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Once
evolutionary theory had weakened the case for special providential activity in
biological history, and humans no longer clearly occupied a meaningful place in
the scheme of things, the way was open to question if there was evidence for any divine purpose in the cosmos.
According to Paley’s view of the world, God’s concern for the details of
terrestrial life could be made clear by simply opening our eyes to the
marvellous designs within nature, but the eyes of evolution look at the same
data and see no concern or purpose whatsoever. Once again, Richard Dawkins
expresses the situation with characteristic clarity: “The universe we observe
has 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.”
It
is important to remember that while Darwin’s religious convictions would become
increasingly tenuous as he grew older, when writing the Origin he had seen fit to occasionally attribute the processes in
biology to a ‘Creator.’ This creator was not a miracle-working God that would
spontaneously generate a Hippopotamus and the corresponding muddy swamp, but
one who created by specifying laws of development. As he wrote in a letter to
the American botanist Asa Gray: “I am inclined to look at everything as
resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to
the working out of what we may call chance.” Could
God’s purposes in nature be seen within these laws? Gray never became
comfortable with this dual characterisation. The key question is: how powerful
is the chance component? Gray’s concern was that any admission of chance
implied that God’s purposes could be derailed. Interestingly, Darwin argued
against Gray’s position on almost the same grounds; it seemed unacceptable to
him for God to be implicated in the minutiae of life because this would make
God culpable for every evil, whether grievous or trivial.
Daniel
Dennett describes this change from picturing God as a divine artificer to a
divine lawgiver as starting theology down a slippery slope toward
meaninglessness. Reductionist explanations can take a rich body of laws and
unify them into a far simpler set, making God ever more distant from events of
concern to humans. He joins chemist Peter Atkins and some theoretical
cosmologists in predicting that the fundamental constants and laws of nature
which currently seem to require a ‘law-giver,’ will turn out to be neither
truly constant nor given. Instead, nature has found them, by means analogous to the way in which natural
selection finds useful adaptations in biology. Once
again Darwin’s dangerous idea can be deployed to challenge the theist’s
conception of a God who acts.
Evolutionary
thinking can also bolster other challenges to traditional theological arguments
for purpose in the cosmos. If terrestrial life arose by natural means rather
than through special divine action, then it is reasonable to wonder if
intelligent life has arisen elsewhere in the universe too. If so, this would be
hard to reconcile with the claim that human life on Earth is central to God’s
purposes. The mechanism of the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection also
become problematic in a universe where several planets need to be redeemed.
French biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod concluded that evolutionary
science posed the opposite problem since as far as he could see “the universe
was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.” If he
is correct and the existence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens should be attributed to
chance rather than natural laws or divine action, then humans can hardly be
said to be the centre or purpose of the cosmos.
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| Feedback | Contributed by: Adrian Wyard
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