I will devote my time this evening to looking at one or two aspects of
Galileo’s and Darwin’s thought and the implications their thought has for
religion, specifically for our understanding of God.
Galileo was a faithful Roman Catholic all his life. Dr. Whitney has described
the trouble Galileo caused for himself when he published The Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World defending the Copernican
view that the earth rotated around the sun. Dr. Whitney has also shown how
the pope’s advisors convinced him that placing the church’s position in the
mouth of Simplicio was a direct attack on the pope personally. Needless to
say, there’s no wrath so great as a pope scorned!
As for the secondary charge that Galileo had elevated human science above
faith as expressed in the Bible, Galileo had long held that there was no real
conflict between science and Scripture if Scripture were properly
interpreted. As early as 1613 in a letter to a friend he wrote that the
greatest error people made was to look upon Scripture as if it made scientific
claims. This happened only when they treated the words of the Bible as
literal descriptions of the natural order. Scripture’s words, he believed,
were indeed inspired by the Holy Spirit; their purpose was to bring people
closer to God and to an understanding of life’s “higher mysteries.” But nature
itself was also a sign of God’s handiwork, and it was a function of the human
intellect, a gift from God, to unravel nature’s secrets. When Scripture
literally understood seems to contradict what the senses tell us, then, to
quote Galileo, it is “the task of wise interpreters to find true meanings of
scriptural passages that will agree with the evidence of sense experience.”
Specifically, the role of the biblical interpreter is to get behind the
literal words and see how, to quote Galileo again, they contribute to “the
primary purpose of Holy Writ” which is “to worship God and save souls.”
In this regard, Galileo was returning to an earlier view of biblical
interpretation held by St. Augustine and a third century church father
named Origin. Both men questioned the literal understandings of Scripture.
Both argued that much of Scripture made sense when its passages were
interpreted spiritually as allegory. In fact in a later letter (1631)
defending his interpretation of Scripture Galileo invoked the name and
influence of St. Augustine for support. Yet Galileo was tried before the
Inquisition for contravening what at the time was taught by the church
concerning the stability and non-movement of the earth. The irony in all this,
of course, is that today the Roman Catholic Church as well as all mainline
Protestant denominations would take their stand with the scientist from
Florence and not the 17th century church to which Galileo always remained a
loyal son.
Now Darwin! As a scientific description of life advancing from simpler to
more complex forms over a very long period of time evolution is true
and biblical creationism is false. Natural selection with its emphasis on
necessity and chance mutations is a naturalistic description of the laws by
which evolution works. I use the word naturalistic here because that
is what the scientific method is. It’s a naturalistic description of what
takes place in the natural order and how the events of that order are linked
causally and in other ways.
Difficulty with this understanding arises when scientists, in this case some
evolutionary biologists, become metaphysicians and claim that science is the
“arbiter of all knowledge,” in other words, that there is “nothing known
beyond what science delivers.” Those who make this claim commit two basic
logical but related fallacies. First they beg the question by positing as a
self-evident truth the unproved assumption that “science is the arbiter of all
knowledge.” Second, they fall into the trap of reductionism. That is, they
selectively focus on a single description — in this instance the
naturalistic account of evolution — change the description into an
explanation and treat it as if it were the total explanation of the
evolutionary process. With its claims of exclusivity and its rejection of
possible, even compatible explanations, the naturalistic account of evolution
moves from its proper place in the realm of science to the realm of
philosophical assertion. The assertion is that only scientific or
naturalistic explanations are true, an assertion which in itself is beyond the
scientific canons of proof; for there is no way such an assertion can be
experimentally validated.
Robert Pennock, the philosopher of science, emphasizes a similar point. While
acknowledging that “all scientific explanations [by definition] are
naturalistic,” he makes it clear that it does not follow from this that “all
correct explanations are naturalistic.” It does not follow, for
example, that an “appeal to God” as the Creative and Sustaining Reality acting
behind and within the evolutionary process is “ruled out.” Quite the
contrary! The belief that “God is that without which there would be no
evolution at all” is in no way logically incompatible with the
naturalistic interpretations of science.
What is required, then, is a rethinking of both evolution and theology.
First, evolution. Martin Nowak, director of the Program for
Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, argues that cooperation, alongside mutation
and natural selection, must be thought of as one of the three “principles of
evolution.” From single-celled protozoa to genes to bees to vampire bats to
dolphins to chimpanzees to humans, cooperation, what some have called
“reciprocal altruism,” both within species and with other species living in a
given neighborhood appears to be necessary for species survival. More than
that, for some reflecting on this fact, it seems to provide a sign of an overall
direction embedded within evolution itself. Linking cooperation with
mutation and natural selection Nowak states that “evolution describes the
fundamental laws of nature according to which God chose to unfold life.”
Second, theology. What does such a view say about how God
relates to evolution? For one thing, it demands that we recognize that God
initiates and sustains in existence the evolutionary process while stitching
into its fabric what Robert Wright has called the “algorithm of natural
selection,” including among living beings the drive toward cooperation and the
possibilities of the diverse experimentation that chance offers. This implies
that the God pictured here is no divine puppeteer. It implies a voluntarily
self-limiting but still an omnipresent God. It implies a continually creating
God who nevertheless does not determine every single happening. As such, it
implies a God who sets the boundary conditions in which events occur, allows
for measures of self-adaptation and self-organization to exist in the created
order and is unafraid of novelty. But this is no watchmaker God of 18th
century deism who sets the universe in motion and then ignores it. Rather it
is a God who continues to create and sustain the networks of interaction that
make up the natural order; a God who in this process continues to create
beings with self-determining powers of their own; a God who continues to reach
out and communicate meaning and direction to people in the depths of their
experiences; a God who continues to undergird the long, slow process of
evolution in its struggle toward its goal of increased cooperation and deeper
harmonious relationships; and a God who continues to trust in that unending
and marvelous experiment called creation.
