Evolution and Theology

Posted on March 10, 2010
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion, Science | 26 Comments

Yes, I’m really behind on blog posts here. Sorry, I’ve been quite busy. Larval Subjects had an interesting post on theology and evolution. It’s primarily brief comments on Nagel, Fodor and Plantinga responding to Darwinism. However Levi raises a good critique I’ve heard both from more fundamentalist critics of evolution as well as atheists criticizing theism.

am not suggesting that it is not possible to develop a non-anthropocentric theology that is consistent with evolutionary theory, but this would require ousting humans from their special place in the order of creation. When this type of theology is formulated I confess that I see little reason why this divinity would be worthy of worship or veneration. To worship such an entity makes about as much sense as worshiping gravity;

Now obviously I disagree and think there is a very workable middle ground. The error is in assuming for God to be worshippable he somehow has to have so much purpose that everything is effectively mastered equipment to him. Now one problem when talking about the divine is that clearly there has been a wide range of views through human history. So to say what the divine must be to be worshipped always struck me as a bit odd. To privilege what I perceive to be a mixture of Hebrew and primarily Greek absolutist perceptions of God is just mistaken. I’m actually quite sympathetic to Nietzsche here who thinks such a conception of God is dead. It is, as Levi points out, simply unworkable. I’ll not deal with that objection more, even though I suspect many will disagree with Nietzsche and I there.

The alternative position is a God who is more limited by the constituents of existence. i.e. reject both creation ex nihilo as well as the views closer to pantheism of the Greek philosophers. Since that’s the deity I happen to have faith in anyway, this isn’t much of a problem for me.

In this I think the approach to evolution is quite different. That is I think evolution just becomes one of the entities or structures in a pre-existent universe God finds himself embodied within. As such the issue of evolution is as much a non-issue as the issue of gravity. Stuff evolves just as an inherent aspect of the substance of existence. There’s really nothing else to resolve inherent to evolution itself.

The bigger problem — even for Mormons — is the nature of man. Typically within evolutionary proponents there is a view that evolution entails there be nothing special about man. That is the traditional medieval great chain of being is wrong. There is nothing special about man in terms of creation. I think the theist who accepts evolution can simply say that God could interfere with the environment and that evolution would produce life that adapts to that environment. I see nothing problematic there. So, for instance, if God sent an asteroid to earth to privilege mammals over dinosaurs is there anything wrong with that? I can’t see how.

The main argument is more that evolution with life is a horribly inefficient way to product man and why on earth would you want to believe in such an inefficient God. My sense is this might partially be behind Levi’s comments. I don’t find that terribly persuasive since it is effectively saying man is all that matters – something I don’t believe. Further it is ultimately making an aesthetic argument against God which seems a pretty weak argument at best.

Related posts:

  1. Mormons Worse at Believing Evolution?
  2. Evolution and Global Warming
  3. Language Evolution
  4. Generating Shakespeare via Evolution
  5. Evolution and the Problem of Evil
  6. Prion Evolution

Comments

26 Responses to “Evolution and Theology”

Might want to check the block quote there.

More to the point of the post, I think the specialness of man is really the crux of the matter for Mormons. Matching up the products of (human) evolution with the pre-existent natures of man and God seems pretty tough. I think Mormonism is just too anthropocentric to fully square with anything close to Neo-Darwinism as it is typically conceived.

Well it depends Jeff. That’s partially why I brought up evolution as a form of technology. The domestication of animals is fully explainable by darwinian evolution. So I don’t think one can point to a problem of God using evolution. Now one can of course argue that there is absolutely zero scientific evidence that God did this (or, if you prefer the atheist version, a giant black monolith ala 2001). But I think one has to separate out the issue of intelligent interference with the environment versus the issue of evolution proper.

(BTW – fixed the double quote in the blockquote)

I think one strategy of argument here would be to question the premise that worship is primarily a relationship between the human and God. Euthyphro is clearly a scoundrel and not the sharpest knife in the drawer, believing that worship is a sort of business or economic relation. But is this true? In its best forms, worship seems directed not so much at God, as the formation of community. This is particularly true, I believe, in Mormonism where relations to the community of believers pervades every aspect of life and where all sorts of activities are done to continuously form and enhance these relations.

Incidentally, have you guys read the work of my colleague Adam Miller who is attempting to develop a Mormon theology?

http://www.amazon.com/Badiou-Marion-Paul-Continental-Philosophy/dp/0826498701/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268269153&sr=1-1

For Miller the key consists in forming a mode of religiosity that escapes economic and calculative reason.

I think the Euthypro dilemma is pretty crucial. While I tend to disagree with his Process Theology influenced theology, Blake Ostler has a pretty compelling discussion of this against Protestant theology in his Exploring Mormon Thought. Roughly Blake takes the position that worship both from our perspective and God’s is about maximizing our interrelativity. I don’t think that can (or should) be taken in purely economic terms. Indeed I think the problem is that an economic conception of God is inherently problematic. A true relationship always exceeds the economy. (I’ll avoid waxing Derridean here)

Adam kindly gave me a copy of his book last year. I’ve discussed it with him a lot over on LDS-Herm. I didn’t realize you guys were colleagues. I think I nearly convinced him of the Derridean position against his critique but maybe he’d disagree with that characterization. I do agree with Adam (and I think everyone on LDS-Herm would agree) that true religiosity requires something “beyond” economy. I think this is one reason why so many LDS thinkers have adopted a more Levinasian view where responsibility is more important than economic based forms of Ethics. (Roughly both the Kantian and Utilitarian broad approaches) Of course there are plenty of Mormon Kantians and Utilitarians so I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush.

Yep, I actually hired Adam. Terrific guy and we’re very lucky to have him here. Small world. Were you the one with whom we organized a panel for SPEP on Derrida and Badiou a couple years ago? (Sadly it was rejected). With Mormon religion I wonder if it isn’t necessary to distinguish between the practice among the community and the various ways in which it’s theorized.

My experience with Mormons is limited, having only be exposed to the religion through a sizeable portion of my extended family on my father’s side that’s Mormon, Adam, and a number of students that I’ve had over the years. My first real exposure was about seven years ago when my Aunt, who was Mormon, died of cancer. What I found really amazing was how the whole community got involved. And by this, I don’t just mean that they attended the service and funeral, but rather they were involved with the family at a very ground floor level, involving themselves in every aspect of the mourning and support for the family. It was then that I discovered that, at least in their particular sect, each of them would meet weekly with a partner to discuss moral and spiritual issues. I was extremely impressed with this level of involvement or community building.

Later on, when I met Adam and talked about these things more, he told me about how the church hierarchy is structured and how people basically rotate through various positions in the church, one year serving as treasurer, another teaching school (Adam’s a hoot and teaches the Jesus of the Gospels as a sort of Lacanian analyst), another conducting services, etc. The Negri and Hardt enthusiast of “multitudes” in me, coupled with the Badiousian/Sartrean enthusiast of subject-groups and truth procedures, is impressed by this sort of immanent, “flat”, “democratic” or egalitarian sort of organization. I have a similar fascination with the early Baptist church, prior to it becoming so dogmatic and hierchialized, where you had the congregation of the lay. And at the risk of making offensive generalizations, proposition 8 in California aside, all of the Mormons I’ve ever met have struck me as extremely happy, tolerant, generous people so something must be working here. Adam is one of the most free wheeling and adventurous metaphysicians I’ve ever encountered, and I seldom find anything he says objectionable, often finding him even more secular than myself in a way that is jarring next to his deep religious convictions. Perhaps this is his Derridean background, requiring as it does a post-ontotheological conception of God and theology, paradoxically enough, that might be described as an “a-theology”.

So I guess what I’m saying is that at the level of community building and activity, it seems to me that these sorts of practices make uneasy bedfellows with the deontological moral theory of Kant or the consequentialism of utilitarianism. Levinas I can see a bit, but it doesn’t seem to me that these practices are done simply out of a command of reason or a duty, nor that they are quite a matter of calculative utilitarian thought. But like I said, my experience is limited here.

While I certainly sympathize with this general form of theistic evolution, I worry that once we get down to the details it might not work so well. I’m not terribly qualified in this matter, but let me venture a couple thoughts.

Aren’t there important differences between natural and artificial selection? One being the speed at which it happens. Another being what kinds of traits are being selected (helpful in the nature environment or not?).

One also wonders what points in our evolutionary history (or is that too anthropocentric?) God intervened? When, or if He stopped intervening, wouldn’t we simply evolve back to what nature had been selecting, sort of like dogs returned to the wild?

Although the idea of God’s creating us by “shepherding” our ancestors is fascinating.

Basically, I’m wondering what empirical consequences the shepherding thesis might have.

9 John Mansfield on March 11th, 2010 10:50 am

Clark, as I’ve objected before, I don’t see why modifying the environment (by manipulating orbital mechanics or such) would be an acceptable realm for divine action, while more direct acts upon the living (fiddling directly with base pairs or loosing angelic hosts to slaughter dinosaurs) would be beyond acceptable limits.

“That is I think evolution just becomes one of the entities or structures in a pre-existent universe God finds himself embodied within. As such the issue of evolution is as much a non-issue as the issue of gravity. Stuff evolves just as an inherent aspect of the substance of existence. There’s really nothing else to resolve inherent to evolution itself”

Interesting thought. I’ve thought of that possibility too (though I don’t yet “believe” in it… I’ve just “thought of it as a possibility” at this point.)

Thanks for the kind comments. I tend to think there is a greater mix of “niceness” amongst Mormons. I tend to see religion partially as a hospital run by the infirmed. I’d hope everyone is living up to their ideals, but I know I fail regularly and I’m sure other fail even worse at times. The danger of too positive a public image is that of course no real community could ever live up to such an image.

Church structure is an odd mixture of hierarchal and “democratic” (although I don’t like that term since the voting is more to accept someone’s call rather than to chose who gets the call). While there’s a lot of movement at the ward and stake level – which practically is what affects most peoples lives – the higher up the hierarchy the less shifting around there is. So Apostles are for life. Those in higher leadership positions do tend to spend more time in leadership positions, although there is also a good chance they’ll move from being in a major leadership position over thousands to being a teacher in the local nursery for two year olds.

The lay ministry has its pluses and minuses. The minus which I think all members encounter is that people aren’t always skilled at the jobs they are called to do. So you might find yourself in a job feeling quite overwhelmed. (I remember the first time I was called to work in the nursery and feeling a bit overwhelmed and I was there for nearly four years!) It also means that if you look at leadership or callings as people with tasks to serve you that you’ll feel underserved at times. (As you’ll find people you clash with, or people who just don’t do that great a job) Overall though, for all the benefits of having a trained paid clergy I think there are big pluses. The difference is one of perspective. I think you have to switch from seeing Church as a place to be served to one where it’s an opportunity for you to serve others. Without that change of perception I think people get frustrated and at times disappointed.

Jeff, while there obviously would be empirical consequences to the shepherding thesis I’m not sure of any practical consequences we could discern at this time. Note that I’m not saying a formal breeding program. Initial domestication probably wasn’t so formal as say 19th century animal husbandry. I’m more thinking of the domestication of say wolves into dogs thousands of years ago.

But my point is more that you don’t need that much involvement. You just modify the environment somewhat – i.e. adjust temperatures, oxygen levels, co2 levels. Presumably even a very limited view of God would allow God a ton of technological prowess in these areas as well as knowledge. Throw in millions if not billions of planets to work with and the probabilities that you could get species close enough for ones purposes seems fairly conceivable. If you think God has some kind of foreknowledge (either direct knowledge of all possibilities or even actualities) then the problem isn’t a problem at all since he’d know what do to intrinsically.

So I guess my point is that for the range of common LDS beliefs evolution seems to pose no problem. The only empirical question would be how to detect divine involvement but it seems any interesting involvement would be nearly undetectable.

John, I’m not arguing God did not do more direct intervention. I’m fine with the idea that he did. I’m just saying it’s not necessary. But if we can conceive of genetic engineering in the not too distant future then I don’t see why God couldn’t do this. The counter question is if God was going to do that, why have evolution at all. That is we’re back to the efficiency question. One has to explain the fossil record as we have it though. But I honestly don’t mind a scheme like Arthur C. Clarke envisions in his famous 2001: A Space Odyssey. That seems a very workable model for Mormons.

I would agree that it wouldn’t take THAT much involvement. Some people will see this feature of your model as a bug, however. I see two tensions at play here.

First, to what extent are we really created in some pre-existent image, be it after God’s image or that of our pre-existing spirits? The stronger we make those latter claims, the more involvement we will require on God’s part.

Second, to what extent does God deserve credit for the creation? If God didn’t get that involved, He’s starting to sound not all that deserving of our worship.

The way I see it, traditional, mainstream Mormonism strongly implies that we are created VERY much after the image of God and He was VERY involved in the process that brought this about. Science, on the other hand, strongly implies that we are created after the image of God in a VERY loose sense, and that He was not very involved in the creation process at all.

That’s the tension that I see most attempts at reconciliation sort of dancing around.

I think the most difficult Mormon doctrine to reconcile with evolution is that God the Father and human beings belong to the same species, in the ordinary biological sense of the word. Given a constant set of initial conditions, the same species won’t evolve twice, so we can’t reasonably expect that God could establish some environmental conditions that would lead through millions of years of evolution to a species reproductively compatible with Himself. In order to do so, such a process would require regular supernatural intervention, but if He’s going to intervene to make humans anyway, why use evolution in the first place?

Some will probably say that Mormon doctrine doesn’t require that God the Father and human beings belong to the same species. If that’s the case, then in what meaningful sense would Jesus Christ be both His son and Mary’s son? If God were not reproductively compatible with Mary, then the adoptionist position would make a lot of sense.

Roger said, “Given a constant set of initial conditions, the same species won’t evolve twice.”

This statement needs modification. Please see convergent & parallel evolution. Nature often produces organisms (unrelated by DNA) with similar characteristics. Ecological demands significantly constrain the number of evolutionary solutions.

S. Faux,

Convergent evolution does not lead to the same species. As you said, they are unrelated by DNA; therefore they are not reproductively compatible and not the same species. Birds and bats share some characteristics by convergent evolution, but they are clearly not the same species and actually illustrate my point, that adaptation to the same environmental conditions does not result in reproductive compatibility.

Roger, I don’t think that is a doctrine. That’s a speculation by BY which most LDS theologies have rejected. There’s one sense in which we are the same species but that’s generally taken to refer to our spirit nature. Although some appear to take the spirit birth itself as speculative and take such comments more as referring to our basic ontological status. Your point about Jesus is apt, but once again that’s pretty speculative and many LDS reject that notion. In any case if we have God as the master genetic engineer I don’t see a big problem.

I think this relates to Jeff’s comments. If we take the resurrection seriously then it is a pretty big physical and biological change. To such a degree that I think any resemblance between God and man need not be that close.

18 Michael Dorfman on March 12th, 2010 4:49 am

Jumping in at a bit of a meta-level– I recently had a topic come up in a different context (about the potential scientificity of the Buddhist doctrine of sending “metta”) which seems to be structurally similar, to wit: what is the purpose of attempting to reconcile science and religion?

If one’s primary allegiance is to science, one would be obligated to follow where science leads, regardless of it’s bearing (or potential conflict with) religious doctrine.

If, on the other hand, one’s primary allegiance is to a set of religious beliefs, one follows those, even if the claims made conflict with scientific findings.

Now, if one is in the former category, I don’t think that finding potential points of harmony between science and any particular religious doctrine is of more than passing interest. “Oh, cool”, a physicist might say, “the ancient Hindu’s were right on this point! Now, back to business….”

If, on the other hand, one is in the latter category, I can see where finding a potential point of harmony between science and doctrine would be temporarily comforting– but only if one’s faith were in need of outside support.

So: what’s the purpose of the exercise?

Clark,

It’s a little more than speculation. Some LDS GA’s have speculated in the past about how material from God was combined with material from Mary to conceive Jesus, but I’m not talking about that. Did Jesus have 46 chromosomes? Because he only got 23 from Mary. If the other chromosomes are shared by God, then we have reproductive compatibility. If God created the other chromosomes de novo, then God is the father of Jesus in the sense that Geppetto was the father of Pinocchio, in which case the designation “only begotten” doesn’t imply anything in particular, since Geppetto made other puppets as well.

The notion of God as engineer, genetic or otherwise, seems fairly common among LDS, but engineers are constrained to work within natural law. The problem arises when one tries to reconcile the doctrine with what we know about natural law.

Michael Dorfman, for Mormonism the purpose is that we are “commanded” to learn the Truth no matter what side of the divide we might be on in our studies. There is no difference between science and Mormonism, at least with the end product of discovering the reality of existence. Since Mormonism teaches that our greatest reward will be to become like God, then we must learn what He knows the best we mortals can.

As for the special creation of Man? My reading of Genesis, and other Scriptures, leads me to believe there isn’t much special about Man the physical. It is the Garden of Eden that is special and Man just happened to be placed there. When he got kicked out of the Garden of Eden then he once again became non-special and has been charged to become special once again. It is the spirit of Man that is special, and not the body.

Michael, like others noted, I think the drive on these issues is more just curiosity about truth. Of course as in all theology or philosophy the weight of argument one can marshall is at best quite weak. Which is why I favor trying to understand the range of possibilities. That quote by Timothy Sider that pops up in the upper right in my daily quote occasionally is apt. He was talking about metaphysics in general but I tend to think it applies equally to most philosophy and theology.

Skeptics often ask too much of metaphysical arguments. A priori metaphysical arguments should not be faulted for not being decisive. … Metaphysical inquiry can survive if we are willing to live with highly tentative conclusions. Let’s not kid ourselves: metaphysics is highly speculative! It does not follow that it is entirely without rational grounds.

Roger, I think you’re appealing in a subtle way to the slippery slope hypothesis. How much engineering is too much engineering and ceases to “be natural.” I don’t know, but I don’t think we can simply dismiss the idea because of the potential here. Especially since I don’t think that kind of fatherhood is necessary in the least.

One thing to keep in mind is all these speculative notions arose long before people even knew there was DNA. Something to keep in mind when considering the hermeneutics of the issue.

It seems to me that the assumption that if God engineers DNA or recombines it to achieve his purposes, then he’s interfering in the natural order. It seems to me that, strictly speaking, if God is a part of the natural there is no possibility of “interfering in the natural order”. Given that humans are part of the natural order, anything we do is part of the natural order. We couldn’t escape it. Is it the Mormon view that God is just part of the natural order like we are (or at least as naturalism assumes that we are)? If so, there cannot be such a thing as escaping from or interfering with the natural order since everything is a part of the natural order.

Punctuated equilibrium (the prevailing model of evolution right now) would certainly suggest that there are periods of rapid evolution. Why not see it as God fiddling with recombinant DNA. After all, humans do it now so it seems quite possible to assume that God could do it too. Further, if God wanted particular persons to look like spirits (whatever spirits are supposed to look like for Mormons) couldn’t God just engineer a body from DNA knowing the natural outcome? We don’t seem so far away from being able to pick all kinds of physical traits for children right now. Why is it such a stretch that God could do it?

I suppose the real issue is whether there is such a thing as final causes or acts done for purposes that are not just reducible to prior efficient causes described in physics. If there is no final causation, then the entire idea of designing anything seems contrived.

Clark,

I’m not suggesting that God acting as engineer is in any way not natural; on the contrary, God as engineer is natural in the sense that no natural laws are violated, changed, or suspended. This is in contrast to a more traditional theistic view in which God is law giver and law changer. I am suggesting that no engineer, no matter how smart, can precisely control the outcome of a process like evolution merely by controlling the initial conditions.

Like you, I don’t think “that kind of fatherhood” is necessary, but let’s not kid ourselves about the difficulty of integrating our view with Mormon theology, which says 1) God has a physical body that resembles humans, 2) God has a son whose sonship somehow differs from the sonship of his other children, and 3) Jesus Christ did not have a mortal father. There aren’t that many dots to connect. On the other hand, our view fits pretty well with Pauline theology where Jesus is referred to as “firstborn” rather than “only begotten.”

“Is it the Mormon view that God is just part of the natural order like we are (or at least as naturalism assumes that we are)? If so, there cannot be such a thing as escaping from or interfering with the natural order since everything is a part of the natural order.”

Chrstine, This strikes me as a definitional problem.

In the book The Fabric of Reality, the author points out that if life wants to survive, they will find a way to change the mass of their sun (presumably by removing some of it and putting it elsewhere) before the sun goes red and engulfs the earth.

His point was that part of the “natural order” of reality is that you have to take life into consideration if you want to know the *actual* phases a sun will go through.

Now is life deciding to change their sun’s life phases part of the natural order or not part of the natural order? It’s purely definitional, so the answer doesn’t matter.

Christine, your comment suffers from the same problem. If by “natural” we mean “all that is real” then by definition it’s impossible to conceive of a God that is “not natural” yet still exists. Therefore, all concepts of God are “part of the natural order” and all that God does is by definition “part of the natural order.” It’s just tautological.

By if by “natural order” we mean “that which happens absent God existing (or absent life existing in the Sun example)” then the answer to your original question is that God is by definition always outside of the natural order. It’s still tautological.

Either way, I can’t make sense of your statement. Either way, it doesn’t seem specific to Mormonism either. It’s an “equally valid or invalid” question for any religion with the same two tautological possibilities either way.

Bruce, I think Christine’s point is that “unnatural” is kind of a loose term. Animal husbandry is as much an expression of evolution as the rise of mammals over the dinosaurs was. Given that it’s unclear why there could be any theological problem with evolution.

The biggest problem remains the argument from efficiency. That is if God wanted humans this seems like a highly inefficient way of bringing it about. I think that is a fairly strong argument, although obviously it isn’t that strong. (Not strong enough to convince me certainly) My point though is evolution just is a feature of the universe. Regardless of what God does creatively evolution would still be in play if the life has reproduction of some sort by change of some information.

“Bruce, I think Christine’s point is that “unnatural” is kind of a loose term. Animal husbandry is as much an expression of evolution as the rise of mammals over the dinosaurs was. Given that it’s unclear why there could be any theological problem with evolution.”

That means my comment was completely in agreement with her. :)

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