I had begun to write a post on evangelism, and part of it was going to be on how Christians from more traditional/Bible belt areas often fixate on the creation vs. evolution, and whether that was a critical component for helping more people know God's truth and decide to follow Him, or something that was best left until after people already saw scripture as an authority.
After I'd already written a good deal, I was listening to a podcast describing the development of humanity from the perspective of what we might call an "optimistic atheist." It occurred to me, as it often does here in Taiwan, that to most of the world, the worldview that evangelical believers and those raised in that subculture take for granted, is utterly marginal and not immediately easy to follow. We find ourselves talking at cross-purposes, with utterly different priorities, and not knowing how to get them to the point where they have lots of blanks that we can enthusiastically fill in with the answers we learned at church over the years.
So here I want first to look at evolution and how it forms a critical segment of the weltanschauung, the comprehensive worldview (a person's individual way of looking at the world and life and their place in it) of the modern secular world. I'll then explain why, although there are "theistic evolutionists" who believe God used evolution to get things to the state we see them now, I am not one of them, and I find evolution in the broad sense of the theory to be an impossible explanation of reality, though I also wouldn't introduce that debate as an evangelistic tool except in really specific and limited situations. Here we go!
1. The Tenants vs. the Landlord
Let us think of the modern scientific movement in this way: It is like someone who woke up one day in a huge house with multiple wings and many tenants, suddenly realizing it's a filthy wreck but could be otherwise, and set about putting everything in order and recruiting other people to help. First came the great task of figuring out categories for things and gathering some cleaning supplies, and then once the first few big rooms were swept and sorted (gradually attracting pleased and impressed tenants who didn't know the house could look so nice), there was the adventure of digging into dark closets and going into attics and finding all kinds of interesting bits of furniture and further impressing everyone by getting the lights to turn on and cleaning the moldy vents that were giving everyone the sniffles.
Christians are like people living in that same house who have received notice from the landlord that the foundation is compromised and the whole thing is going to be demolished, and that having violated the original rental agreement we are in fact now all illegal squatters. As the landlord is a generous man, however, he explains that if we are willing to sign an updated contract in good faith, sight unseen, we'll receive rooms in the new development that's taking its place. In the mean time, we don't know how much longer we'll need to live in this old house, so there's some value in keeping it decent until we move. Admittedly too, due to the efforts of the cleaners, it's a much more comfortable place than it had been before the cleaning revolution started. But in the grand scheme of things the house itself is not quite so urgent a priority as securing a spot in the new one that will take its place. The thoughts of these people, then, are much more concerned with the Landlord and the state of their agreement with him than with efforts to renovate new wings of the current house. They frequently neglect the house exploration projects, are lackluster in their praise of new renovation developments, and try to persuade more people to sign the new contract with the landlord.
But if you had found great meaning and joy in taking messy rooms and leaving them well-ordered and clean, had your imagination seized by the adventure of exploring the high attics and mysterious cellars of this house, and yet you found people kept refusing to help you on the basis of this landlord no one has actually seen, in your mind the task in front of you easily takes precedence over this hypothetical landlord, or whether a so-called demolition is impending or not. Increasingly, you will have a vested interest in convincing as many people as possible that there is no landlord, therefore the house must be kept clean and the explorations must continue because we are not illegal squatters but in fact the owners of the house who can make it into a palace if everyone can work together long enough. Perhaps even the foundations, which have shown signs of instability, can one day be repaired, once the deepest basements have been explored and cleared. But that would require everyone's help, and the more people who sign the new contract and give up on the house projects, the less resources they have for their work, the fewer willing hands.
Many residents find this convincing; it's hard to argue against investing more in this increasingly comfortable and impressive living space on the basis of an unseen landlord who apparently wants to tear the place down, and why should the legality of an outdated rental agreement take precedence over the reality of lots of people currently occupying the space? Their belief shifts from the priority of trusting the Landlord to the priority of working on the house as it is. And surely, if there is indeed a Landlord, he could only agree that they've done such a good job with the place that they don't need his promises of a better home to replace it.
(Indeed, some of them argue persuasively, if there is a Landlord, perhaps this was his real goal to begin with? An imaginary threat of demolition and imaginary motivation of a idealistic new home, all to get people to stop slacking, rise up together, and turn this house into a palatial estate that needs no replacement?)
2. Evolution as Narrative
Scientists, and perhaps even more so science groupies, the apologeticists of scientism who tolerate no doubts regarding its salvific power for humankind, don't like it when you use "belief" with regards to theories. Evolution is considered a theory, or a sort of meta-theory, which isn't seriously questioned by most scientists. (that fact is considered the end of the argument for people who think truth is determined by popular vote). For interested parties, problems with evolution as the best explanation of our planet teeming with life (while having not yet found a single alien microbe or bacterium anywhere else) are dismissed as "gaps" which subsequent information will fill. This is not really how science is supposed to work, but so long as it's humans who do science, story will reign supreme.
The idea of Story is important here because evolution is less a theory than a kind of scientific narrative; the story of how the biological world we see came to be, which takes the puzzle pieces obtainable by scientific research and puts them together in a coherent way. From early days (or at least since the days of Cuvier and the French Revolution), the rigor of the scientific endeavor has been accompanied by growing public interest in the "adventure of science" in figuring out the world; exploring the mysterious, beautiful, and dangerous house into which we find ourselves born as tenants. (I mention the French because they caught the science bug early and strongly; French authors Victor Hugo and especially Jules Verne, one of my favorite authors in middle school, wrote enthusiastically about the prospects of science to bring light to darkened humanity. Their well-written sentiments seem beautifully naive after the events of the 20th century)
This public interest which took place alongside the secularization of Europe (for interrelated reasons much too complicated to explore in depth here) came at the right time: the Bible presents a powerful and compelling narrative which explains the existence of the world and people, why people act as they do, and provides hope in suffering grounded in a higher and better reality than that which we see around us. As this narrative was displaced, a new one was needed. In an age where the divine right of kings was viewed with increasing cynicism and the idea of a free citizenry was developing, in opposition to a heavenly monarch who sent out orders via an earthly religious hierarchy arose the idea of man as free from divine fiat as well, self-existent and self-justifying. A new model for human history thus emerged--not a repeating vicious cycle where hope was in God and not temporal pleasures, but of steady advancement and self-ascension, from primitive savagery to enlightened civilization and then out to the stars.
Evolution, the idea that things can go from simple to complicated on their own through accumulated tiny changes, given enough time, and that they have in fact done so, is the absolutely critical component to this narrative. Without evolution, there is no explanation for the existence of life except "God did it," which takes us right back to God as Sovereign and humans as His subjects, a worldview modern people have been programmed to think of as ridiculous and impossible. With evolution, there is an explanation which can dispense with the necessity of God and thus free humanity to be their own saviors, not beholden to a Divine monarch or His laws, or (importantly) the depredations of those humans who claim to speak for him.
In my own discussions with atheists and some debates over evolution, this came out clearly. Ideas put forth by Creationists or Intelligent Design advocates like irreducible complexity (the observation that some biological systems could not have evolved step by step because they are useless until all the parts are working together) are resisted, at the end, because they simply must not be correct, because evolution must be true, because it is the only explanation secular science has come to consensus on that doesn't invoke "God did it." (This is the logical fallacy called "Begging the Question" - when your argument's premise assumes its conclusion. With neither the existence or non-existence of God able to be proved objectively (without requiring faith), both theists and atheists do this all the time)
So the compelling narrative of evolution, with its spoon-spork-fork fossil displays, with its colorful and almost 100% imaginary illustrations of fish crawling up onto land and cavemen getting a clue, all rests on the claim that somehow all the life we see happened by accident, by the slightest chance (in fact an impossibly small chance, except that we can see it did happen, thus it must be possible), but having emerged within it, and woken up to realize we are here, the best we can do is try to live according to the better angels of our natures, a phrase which makes less and less sense the more you think about it.
In this narrative scientists are our new pioneers, the explorers of this strange world where there is no divine revelation to grant truth to us or demand obedience from us, just very complicated chemical reactions suddenly aware that we are clinging to a tiny rock in the vast universe, the authors of our own destiny, or destruction.
Or... rather... they were. That was the prevailing narrative of the 19th and 20th centuries, one so initially impressive and conclusive that much of the Church was carried away by it too. But with the chaotic events of the 21st century, and more rapidly with each passing year, the story of man's self-ascension from primitive savagery to the stars, the narrative of the modern age, is collapsing all around us.
3. Revenge of the Gaps
When the gospel went out into a pre-modern world, people saw evidence for God in everything they did not understand, what is now called the "god of the gaps" argument. Given that there was an existing narrative to explain things which seem impossible or unknowably mysterious ("God did it" was an entirely respectable and mainstream answer at that time), it seemed reasonable, and indeed, appropriately faithful and obedient, to settle for that explanation and not push further. Also, pushing further required time and resources (and curiosity) that most people simply didn't have, and practically speaking there were not many useful ways to share anything you learned with people outside your immediate kinship group (except by popular story and myth, which is exactly how people did it) so the collective body of shared real knowledge about the world accumulated very slowly.
To talk about science or theology or anything else, it's good to first recognize that really ignorance is a central and enduring component of the human condition; not only do we exist in a state of mostly not knowing things (part of how your brain keeps you sane in our modern, information-saturated world is actually by not noticing as much as it can), we never even know how much we don't know. An ignorance-based argument for God, to someone who believes the triumph of humanity will not be found in faith but in the war against ignorance, sounds very similar to saying "Ignorance is God."
This atheist sums up what many atheists think about the god of the gaps idea fairly articulately, and also is a great example of how most secular thinkers feel the extraordinary burden of proof is on anyone who finds God as the answer, instead of the other way around, something I'll briefly address in part 5.
God is not a gap-god. My belief in Him does not hide in those parts of reality not yet explained, but flows out from what I do understand; that "I am a great sinner, and He is a great Savior." (John Newton)
But for those scientists who saw God as getting "smaller and smaller" as the guy in the video said, just as those gaps and potholes seemed all but filled in and smoothed over, as modern man seemed capable of reaching earthly paradise himself, via science--suddenly we had world wars. Massive, globe-spanning conflicts, where science produced weapons more destructive than anyone had ever imagined. Now in the 21st century, after nearly two decades of terror attacks, social media, and the rise of "privilege" and shame mentality, deep fissures are widening in all that smooth, gapless surface.
Post-modernism had eroded the mortar with which modernism had been constructing a new Tower of Babel, and having lost a uniting cultural narrative, science began to fracture as well. Now, with identity politics and neo-tribalism on the rise, those shiny bricks meant for a tower to heaven based on universal scientific principles are being fought over by competing factions who have no concept of the common good; post-modernism took away "the good", and now post-postmodernism is rapidly taking away "the common."
Belief is coming back in a big way; the Church had best be ready for that challenge, and not try to fight yesterday's modernist battles: in 2018, we haven't been back to the moon in over 45 years, but we have Louis Vuitton hiring shamans to keep their shows rain-free. (Yes really)
4. Distinguishing Science from Sciencism
To explain why evolution can be rejected without throwing out science altogether requires our look above at the secular perspective on human existence, because it's important to separate the process of "doing science" and the secular meta-narrative which tries to borrow the legitimacy of the scientific method as a trustworthy authority, just as a Christian narrative of history is based on the legitimacy of the authority of scripture. When the proponents of sciencism want to attack the Church and the societal legitimacy of belief in God, they sometimes do so by trying to sever the link between the Bible and what Christians believe now, usually by citing particularly violent or disturbing passages from the Old Testament out of context, and asking if we believe we're supposed to do that now.
But turnabout is fair play, so we can also sever the link between the scientific method and "hard science" and a narrative which borrows its authority and rigor but relies on imagination, crowd-think, and the insistence of a god-less explanation for reality. Science is a great way of discovering facts about the physical reality of the universe, like new puzzle pieces, but it doesn't follow that a particular narrative, a particular arranging of the puzzle, is right simply due to the discovery of these new pieces.
Sciencism tells you evolution means there is no need for God in explaining reality. When you bring up problems in evolution, they laugh and show you cool pictures of researchers using high tech equipment to measure things, and professional scientific conventions, and the space shuttle, and ream upon ream of peer-reviewed papers citing each other. (And the problems with the peer-review process are an increasingly open topic, though it's best to educate yourself on that before trying to wade into that debate) What you will be told, over and over, is that evolution is the established scientific consensus. There are no competing theories. (And if there ever are later, it won't be "God did it")
What I have tried to explain above in this post, is why that is. The grand secular narrative of how our world came to be, absolutely requires evolution. It fits the puzzle pieces together in a way that can be easily understood, and changes in animals over short-time frames (like the infamous white/black pepper moth example) can be observed as scientific fact. Humans being wired for pattern-recognition, it was inevitable that someone would extrapolate from the small changes we can see into a tree of life from the simplest forms of life up to us.
So I believe in science, in the sense that I accept the legitimacy of all the puzzle pieces discovered when science is done correctly, allowing time for self-corrections. When science says that at no point has water been observed being turned instantaneously into wine in a laboratory setting, it is affirming what we knew all along, that Christ performed a miracle. Science is in fact one of the greatest affirmations of biblical truth, because it objectively proves the world that the Bible describes, one in which things proceed as usual and people are brave and cowardly and generous and selfish, and then sometimes God intervenes and people are appropriately awestruck, which is precisely the world we see around us today. (It is atheists who must close their eyes to every miraculous recovery, every unbelievably-timed coincidence, etc. and insist they are each and every one frauds or simply coincidences, or else construct theories more elaborate than simply admitting God is there and sometimes chooses to intervene in the natural order of things)
What I don't believe, is the prevailing god-less narrative which insists the picture it paints is the only way the pieces fit together. That's simply not true, and when astute but unbelieving scientists try to lend their scientific prestige to the god-less narrative, they tend to wander onto shaky ground almost immediately. (One thinks of the late Stephen Hawking venturing outside astrophysics to make silly philosophical or theological-level pronouncements, as if his black hole theories entitled him to do so)
5. "Extraordinary Claims"
Evolution, from the standpoint of that narrative, cannot be untrue, or else "God did it." That is one reason you probably won't make much progress trying to debate it, and why I'd say its definitely best avoided as part of evangelistic strategy. It's almost impossible to make the argument from the theistic side without begging the question too, and you're trying to argue towards a conclusion they won't accept without first accepting your premise. And that argument isn't going to help them accept your premise. Sharing the love of Christ and inviting people to participate in a life lived joyfully in His presence will go much farther. When people have believed in God and recognized the truth of scripture, that's a good time to look at Genesis 1 again.
All that being said, like Keynesian economy theory, despite everyone granting it prestige status, the theory of evolution really does have some fundamental problems, fundamental enough that it will almost certainly replaced by something more interesting and impressive within the next couple of decades.
I mentioned irreducible complexity above; there is a youtube video of Richard Dawkins attempting to explain how an eye, often cited as an example of a thing that wouldn't be helpful without all its working parts, isn't irreducibly complex if we just think of something that has 1% of a human or hawk eye's capabilities, then the next step is 2%, and so on. The problem with this argument is that it's biologically meaningless. Yes, if the functionality of an eye were abstract, we could use his approach, but an eye is a very concrete thing. That functionality needs certain parts to be there, and they can't disappear in the next generation but need to stay, and have mutations which add to their usefulness and do not detract from it, and the animals with the lucky mutations have to survive, etc. Either that's simply impossible, and the puzzle pieces have been massaged into orientations that don't make any sense, or there is no God and that's the best explanation we can come up with. If it is, I choose to believe in God, who happens to answer some of my prayers too.
There are lots of good resources out there pointing out fatal problems with evolution as an explanation, and even as the scientific community mostly rolls along not troubled by the objections of some theists, evolution theory as traditionally explained is suffering death from a thousand cuts, not only from theists but from within the secular scientific community, and creative new twists on the idea are popping up, as one would expect. What you can be sure of is that as we slowly understand more about our universe, those new puzzle pieces will be fit into the pre-existing secular meta-narrative, whether to expand it or to replace pieces who were too obviously massaged into the wrong positions.
Here I just want to give my own short-cut answer whenever evolution comes up: the bat.
 |
| Picture a little tree mouse. Now picture it halfway to this, trying to run around. |
You can't get to a bat via evolution. A flying squirrel, sure--the skin flaps for gliding make sense and could be increasingly helpful as they developed. But a bat's wings aren't skin flaps, those are its hands. Imagine countless generations of tree-dwelling mousy creatures, with fingers unhelpfully getting longer and longer. Maybe at first it's not bad, they can cling to bark better or something. But there's a point where flight is still far off, but with ridiculously elongated fingers the poor things can't maneuver around, somehow surviving and still doubling down on that increasingly unhelpful trait, because one day they're going to be wings? Evolution isn't working through unhelpful mutations toward specific goals, unless we go with theistic/guided evolution. (And, are there fossils of these poor creatures? Nope, only tree rats good at running and bats good at flying?)
Again, if you want to insist that I believe mutated mice that can't get around well are going to survive and thrive and reproduce themselves with even more severe mutations that cripple them even further, all to explain how we got bats without God, then I choose God instead of that ridiculous theory. We already have lots of other reasons to believe in God.
The extraordinary claim, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, is not the existence of God, but that something as impossible as that explanation for the world as we see it. (As I saw someone say recently: 'The claim that seawater will eventually give rise to Manhattan seems sufficiently extraordinary to require extraordinary evidence. So far evolution proponents can't demonstrate that ocean water can produce any life at all, let alone the New York Philharmonic.')
6. Secular Saints: The Real Galileo
So evolution may have unanswerable problems, but it's the best explanation secular science has come up with yet, so naturally it's the story they're sticking to. And that god-less narrative, the attempt by humanity to construct a coherent worldview that begins itself without Creation, saves itself without the Cross, and obtains for itself paradise without Heaven, like all good religions must also have its saints and demigods.
Galileo is one of the greatest in that pantheon; a brilliant mind who was "martyred" by recalcitrant, anti-science religious authorities, being forced to recant, but whose views ultimately triumphed and paved the way for the scientific enlightenment we enjoy today, without witch trials or blasphemy laws. (Unless you express certain political opinions in U.S. academia, or want to make public statements against Islam in Britain; then you'll find these are very much still around)
As it turns out, Galileo's story is not quite so simple. His theory challenged not only the non-phenomenological understanding of scripture of his time, but the consensus of most scholars of his day, without answering some legitimate objections (like parallax); after incurring censure he was still permitted to share it as a theory among others but went further to declare it as the only correct one; he jumped into theological debates on the subject and insulted the Pope; after the inevitable religious trial, he received what was a comparatively light punishment for the day, and was treated with respect.
Of course, today we can still look back at the treatment of Galileo as fundamentally wrong. In 2018, it's hard to imagine a time in which religious authorities in the West wielded the sociopolitical power to say which astronomical theories could or couldn't be published. Once we know the facts, however, Galileo comes across as less of a crucified scientific messiah and more of a gadfly genius who had some facts on his side and exercised poor judgment in his promotion of them.
To top it all off, Galileo was both very right and very wrong about the heliocentric model; it's true the earth orbits the sun and not vice versa, but the sun does move too, orbiting the galactic center, whereas Galileo regarded it as the fixed center of the universe. Ironically, then, he was making the same mistake about the sun as most scholars of his day were making about the earth. As the Catholic Church rather cheekily points out in the linked article above, the prevailing views of the day regarding astronomy were incorrect, but had the Church endorsed Galileo's view, they would have been endorsing a different erroneous view which would later be proven scientifically inaccurate. (I don't suggest they don't have their own bias, but how often have you heard their side of the story presented alongside the secular-saint version?)
It is undeniable that he was a central figure of his age, and his astronomical discoveries were of great value. However even the faithful of secular science caution that he is not quite the pivotal figure in the history of science as what we might call "popular sciencism" would have us believe.
That idea of "popular sciencism" is what's emerging in our post-postmodern world; science is a process we'll always need and will never disappear, but a real understanding and valuing of it is diminishing; sciencism is a subculture, a faction, almost a stance. Post-postmodernism, as I wrote last year, means we're no longer good scientific modernists, but they're still around, along with every other group that arises, laid out in parallel in the internet's eternal historical present. Increasingly, however, as political radicalism and societal instability and a scramble to scavenge the bricks of modern science's falling tower ensure, it is science itself that is running afoul of the counter-narrative.
Conclusion:
This is a rather long post, so let's see where we've been by way of summing up:
1. Evolution is the biological component of the secular metanarrative of How Things Came to Be, so in general people who don't already have faith in God aren't going to be persuaded out of it any more than Noah could be persuaded out of his ark. (Where else would he go?)
2. At the same time, evolution has serious problems and we do have a valid alternative explanation (the historically mainstream one, in fact), so believers need not feel compelled to accept that particular component of the world's counternarrative to the biblical explanation.
And now what I hope Christians can do, is recognize that this counternarrative exists, and is the underlying story of the modern world, the mythos which underlies a secular worldview.
Whole generations of Christian schoolchildren swallowed it in its entirety without realizing it, and grew up not recognizing its mutual exclusivity to the biblical account. Then upon reaching college they found that despite having perhaps made professions of faith at a particular point, they had already been standing on the secular boat for years, they just hadn't thrown off the moorings and let the winds of the world fill their sails and take them to places more fun and interesting than their church youth group. Many chose to do so; some repented later in life.
Note that this is not a conspiracy. We know from scripture we have a spiritual enemy who hates the Church, opposes the gospel, and controls the power systems of this world, and he is certainly driving the counter-biblical-narrative in every interesting new form it takes. But from the human standpoint, it's just the story the world has come to believe over the past two centuries, of how the world came to be. We who reject it are now the marginalized minority, but that shouldn't trouble us as long as we recognize the situation for what it is.
What should trouble us is the Church remaining blind to the idea of a parallel narrative, and thus having each generation of believers unconsciously absorbing it, or else hiding from it yet trying to take the gospel into a world without understanding the worldview of those they are trying to reach.
(And exactly how are we supposed to do it, then? I don't have all the answers, but some thoughts are coming in a future post. Thanks for reading, stay tuned!)
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