Old Testament scholar and preaching professor John C. Holbert joins a Patheos roundtable conversation on “Evolution and Christian Faith,” sponsored by BioLogos. Click here for more perspectives — from evangelical to atheist — on this topic.
I would like to respond briefly to several of the videos provided by Biologos, an organization dedicated to the conviction that there need be no incompatibility between belief in the theory of evolution and belief in the tenets of the Bible. Though these videos, in the main very well done (despite some rather irritating voices used on a few of them), are aimed at persons far more conservative in their use of the Bible than I am, we progressive Christians can still learn much from these reasoned and reasonable presentations. Things have come a long way since 1925 in Tennessee and the infamous Scopes trial.
The video entitled Evolution and the Bible gave as clear and helpful an explanation of the theory of evolution as I have heard, focusing squarely on the multiple definitions of “randomness.” The argument is that evolution, or speciation, is in fact not random in the way it has often been portrayed by those threatened by it, those who are convinced that if evolution is accepted as a way of explaining how the vast multiplicity of the world’s plants and animals came to exist, God will be completely removed from the process, and acceptance of evolution will lead necessarily to atheism. The video nicely demonstrates that within the processes of evolution one finds randomness, but also discovers that species develop in ways far from random as well, ways that include DNA mutations within fixed possibilities, natural selection that means much more than that old bogey man “survival of the fittest,” but in fact survival of those “mostly fit” to their environments. For Christian, Jewish, Muslim believers, God can either be seen as creating these possibilities and allowing them to unfold (the “Deist” view) or God may be intimately involved with these processes every step of the way (an “intimate/personal” view).
I admit to finding all this talk not especially difficult for me, since I have long felt that there is inherently no contradiction between these worlds of ideas, since the Bible, for me, has nothing whatever to do with science, while science has little necessary interest in faith. I understand how my more conservative colleagues could be troubled by this sort of discussion, but I am not. I would, however, add one factor in all this that I learned now over 40 years ago in the wonderful book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), by Annie Dillard, a book that led me to the word “messiness” in my title.
When we speak of the world as created by God, we too often speak of its astonishing clock-work precision, its puzzle-piece-like unity, the incredible conviction that so many factors had to be exactly right—time, temperature, the correct stew of molecules and amino acids, etc.—to create life as we know it. Older theologians, especially Thomas Aquinas, named this the “argument from design,” claiming that the intricacies of life, human, animal, and plant, are too bound together to have occurred by happenstance only. More recent persons, arguing that the complexity of things is too astounding to believe that it all “evolved randomly” (note my comments above), often point to the human eye, and conclude that “someone must have designed this,” and for some religious types that someone is God.
However, I want to note Dillard’s meticulously poetic observations at a small Virginia creek, and suggest that really to see and notate the workings of nature more often than not leads one to wonder just who is running such a railroad anyway? Dillard watches in some sort of horror as a frog, swimming lazily on the surface of the creek is, before her very eyes, sucked dry and dead by a huge and terrible worm that lives for such as this. She witnesses thousands of an insect species drown in the creek in order that the species may survive from the few that make it across the drowning backs of its fellows. She summarizes in what I find to be one of the great passages in recent literature:
“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
In that grand paragraph I find what I believe to be the complementarity of science and faith. We faithful ones, whether we are scientists or not, (and I plainly am not, as any real scientist can easily conclude from my stumbling presentation of science earlier in this article), stand mute before the free wonders of the world the creator has given to us, and however we attempt to explain it, theologically sophisticated or scientifically nuanced, what rests at the bottom is that realization that the creator we worship and praise, that mystery who hides in bush and cloud, in the end loves pizzazz, every clack and buzz and whistle and roar. God is madly in love with the world, with the cosmos, and will do about anything to make it rich and myriad and fecund and wonderful. Let us have the best science, O God, and help us to think hard theologically about who you are, but, more, let us stand by the creek and witness and wonder and laugh and sing and dance. For before we can think hard, we must love hard; before we can praise with power we must be overpowered by your huge love for us.
Photo credit: Shutterstock / James E. Knopf
John C. Holbert is the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, TX. Holbert’s popular column, “Opening the Old Testament,” is published every Monday on the Progressive Christian Channel at Patheos.
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