the landscape of biology. Did our loving Father create these species to interact in this way? Are these the dirty little secrets of Special Creation? or are these horror-filled anomalies the work of an “Intelligent Designer”?

Some Christians choose to ignore this darker side of Creation. They speak freely of the beauty of the natural world, the grandeur of the mountains, the majestic power of the crashing sea, the glory of the soaring eagle, the elegant beauty of the Stargazer Lily. But they avoid the endless stream of agony, suffering and brutality implicit in the natural order: the parasite, the predator and prey, Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and claw”. The standard Christian response, that these are but manifestations of the curse, the consequence of Adam’s sin, are hackneyed and obsolete. We now have an endless trail of irrefutable fossil evidence: these brutal horrors of nature precede man by hundreds of millions of years. It has been thus from the beginning!

Richard Dawkins, in his new defense of evolutionary science, The Greatest Show on Earth, retells the habits of the Ichneumon wasp in his chapter entitled “Arms Races and ‘Evolutionary Theodicy’” (page 395). I found the chapter absolutely fascinating. Even the renown atheist recognizes how an understanding of the requisites of evolution offer at least a measure of resolution to the age-old theodicy problem.

It has been my contention for sometime that evolution, properly understood as a part of God’s master plan for the cosmos, actually helps the believer find his way through the thorny issues of the problem of evil, and its corollary, the problem of pain. In building my case, it becomes my burden to confront believing friends with aspects of Creation they’d sooner not think about. It is not a popular thing to do. Some friends are enraged at what they perceive me to be: an agitator, a faith-challenging troublemaker. They fail to see my long term goal: to solve problems of faith.

In truth: evolution, the powerfully-supported science which believers often reject, actually helps to solve theodicy, the #1 stumbling-block which believers typically choose to ignore. But before we can proceed down that path, believers must lay down their resistance to undeniable science, and abandon their denial of the dark underbelly of life. When Christians face these two realities, and consider them side-by-side, they will soon be free to explore fresh answers in the full light of reality!

The sooner this day comes, the better!

Evolution: God's Idea?

"Aren't evolution and faith in God incompatible? Can a scientist believe in miracles like the resurrection? Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things. But why couldn't this be God's plan for creation?"

~ Dr. Francis Collins

Few Christians I know are even trying to understand how evolution might play into the big picture plan and purpose of God. Many Christians are just straining to get used to the idea of evolution, and many more reject it altogether. When believers get past their initial aversion, get comfortable with the new paradigm, and attempt to look at evolution through the eyes of the purposeful Creator, new and exciting vistas open up on a very large, cosmic scale. Francis Collins, the world’s leading geneticist and an evangelical believer tells us that evolution is clearly true. He accepts it as “God’s plan for creation.”

Where are you on this scale below? Please comment!

o Evolution is not compatible with Christianity.

o Evolution might be true, but I’m not convinced.

o Even if evolution is true, it would not effect Christian theology.

o The evidence for evolution is powerful, and I am trying to adjust my thinking, to understand how it fits into my faith.

o I am comfortable with evolution and common descent.

o I am comfortable with evolution and common descent, and actively exploring how this truth impacts Christian theology.

Human Suffering in Haiti ~ and my Faith

The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake is iconic in the philosophical and theological discussions of evil and suffering. The Hatian earthquake threatens to surpass Lisbon in death toll, perhaps rising into the top ten earthquakes in the category of human casualties. We are confronted once again with the age-old theodicy problem: How can we account for such incredible suffering in a universe purportedly created and governed by a God who is loving and good.

It has been my contention that no world-view, whether theistic or non, can skate on this issue. No philosophy, no theology, has integrity if it ignores this elephant in the room, the problem posed by suffering and evil. Today, as I view dump trucks discharging their faceless, nameless loads into mass graves, I am sometimes amazed at the indifference of some believers who claim this huge affront to faith does not faze them. The comment threads on this site are littered with such cavalier dismissals. Many other believers are guilty of a greater atrocity, blaming the victims of tragic disasters for exciting the Posieden-like anger of a vindictive God. Still others take the easier hand-in-the-sand mentality: what I don’t think about can’t threaten me!

Lisa Miller, Religion Editor at Newsweek, commenting on the suffering in Haiti, has raised the question again in her column, Why God Hates Haiti, The frustrating theology of suffering. Read it. Ask the hard questions.

Some Christians react defensively when I call them to consider the problem of evil. They perceive me as attacking their faith. Of course, they are correct. A faith which does not take into account the horrors of evil and suffering ought to be attacked. But my purpose is never to destroy faith. Rather, I seek to build faith that is rational, robust, reality-based. Arriving at such a faith may involve a good deal of illusion dismantling. Is it worth the risk? For some, such an examination may result in the complete crumbling of faith, as it did for Bart Ehrman. It is my experience, however, that most Christians who engage is this perilous work of critical thinking, asking the hard questions, emerge on the other side with a faith that is more vibrant, more reliable, more defensible. For me, it is the only kind of faith worth possessing.

Retroactive Curse?

I’ve been involved in an interesting discussion over at Undeception. In this post, Steve discusses how William Dembski, one of the foremost proponents of the Intelligent Design movement, has embraced Old Earth Creationism. That is, he understands the incontrovertible evidence for the age of the earth. And he knows that such evidence includes a history of suffering and death on our planet before the dawn of man. While he still rejects evolution (acceptance of evolution in Dembski’s case would apparently spell the end of his employment at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary where he is a philosophy professor), his acceptance of the geological and paleontological records creates a conundrum for his theology: billions of years of suffering and death on our planet prior to the dawn of man. More importantly, all of this death occurs before the Fall of man. And Dembski’s theology posits that death and suffering are included in the curse which resulted from the sin of Adam and Eve. No problem, according to Dembski. God merely set a curse upon Creation in anticipation of the Fall.

This is like blaming that the man who struck a match at 3:30 in the afternoon for thereby causing an early morning fire on that same day. Except that God is all-knowing, and apparently therefore it is perfectly rational that the curse resulting from Man’s sin might extend backward for billions of years. And thus does Dembski solve the theodicy riddle (how can evil exist in the creation of a good God?) in his book, The End of Christianity. Blame the extinction of dinosaurs on Adam! Eve eats an apple, and trillions of preexistent bacteria die over billions of years. Of course, such a view wreaks havoc upon common sense notions of cause and effect, which lie at the foundation of all science. If God plays such a huge cosmic trick with the sequence of events, can a scientist like Dembski really trust anything in the natural order?

Dembski has effectively rewritten Genesis 2:17 to read, “For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely set into motion a whole set of retroactive physical, spiritual, and biological laws including the eventuality of death, laws which will not only henceforth govern your lives and all Creation, but actually have already been governing Creation for 13.7 billion years. So, verily, don’t eat thereof. On second thought, maybe you should eat because if you don’t you’ll really screw things up.” And he has altered the grammar of Genesis 3:14-19, effectively replacing a string of straightforward future tense verbs with past perfects. Exactly how does this solve anything for a man who has so much invested in literalism and inerrancy?

Dembski’s commitment to a literal reading of an inerrant Genesis 1 compels him to reject evolution (God created each species “according to its kind”). His insistence upon a literal understanding of Genesis 2 and 3, (and thus a literal Adam and Eve) lead him to reject common descent. But unlike other Biblical literalists, he cannot square the geological and paleontological record with six-day young earth Creationism. The resulting theological dilemma has Dembski contorting Biblical literalism beyond recognition.

Christians who take seriously their faith must deal with the issue in some way. It won’t go away anytime soon. So I am asking my believing readers, How do you solve this dilemma?

o I avoid science, thus shielding myself from all the potential difficulties of squaring my chosen beliefs with hard facts.

o I avoid the philosophical issue of the problem of evil. If I don’t think about it, it doesn’t effect me.

o I avoid the theological issue of death before the Fall. If I don’t think about it, it doesn’t bother me.

o I accept Dembski’s logic. It is the only way to hold together my acceptance of Biblical inerrancy in the face of the vast fossil record showing a long history of death and extinctions prior to man.

o I reject Dembski’s solution as irrational. I accept Biblical inerrancy, but have another solution to the dilemma.

o My view of reality compels me to redefine how God reveals truth, and I do not read the Bible as the literal, inerrant “Word of God”.

Or do you have a different approach than one listed here?

Our Default Setting? (Part Two)

“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!” It’s all many Young Earth Creationists, and other Fundamentalists need to know! They are completely satisfied with the simple statement of faith. I am not.

Michael Spencer keeper of the popular webblog, Internet Monk, recently entered a post on the meaning of “post-evangelical”. In describing his own post-evangelical approach to belief, Michael writes,

“I reject any notions that Christian belief falls from the sky as a magic book that exists apart from other components of human experience.”

I’ll leave it the reader to decide whether or not I qualify as “post-evangelical”, but I do resonate with with Michael on this point. For many believers, the Bible is the starting point and the ending point for their belief in God; I find it necessary to consult those “other components of human experience.”

Thus, when I ask the ultimate questions about whether there is a God, my starting point is the evidence in creation, that place where the Apostle Paul declares that the invisible things of God can be clearly seen (Romans 1:20).

But if anything is clear, it is that not all see those “invisible things of God” with equal clarity. Hence, the question of my previous post about whether we are intrinsically theists or atheists, or whether any such default setting exists. The responses were mixed, as I expected, and made for some fascinating reading for me. Thank you to all who participated.

No one denies that God-consciousness is wide-spread in humankind. But the explanations for religious belief vary.

Commenting on the previous post, Psi suggests that a tendency to see purpose and intention in our world was a survival tool, perhaps necessary in the early development of our species. Thus, religious belief is a product of evolution, though less genetic than memetic. He cites Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief in which Wolpert traces religious belief, like many such superstitions, to our tendency to assign causation to phenomena.

Isaac points us to the work of British psychologist Bruce Hood who believes that humans are hard-wired for religious belief:

“Humans are born with brains designed to make sense of the world and that sometimes leads to beliefs that go beyond any natural explanation.... We are inclined from the start to think that there are unseen patterns, forces and essences inhabiting the world ...”

This intrinsic human inclination lead to superstitions of all kinds, including (in Hood’s view) belief in God.

Of course, in order to be evolutionarily explained, the human tendency to believe in God must have adaptive value, and those evolutionary scientists who doubt God’s existence have gone to great pains to explain how fanciful notions about gods could have helped our species in its evolutionary struggle. We hear about things like hope and purpose, necessary to drive us forward, even if they were false to the core! “Belief in a supernatural Being served the species well (it must have!)” they tell us, “but of course now we have outgrown its usefulness.”

But when the dust settles around the skeptics’ evolutionary explanations for religious belief, what emerges is this salient observation: religious belief is so universal that it demands an explanation. And of course, the skeptic rejects out of hand any suggestion that this ubiquitous inborn belief in the supernatural might be borne out of supernatural reality.

But the Hebrews had a simpler way of viewing things. The Creator himself, Koheleth instructs us, has “set eternity in the hearts of men”. I cannot say that I’ve never experienced doubt about God. But neither can I deny the reality of Ecclesiates 3:11 in my own experience: eternity is solidly set in my heart, and it is unshakable.

These two competing ideas, 1) the contention of the Bible, that God-consciousness is inborn, irrepressibly written upon the human soul, and 2) the notion that religious belief is merely an adaptive step in our evolutionary history are not mutually exclusive constructs. When we understand evolution as the Creator’s chosen mechanism, it ought not surprise us that an awareness of God would arise developmentally. RBH points us to evolutionary anthropologist Justin L. Barrett, who traces belief in God through its evolutionary stages, finding “adaptive value” in our own evolutionary history along the way. And Oxford researcher Barrett is a professing Christian, one with whom I think I would get on quite well. Together with others, he has helped to establish “the Cognitive Science of Religion” which seeks to study and explain the phenomenon of near ubiquitous religious belief. He writes, “CSR is often associated with evolutionary science and anti-religious rhetoric but neither is intrinsic nor necessary to the field.” Evolution provides little shelter for the atheist in his contention that belief is passé.

Pervasive religious belief remains for me evidence of a default human setting. It appears to me that people widely believe in supernatural causation based upon the witness of nature, and the witness of their own heart and mind. To be sure, many of the forms of this belief, and the early rationales, appear quaint and strange to us today. For me, this is no justification to abandon the implications of God-consciousness. Rather, it compels us to allow our understandings to be refined. Early beliefs were often based upon mysteries in nature (weather, astronomy, etc.) now more fully understood. But the witness of nature today is no less compelling.

And thus the starting point for my personal theology, the launching pad for my exploration of God, is this inner witness, this deep inclination formed by observation of nature and listening to my own heart. I find belief in God to be natural and irrepressible. I experience its renewal every time I step out on my front porch and breath in the fir scented air, and gaze upon the Oregon sky, and the dazzling array of living things that greet me. Yes, eternity is indeed set upon my heart.

Our Default Setting? (Part One)

This is a reader participation post, please weigh in. I've been thinking about the following question for the last few weeks. And now I want to hear what my readers think. So ...

The default human setting:

is it theist or atheist?

... or does any such default setting exist?

Regular contributors here are about half atheist, and half theist. But that may or may not dictate your answer. Offer an opinion only, or support your answer from psychology, history, evolutionary science, sociology, logic or experience.

Genesis 2-3 ... Literally?

Was Adam an historical person? Is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden intended to be understood literally, or allegorically? (see this earlier post on Adam in which I explore various possibilities.)

When a 21st Century Christian reads early Genesis, it is difficult to do so without bringing along baggage, preconceptions. Christians who accept the evolutionary framework will generally conclude that the story as written is allegory. Anti-evolutionists, perhaps in fear of giving space to evolution, will generally conclude that the story is literal.

Many fundamentalists cite their tried and tested principle of hermeneutics which says we ought always assume a literal meaning unless there is overriding evidence within the text itself compelling us to do otherwise. Despite the obvious logical flaw in that principle, someone please explain why we are not so compelled by the text to understand Genesis 2-3 allegorically. When I read a story that includes talking snakes, magic trees, a human being formed from the rib of another human being, I see many not-so-subtle hints that we are reading an allegory. Yet, what seems patently obvious to me is vehemently denied by anti-evolutionists and fundamentalists, who are utterly convinced this is a literal bit of history and that there is no reason to read it otherwise. Perhaps we are all guilty of superimposing our preconceptions upon the text.

It may be impossible for any of us to approach this story with an open mind, uncluttered by personal bias. I am coming to believe that genuine, unbiased exegesis is actually impossible for human beings to do. In the case of the story in Genesis 2-3, wouldn’t it be great if we could erase from our minds all the contemporary squabbles over the science of origins, and simply let the story speak for itself?

Ah! but we needn’t do that. It has already been done. We can journey back to an earlier time when evolution did not color a reader’s response. In a recent comment here, frequent contributor Isaac offered the following quote from Origen. When Origen, the respected 3rd Century church father, read Genesis, he did so without the baggage we moderns carry; and he asks ...

"Who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it." (Origen de Principiis, Volume 4)

It is true, not all early theologians shared Origen’s view (although Augustine, at the very least, maintained a quite flexible view regarding the literalness of the Garden of Eden story [see this comment by Rich]). There have always been some perceived theological reasons to favor a literal reading of this story — a discussion for another time. But my point here is simply this: the great early theologian and Bible student, Origen, unencumbered by issues of science that haunt our minds, when he read Genesis 2-3 in his Hebrew Bible came away unequivocally asserting that the text is patently allegorical.