Creation, Providence And Evolution

Lecture Road-Map

1. A robust view of Christian theism which provides a matrix within which the natural sciences in general, and evolutionary biology, can happily flourish.

2. The Christian doctrine of providence.

3. How comfortably can evolution be accommodated within Christian ideas of creation and providence?

Evolution: ‘chance’, ‘random’, ‘stochastic’, ‘purposeless’…..??

John Ray [1627-1705] - a key Christian founder of the discipline of natural history Francesco Petrarch [1304–74]: “What is the use--I beseech you--of knowing the nature of quadrupeds, fowls, fishes and serpents and not knowing or even neglecting man’s nature, the purpose for which we are born, and whence and whereto we travel?”

The more objects are magnified with the microscope “the more we discover the imperfections of our senses, and the Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creatour.” Robert Hooke,

Micrographia

(1665) A magnified flea from Hooke’s

Micrographia

Hooke’s compound microscope - an illustration from his

Micrographia

John Ray published his

Ornithology

[1676] for “the illustration of Gods glory, by exciting men to take notice of, and admire his infinite power and wisdom.”

John Ray (1627-1705)

John Ray Trinity College Chapel

The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation

“one insect is more in touch with Divine wisdom than the whole of Greek and Roman history.” Nicolas Malebranche [1638-1715] In his

History of the Royal Society

, Bishop Thomas Sprat claimed that the formal study of nature had been part of the original religion of Adam in Paradise!

Bishop Thomas Sprat [1635-1713]

A theology of nature

A TRINITARIAN MATRIX EVOLUTION

The Christian understanding of creation

GOD

EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS

Human Creation God’s Creation “God's causality is so different from the causality of creatures that there is no competition between the two, that is, we do not need to limit, as it were, God's causality to make room for the causality of creatures. God causes creatures to be causes”.

“Creation is not essentially some distant event; rather, it is the on-going complete causing of the existence of all that is. At this very moment, were God not causing all that is to exist, there would be nothing at all. Creation concerns first of all the origin of the universe, not its temporal beginning”.

Bill Carroll [Oxford University]

Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274] "Over and above the mode of becoming by which something comes to be through change or motion, there must be a mode of becoming or origin of things without any mutation or motion, through the influx of being”.

God’s transcendence in creation

‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ Isaiah 55:8–9 “Our God is in heaven, he does whatever pleases him” [Psalm 115:3].

The contingency of creation promotes the emergence of empiricism 'Without all doubt this world...could arise from nothing but the perfectly free will of God....

These (laws of nature) therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures, but learn them from observations and experiments.

Cotes in his preface to the second edition of Newton's

Principia Mathematica

Isaac Newton

“Since there are countless different configurations which God might have instituted here, experience alone must teach us which configurations he actually selected in preference to the rest. We are thus free to make any assumption on these matters with the sole proviso that all the consequences of our assumption must agree with experience” [Rene Descartes,

Principles of Philosophy

].

1596-1650

The immanence of God in the created order

“God’s

ruach

swept over the surface of the water” [Gen. 1:3] “…the divine Spirit ( Spirit gives form”.

ruach

) is the creative power and the presence of God in his creation. The whole creation is a fabric woven by the Spirit, and is therefore a reality to which the

Jürgen Moltmann

“For it is the Spirit who, everywhere diffused, sustains all things, causes them to grow, and quickens them in heaven and on earth….In transfusing into all things his energy, and breathing into them essence, life and movement, he is indeed plainly divine’.

[

Institutions

1, 13-14] John Calvin

A Christological Creation

“Through the

Logos

all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” [John 1:3] by the Son of God “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things,

and in him all things hold together

’ [Colossians 1:16-17]

A Christological Creation

‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,

sustaining all things by his powerful word

’ everything exists’ [Hebrews 1:3] for: God is the one ‘for whom and through whom [Hebrews 2:10]

‘He

causes sends

his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ [Matthew 5:45]. ‘You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and

have their being

’.

[Rev. 4:11]

The Spirit-energised Christological created order

PSALM 104: God “makes grass grow for cattle and plants for man to cultivate” [v. 14] “The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God” [v. 21] “How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” [v. 24] “When you hide your face, they [the animals] are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit, they are created (

bara

)), and you renew the face of the earth” (verses 29–30)

The Spirit-energised Christological created order

“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind” [Job 12:10].

“…in God we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28].

“O LORD, you preserve both man and beast” [Ps. 36:6].

God provides “food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food” [Job 38:41].

The eagle soars at God’s command and builds his nest on high… “His young ones feast on blood, and where the slain are, there is he” [Job 39:30].

The three tenses of creation

Jesus is “the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 22:13). PAST PRESENT FUTURE “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working” [John 5:17]. “Behold, I will create (

bara’

) new heavens and a new earth” [Isaiah 65:17]

What do scientists do?

GOD THE PRIMARY CAUSE

EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS THE SECONDARY CAUSES WHEREBY THEY EXIST

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

Providence

“Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me? Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese, clothe me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews? You gave me life and showed me kindness, and in your providence watched over my spirit” [Job 10:8-12] “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” [Ps. 139:13].

Providence

“God exhaustively plans and meticulously carries out his perfect will as he alone knows best, regarding all that is in heaven and on earth, and he does so without failure or defeat, accomplishing his purposes in all of creation from the smallest details to the grand purposes of his plan for the whole of the created order”.

Bruce Ware

EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS PAST PRESENT FUTURE

How comfortable the fit?

GOD’S INTENTION AND PURPOSES THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

CREATION

“We are a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted…” Stephen Jay Gould “The universe we observe had precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins

Dennett asks: “Can [the biosphere] really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that cascade?” His answer: “Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind, algorithmic process.” And again, “Evolution is not a process that was designed to produce us…”

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

Daniel Dennett

Biological data that render the inference of randomness and purposelessness less plausible: 1. Natural Selection

Biological data that render the inference of randomness and purposelessness less plausible: 1. Natural Selection

Biological data that render the inference of randomness and purposelessness less plausible: 1. Natural Selection – the role of Chance COPY ERRORS RADIATION CHEMICAL MUTAGENS MEIOTIC RECOMBINATION NATURAL SELECTION

2. The overall sweep of evolutionary history Cells 3.5b

Everything really small <1mm Multicellular Life-forms 1.2b

Cambrian explosion 505-525m Human Brains 10 11 cells 10 14 synapses

From: S.B.Carroll Nature ‘Chance and necessity: the evolution of morphological complexity and diversity’,

Nature

409:1102-1109, 2001.

2. The overall sweep of evolutionary history

“Life’s contingent history could be viewed as an argument against any direction or pattern in the course of evolution or the shape of life. But it is obvious that larger and more complex life forms have evolved from simple unicellular ancestors and that various innovations were necessary for Sean Carroll [Nature Review] the evolution of new means of living. This raises the possibility that there are trends within evolutionary history that might reflect the existence of general principles governing the evolution of increasingly larger and more complex forms ”.

Multicellularity has evolved many times in the different domains of life

From: S.B.Carroll Nature ‘Chance and necessity: the evolution of morphological complexity and diversity’,

Nature

409:1102-1109, 2001.

The allometric scaling laws of evolution

Kleiber's Law: metabolism equals mass to the three-quarter power [Max Kleiber, 1932]

Trees Mammals Kleiber's Law: metabolism equals mass to the three quarter power. Banavar, J.R. et al., ‘Form, function, and evolution of living organisms’, PNAS 111: 3332 3337, 2014.

4. Evolutionary Convergence

4. Evolutionary Convergence

Energy-hungry animals

INDEPENDENT LINEAGES Blue-nosed dolphin Bat Primates IDH2 = Mitochondrial NADP + - dependent isocitrate dehydrogenase - a key enzyme in the energy-producing Kreb’s Cycle

IDH2 – a key enzyme in the energy producing Kreb’s Cycle VALINE ALANINE AT POSITION 186 MUTATION AT POSITION 186 Ai, W-M. et al., ‘Parallel evolution of IDH2 gene in cetaceans, primates and bats’, FEBS Letters 588:450-454, 2014.

VALINE ALANINE AT POSITION 186 The red lines indicate the three vertebrate lineages in which valine has been changed to alanine INDEPENDENTLY at position 186 ONLY for energy-hungry dolphins, bats and primates

Simon Conway Morris

Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Cambridge “[I]t is now w idely thought that the history of life is little more than a contingent muddl e punctuated by disastrous mass extinctions that in spelling the doom of one gro up so open the doors of opportuni ty to some other mob of lucky-chancers.

…Rerun the tape of the history of life… and the end result will be an utterly different biosphere. Most no tably there will be nothin g remotely like a human…Yet, what we know of evoluti on suggests the exact reverse: convergence is ubiquit ous and the constra ints of life make the emergence of the various biological properties [e.g.

intelligence] very p robable, if not inevitable”

Life’s Solution Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe

pp. 283-4

www.mapoflife.org

Filling up design space

= Genomes that don’t work = Genomes that work

“My position is very simple. Evolution has led to a human brain that can gain access to a Platonic world of forms and ideas”. Martin Nowak, 2009 Harvard University [Director, Programme of Evolutionary Dynamics]

Plus hundreds of other examples of ‘constraints’ in evolution!

• • • • •

evolution of proteins. RNA structures. the genetic code. hot-spot genes.

and many other examples.

‘Atheism-of-the-gaps’?

Premise: Evolution is a purely chance process: had the tape of life been replayed, everything would have come out very different.

Ergo, there can be no God with intentions and purposes for the world.

PROBLEM: The premise turns out to be implausible

A theology of nature: The Trinitarian God’s created order, including the evolutionary process, fulfilling his intentions and purposes GOD’S INTENTION AND PURPOSES THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

CREATION

Many questions remain!

• • • • •

Why would God choose to create living things through such a lengthy process involving so much pain and death?

How should we interpret the early chapters of Genesis?

What about Adam and Eve and human evolution?

How do we understand the doctrine of the Fall in the light of human evolutionary history?

Etc.

Second revised expanded edition.

September 2014 £8 from: www.faraday-institute.org

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