Reconciling God and Evolution

This is a short and interesting article by Prof. Sarah Coakley at Harvard Divinity School. She argues that "the three most profound problems for Christian theism since the advent of Darwinism, so profound as to cause many to see Darwinism as a "defeater" of Christian belief" are:

1. "[T]here is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God's providence to prehuman dimensions of creation and their development."
2. "[T]here is the issue of how God's providence can relate to the specific arena of human freedom and creativity."
3. "[T]here is the problem of evil, the question of why what happens in the first two realms manifests so much destructiveness, suffering, and outright evil, if God is indeed omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent."

Her response, particularly to (1), essentially boils down to this: "God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or "randomness," yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself." * This allows her to conceive of God as ever-intervening (indeed, without whose intervention at every stage the world would simply cease to be), but whose interventions are masked by the order of the universe (which in itself stems from God).

From what little I know, this view is fairly close to the classical theologians of Islam, particularly Imâm Ghazâlî (without the trinitarian interpretations, of course!). Imâm Ghazâlî in no way denies that the world is orderly and is governed by "natural" laws; what he says, though, is that this order is a contingent one that is sustained by God at every moment. I've always thought that this is a pretty neat way to fully and healthily accommodate scientific investigation of the spatiotemporal universe while not losing sight of religious / spiritual insight. (It's certainly a far more nuanced position than either "it's obvious that a tall old man in a white beard made all this" or "it's obvious that we're nothing more than a handy way to help a few large molecules self-replicate"!)

I'm not convinced by her later argument, that recent discoveries showing the importance of cooperation in evolution help build the case for getting evolutionary biologists and theologians talk to each other. I suspect that given the nature of the scientific method, no dialogue between a scientific discipline and a non-scientific discipline can be well founded on the basis of particular scientific explanations. (All it takes is one paper that shows that what we think is cooperation is really just selfish genes, and poof! vanishes your bridgehead.) No, I think true dialogue must depend on two things:

1. The fact that science and theology are both committed to using reason reasonably to discover something about the world—with the caveat that "world" likely means different things to scientists (probably depending on their institutional and disciplinary affiliation!) and theologians.
2. The fact that it is not particular scientific theories or hypotheses that bind scientists together as a community, but the scientific method per se. In other words, if you want to show that sensible science and intelligent religion are not incompatible, then find a way to accommodate the scientific method into your theology (or vice versa, if you prefer).

In case you think faith and reason are irreconcilable and separated by an unbridgeable gap—welcome to theology! Thinkers affiliated to all the major religious traditions I can think of have invested great efforts into thinking rationally about God and the universe and all that jazz, and I think the modern debate is deeply impoverished by our inability and unwillingness to incorporate their ideas into our discourse. For what it's worth, I think there are at least two solid reasons for encouraging a fruitful dialogue of this sort:

1. Like it or not, the scientific method truly has transformed the depth and breadth of our knowledge of the physical world. It is the single best method we have come up with that explains how the world is (or, more precisely, how the world is not). It would be utter folly for serious modern thinkers to ignore these insights when trying to understand our place in the cosmos—particularly when it is the case that many, if not most, earlier thinkers were willing to do the same.
2. Like it or not, the scientific method alone cannot really offer guidance of any sort—emotional, social, moral, spiritual. And while this does not mean that the only alternative has to be a religious worldview, it does mean that our scientific insights must be contextualized within a broader intellectual framework. What these frameworks can be is up to us—whether we pick mechanistic deterministic nihilism or evanescent illusionary idealism or infinitely fruitful pan(en)theism or whatever else floats our boat—but we need something more.

* This is not a rigorous statement as it stands. The article does a better job of explaining why this may be the case, but also acknowledges that this is but one starting point for a deeper philosophical and theological investigation of a problem that, as is currently being debated, really could do with more sophisticated, more inclusive arguments from both sides.