Last week, Greta Christina wrote a post titled \u201cWhy You Can\u2019t Reconcile God and Evolution<\/a>.\u201d It was this piece that inspired yesterday\u2019s post, in which I argued that Christianity is a complex and varied tradition that does in fact leave room for reconciling God and evolution, Christian faith and feminism, and the Bible and LGTBTQ rights. I also argued that trying to winnow away at that middle ground\u2014those who embrace faith but also acceptance, equality, and the scientific method\u2014runs the risk of both pushing progressive or mainline Christians into the fundamentalist and evangelical fold and keeping fundamentalists and evangelicals from thinking outside of their box. But I feel like I have more to say.<\/p>\n In this post, I want to address the four reasons Greta argues God and evolution cannot be reconciled. I want to be clear that I have a lot of respect for Greta. I simply disagree with her\u2014strongly\u2014on this point. I want to respond drawing on the experience of the several years I spent as a liberal Christian (of the Catholic, and then more universal, variety).<\/p>\n 1. It contradicts a central principle of the theory of evolution.<\/strong><\/p>\n According to theistic evolution (the fancy term for \u201cGod made evolution happen\u201d), the process of evolution is shaped by the hand of God. God takes the processes of mutation, natural selection, and descent with modification, and uses them to direct life into the forms he wants \u2013 including the form of humanity.<\/p>\n But in evolution, there is no direction. At the core of the theory of evolution is the principle that whatever survives, survives, and whatever reproduces, reproduces. Each generation has to survive and reproduce on its own terms: there\u2019s no selecting for a particular feature that\u2019s harmful now but will be useful ten generations later, after a little more adapting. . . .\u00a0Evolution is all about the immediate present and the very near future: it\u2019s about surviving, and producing fertile offspring that live long enough to reproduce.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s a huge amount of random chaos in the mix. If any of a hundred thousand quirks go a different way, the outcome can be different \u2013 sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. A flood shifts the course of a river, and a plant\u2019s seeds float south-south-east instead of due south, and the seeds sprout on the part of the continent that splits off and becomes South America. An asteroid hits the planet and wipes out the dinosaurs, and these weird rodent-like creatures start reproducing like gangbusters, and in a few hundred thousand years some of their great-great-thousands-of-times-over grandchildren wind up as human beings.<\/p>\n . . .<\/p>\n So it makes no sense to say that evolution is real, exactly as the scientists describe it \u2014 but that God is guiding it in the direction he wants. If evolution is exactly as the scientists describe it, there\u2019s no direction for God to be guiding it in. God hasn\u2019t got a thing to do with it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As Greta admits later, not all theistic evolutionists hold the exact same views. But when I was a theistic evolutionist, I found two views compelling: First, that God started off the Big Bang and then watched, fascinated, as everything unfolded. In this view, God was a silent observer, gazing in wonder as the world we know today developed, gradually, over time. I could see him taking time off for a bit to eat (I know, I know) and then coming back to find a new wonder that had developed while he was away.<\/p>\n The other view that I found compelling involved some intervention, but not of the sort Greta imagines. I could see God shoving over a sandbank, or blowing up a sandstorm, to see what would happen and how the ecosystem would react. I could even see him hurling that asteroid at the earth, and watching as the world changed. In other words, God is not directing so much as he is tinkering. But then, that gets at Greta\u2019s next point.<\/p>\n 2. There\u2019s not a scrap of evidence for it.<\/strong><\/p>\n If there really were a Divine Tinkerer mucking about with evolution, like civil engineers re-directing a river or kids putting sticks in a stream, we\u2019d see signs of it. When we looked at the fossil record, we\u2019d see human knees suddenly re-shaped to better suit upright bipedal walking. We\u2019d see human female pelvises suddenly re-shaped to better accommodate their infants\u2019 larger brains without dying in childbirth. We\u2019d see human brains suddenly re-shaped to better understand long-term cost-benefit analysis. And that\u2019s just the humans.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t see any of that. When we look at the fossil record\u2014and the genetic record, and the geological record, and the anatomical record, and every other record from every branch of science that supports the theory of evolution and investigates how it works\u2014we don\u2019t see any signs whatsoever of outside intervention. What we do see is exactly what we\u2019d expect to see if evolution were an entirely natural process, proceeding one generation at a time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s a far cry to from suggesting that\u00a0God once and a while knocked over a sandbank or blew up a sandstorm to suggesting that God reshaped human knees or reshaped human pelvises or reshaped human brains. In fact, I don\u2019t know a single theistic evolutionist that would suggest any of those things. When I was a theistic evolutionist, I would have found such ideas absurd. To the extent that I believed God intervened in the process of evolution, it was not to make direct developmental changes but rather to slightly change the conditions\u2014and in ways that used or mimicked natural causes.<\/p>\n In other words, for me\u00a0theistic evolution was not falsifiable. It was not in fact something you would expect to\u00a0see evidence<\/em> of. In fact, you would rather expect not<\/em> to see evidence of it. And that was fine with me! Progressive, mainline, or liberal Christians don\u2019t tend to find hard physical evidence important in the way fundamentalists or evangelicals do. It honestly did not matter to me. In some ways, theistic evolution allowed me to accept scientific reality while being able to create a beautiful spiritual mythology around it. I wasn\u2019t supplanting it. I was accepting it, and then adding mythos to it. And it was beautiful.<\/p>\n This issue of falsifiability\u00a0ties in nicely to the point Greta makes next:<\/p>\n Now, some adherents of theistic evolution don\u2019t think that God is tinkering with the process every day, or even every millennium, or even every epoch. Some theistic evolutionists are really more like deists: they think God set the entire process in motion, four billion years ago at the dawn of the planet, or 13.7 billion years ago at the dawn of the universe. They think God set the parameters way back in the mists of time, knowing how things would turn out, and is just sitting back watching it all unfold. That\u2019s what they mean by \u201cGod made evolution happen.\u201d<\/p>\n But there\u2019s not a scrap of evidence for this, either. If your god is so non-interventionist that he\u2019s entirely indistinguishable from physical cause and effect\u2014what reason do you have to think he exists? In all of human history, the supernatural has never turned out to be the right answer to anything: natural explanations of phenomena have replaced supernatural ones thousands upon thousands of times, while supernatural explanations have replaced natural ones exactly never. So why would you think that an invisible god who set the wheels of evolution in motion, in a way that looks exactly like physical cause and effect, is more plausible than simple physical cause and effect?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Yes, this understanding of theistic evolution is unfalsifiable. And that\u2019s fine\u2014like I said, it didn\u2019t bother me in the least when I was a theistic evolutionist. Progressive, mainline, and liberal Christians do not tend to be interested in finding\u00a0scientific proof of theistic evolution. That\u00a0obsession with finding scientific proof for foundations mythos is\u00a0a fundamentalist or evangelical thing, not a progressive, mainline, or liberal Christian thing. So what if their\u00a0foundations mythos does not differ from simple physical cause and effect? This doesn\u2019t matter to them. It\u2019s fine, and it doesn\u2019t much up their theology in the least.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s something else here, too. There is more than one kind of evidence. Evangelicals and fundamentalists tend to be overly\u00a0focused on outward scientific evidence. Progressive, mainline, and liberal Christians tend to be more focused on internal spiritual meaning. Feeling the closeness of God, feeling the interconnection of nature, feeling the depth of connections and friendships\u2014these things are spiritual things, not something you boil down to numbers or facts. In my experience, most progressive, mainline, or liberal Christians defend their beliefs not with outward fact\u00a0but with inward feeling. If someone believes they have personally experienced God, arguing that they should not believe in God because their mythos origins story does not differ from simple cause and effect isn\u2019t going to get you very far, because it does not matter to them<\/em>\u2014and it does not muck up their theology in the least.<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s move on to Greta\u2019s next point:<\/p>\n 3. There\u2019s a whole lot of evidence against it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Sinuses. Blind spots. External testicles. Backs and knees and feet shoddily warped into service for bipedal animals. Human birth canals barely wide enough to let the baby\u2019s skull pass \u2014 and human babies born essentially premature, because if they stayed in utero any longer they\u2019d kill their mothers coming out (which they sometimes do anyway). Wind pipes and food pipes in close proximity, leading to a great risk of choking to death when we eat. Impacted wisdom teeth, because our jaws are too small\u00a0for all our teeth. Eyes wired backwards and upside-down. The vagus nerve, wandering all over hell and gone before it gets where it\u2019s going. The vas deferens, ditto. Brains wired with imprecise language, flawed memory, fragile mental health, shoddy cost-benefit analysis, poor understanding of probability, and a strong tendency to prioritize immediate satisfaction over long-term gain. Birth defects. 15-20% of confirmed pregnancies\u00a0ending in miscarriage<\/a>\u00a0(and that\u2019s just confirmed pregnancies \u2014 about 30% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, and as many as 75% of all conceptions miscarry).<\/p>\n And\u00a0that\u2019s just humans<\/a>.\u00a0. . .<\/p>\n You\u2019re going to look at\u00a0all this<\/a>, and tell me it was engineered this way on purpose?<\/p>\n Yes, there are many aspects of biological life that astonish with their elegance and function. But there are many other aspects of biological life that astonish with their clumsiness, half-assedness, inefficiency, pointless superfluities, glaring omissions, laughable failures, \u201cfixed that for you\u201d\u00a0kluges and jury-rigs<\/a>, and appalling, mind-numbing brutality. (See\u00a0Some More of God\u2019s Greatest Mistakes<\/a>\u00a0for just a few of the most obvious examples.) If you\u2019re trying to reconcile all this with a powerfully magical creator god who made it this way on purpose, it requires wild mental contortions at best, and a complete denial of reality at worst.<\/p>\n . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This assumes that theistic evolutionists believe that God was trying to create a perfect world, or that he should have<\/em> created a perfect world. When I was a theistic evolutionist, I didn\u2019t believe anything of the kind\u2014and it didn\u2019t take \u201cwild mental contortions.\u201d Why does it naturally flow that a \u201cpowerfully magical creator god\u201d would create a perfect world? Even if the science had advanced far enough for me to have a designer baby, I tend to think that I would have chosen to have Sally and Bobby the natural way\u2014because I like the variability, the differences, the things that surprise and amaze me about them. Why then would God choose the perfect over the complex and varied? Why should we assume that he would prefer a \u201cperfect world\u201d? As a theistic evolutionist, I never for a moment believed that God was trying to create a utopia, or that he would want such a thing.<\/p>\n And beyond that, what exactly is<\/em> a \u201cperfect world\u201d? You could ask ten different individuals and they\u2019d give you ten different answers.<\/p>\n And now to Greta\u2019s last point:<\/p>\n 4. If it were true, God would either be incompetent or malicious.<\/strong><\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing about evolution. Evolution has led to some truly wondrous, truly amazing forms of life. (Or, to be more precise: Evolution has led to human brains that are capable of the experience of amazement, and that are inclined to be amazed at the variety and complexity of biological life.)<\/p>\n But evolution is messy. Evolution is wildly inefficient. See #3 above. It\u2019s not just the products of evolution that are inefficient, either. The process itself is inefficient\u2014inherently so, almost by definition. If you\u2019re an all-powerful magical being trying to create sentient life, evolution is the long, long, long way around. If you\u2019re trying to get from Point A to Point B, evolution is a slow, meandering walk down convoluted dirt roads, with thousands of stops on the way to visit your\u00a0doddering uncles who never shut up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I don\u2019t think the argument that evolution is \u201cthe long, long way around\u201d works as a counter to theistic evolution. When I was a theistic evolutionist, I believed God was capable<\/em> of creating everything on one day as it is now, but that he found the evolutionary process more interesting, more awe-inspiring, more fascinating. I believed that God had all the time in the world. Why would he care about efficiency? Maybe he liked the convoluted dirt roads.<\/p>\n And here we come to Greta\u2019s last poing:<\/p>\n And evolution is brutal. It\u2019s not just that the results of the process are often uncomfortable, frustrating, even painful. The process itself is inherently brutal. The process ensures that most animals die in dreadful suffering and terror: they die from starvation, from injury, from disease, from birth defects, from being torn to pieces and devoured by other animals. Of all the billions upon billions of conscious living beings that have ever existed, an infinitesimal minority got to die peacefully in their beds surrounded by their families. The overwhelming majority died brutally, in pain and fear. And that includes the ones who actually won the evolution sweepstakes, and got to live long enough to reproduce with fertile offspring.<\/p>\n If there were a god who was using evolution to direct life in the direction he wanted, it immediately begs the question: Why? Why on earth would anyone do this?<\/p>\n . . .<\/p>\n If theistic evolution were true\u2014if there really were a god who either tinkers with evolution to create human life or who set the universe in motion knowing that evolution would eventually result in human life\u2014then that god would either be grossly incompetent or cruelly malicious. That god would have to be either incapable of using the system of evolution to create life efficiently and with minimal pain\u2014indeed, incapable of coming up with a better system for producing life in the first place\u2014or brutally callous to the great suffering he has caused for hundreds of millions of years, and that he continues to cause on a daily basis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The thing is, this isn\u2019t just a critique of theistic evolution. It\u2019s a critique of Christianity as a whole. This pain and suffering that has gone on for millions of years is still going on today\u2014animals still fall prey to predators, humans still contract excruciating diseases, and people\u00a0still starve to death. This is called the problem of evil, or the problem of suffering, or the problem of pain. Christians have grappled with this problem for millennia, and progressive, mainline, and liberal Christians today have a variety of explanations.<\/p>\n And the problem is an interesting one to grapple with. I know that I chose to bring Sally and Bobby into the world knowing that at times they would experience suffering. Perhaps God chose to bring the world into existence because he believed that existing was better than not existing. But then, God is all powerful, and could (presumably) stop the suffering. But would I, as a mother, stop my children from ever suffering if I could? Well, no. We learn through suffering. We grow\u00a0through pain. A year and a half ago Sally went through some friend drama at her preschool, and ended up in my lap in tears. But through that experience, she has learned to better manage friendships and has gained self-confidence.<\/p>\n But of course, we\u2019re not just talking about learning experiences here. We\u2019re talking about people dying of ebola. We\u2019re talking about terrible diseases and excruciating conditions. We\u2019re talking lives cut short for no reason. Even when I was a theistic evolutionist and still considered myself a Christian, this problem bothered me. I could never quite find an explanation that made sense. If God could save starving children by having manna fall from the sky like in the Old Testament, why doesn\u2019t he? The problem of evil was one of the things that eventually led me out of Christianity entirely. The world we see around us started to look more like a world without an all-powerful divinity than a world with one.<\/p>\n But I don\u2019t think God using evolution to bring the world into being creates a problem for progressive, mainline, or liberal Christians that they don\u2019t already have. They already have to deal with the problem of evil, pain, and suffering, and if they\u2019ve found ways to justify it for themselves in general it shouldn\u2019t be that difficult for them to apply those justifications\u00a0to God\u2019s use of evolution. The real question here should not be, how could a loving God use the brutal process of evolution to bring our current world into existence, but rather, how can\u00a0a loving God watch\u00a0pain, suffering, and brutality in general and do nothing about it? This isn\u2019t an evolution problem. It\u2019s a Christianity problem.<\/p>\n I am today an atheist. I do not believe there is a God, and I do not believe in any form of supernatural force. My intent here is not to argue that everyone should go out and become theistic evolutionists\u2014far from it. My intent was simply to show how I, as a theistic evolutionist years ago, understood theistic evolution and reconciled God and evolution. From my reading Greta\u2019s\u00a0piece and my own personal experiences, the only one of Greta\u2019s points that creates problems for theistic evolutionists is the problem of evil, and that problem is general to Christianity rather than specific to theistic evolution. The other points are hindered by misunderstandings of what progressive, mainline, and liberal Christians tend to believe and value.<\/p>\n What about the rest of you? Are any of you theistic evolutionists today? Were any of you theistic evolutionists in the past? How do my experiences line up with yours? How effective did you find Greta\u2019s four points?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this post, I want to address the four reasons Greta argues God and evolution cannot be reconciled. I want to be clear that I have a lot of respect for Greta. I simply disagree with her—strongly—on this point. I want to respond drawing on the experience of the several years I spent as a liberal Christian (of the Catholic, and then more universal, variety). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-22817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-evolution"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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