I'd like to propose a possible way of demonstrating that Darwin's theory of evolution not only does not contradict the Bible, it upholds it!
I'll lay my method of reasoning out in this and subsequent "Does Evolution Contradict the Bible?" posts to this blog. In this post I'd like to begin to sketch out my reasoning process and the worldview that goes along with it. Then I'd like to follow up in subsequent posts by going into more detail on each of the steps of reasoning involved.
In discussing my point of view about evolution and religion, I want to be as openhanded as I can. I don't want to "snow" anyone into feeling that they need to agree with a position that is fundamentally incomprehensible to them, or even downright offensive.
So let me be crystal clear right up front: my whole argument depends on analogies. The way I look at things depends on "reasoning by analogy," as I call it. I'm going to try to draw certain analogies between what science teaches us and what the Bible teaches us.
I know a great many people are uncomfortable with analogical reasoning, so let this stand as a fair early warning. If you read any further into this post and those that follow, you are apt to be confronted with ways of looking at things that you may find disturbing ... even if you can't say why they disturb you. One reason they may make you uncomfortable is that there is analogical reasoning going on here, and many people don't care much for that type of reasoning.
Science teaches us that life on earth evolved from primitive, single-celled life forms into a panoply of species, one of which is Homo sapiens: us. This happened over the course of billions of years, as the age of the earth is dated at roughly 4.6 billion years.
Many people who take the Bible seriously and want to read it in as literal a way as possible have trouble with Darwin's theory of evolution because it seems to contradict the creation story in chapter 1 of Genesis. This is the familiar story of how the Lord God created the world and everything in it — including all types of living creatures, culminating in man — in six days. Then God rested on the seventh day.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species and said that all species developed slowly and gradually out of the first forms of life on earth, in response to what we today understand to be genetic mutations. Mutations can be beneficial if they cause some organisms to be better equipped to win the struggle known colloquially as the "survival of the fittest." Natural selection is the name survival of the fittest is more formally called by.
In the last three or four decades, scientists have begun to augment that standard Darwinian story of evolution. They have begun to study two theories that are thought to relate closely to Darwin's: the theory of chaos and the theory of complexity. These two theories provide a way for us to explain the evolution of life on earth as an example of change that happens at the "edge of chaos."
Chaos theory tells us that, in addition to two very familiar types of orderly change, certain systems are capable of undergoing a third type of change: chaos.
Chaotic change happens when a "nonlinear dynamical system," as it is formally called, is following a path or trajectory that leads it to, as a well-known song puts it, "who knows where, who knows where." Orderly systems either never change at all or change in a cyclical, predictable way. For example, on earth day follows night in a regular, orderly fashion. Our day-night cycle is definitely not in thrall to what chaos theorists have called a "strange attractor," one whose eventual destination is "who knows where."
However, the weather on this planet is on such an attractor. The weather on our planet is unpredictable beyond a horizon of a few days into the future, because the weather is fundamentally chaotic. Scientists are wont to say that it is subject to the "butterfly effect": a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.
Here's where my penchant for analogical reasoning enters the picture. I claim that it is a valid analogy to identify chaotic behavior with what theologians and religious believers call "demonic activity."
In a later post, I'll try to better justify this analogy. At that time I'll go into greater detail than I'll go into here. But here, for what it's worth, are some samples of my reasoning.
First of all, let me suggest that there are no chaotic systems in heaven.
Summon up whatever standard images you have of heavenly life (whether we are religious or not). Are there storms? Are there tornadoes? Is there even "weather" as we know it?
True, there is air to breathe. There are perhaps gentle breezes, even fluffy white clouds for harp-plucking angels to recline on. But no storm clouds, no hurricanes, no monsoons. In fact, the weather in heaven never changes!
This tells us, I would suggest, that the strange, chaotic attractor that the weather on earth is in thrall to doesn't exist in heaven.
Another thing that doesn't exist in heaven is heart attacks. A common kind of heart attack here on earth is ventricular fibrillation, and it's always fatal if not reversed by the medical intervention called defibrillation. "V-fib," as it's called for short, is an instance of chaos. Our ordinary, endlessly repeated, regular heartbeat careens off on a strange, chaotic attractor, and then we die. That's definitely not something than can happen in heaven.
So I claim that it makes sense, at least provisionally, to think of chaotic activity as something totally out of place in God's own kingdom. Which suggests that, if you are at all inclined to believe in sin and Satan, it makes sense to think of chaos as satanic or demonic.
OK, I can hear you saying, so what? So what if we can draw some kind of analogy between chaotic behavior and demonic activity? Does such an analogy have any import, any meaning?
In order to answer that question I need to note, first of all, that Judeo-Christian religion has historically looked at certain things that occur here on earth as inspired by Satan. Satan, by whatever name you want to call that personage, has been called "Prince of This World," because he is said to reign here just as God reigns in heaven.
Now, that kind of talk today seems to us old-fashioned, even medieval. Those who are not religious believers will disparage it in exactly those terms, and a lot of those who do have religious faith will also find such talk quaint and outdated. (I count myself in that latter group, by the way.)
So why even bring it up?
I bring it up because I think granting such a notion credence and then drawing the aforementioned analogy between chaos as science studies it and satanic activity as religion envisions it gives us a way to harmonize evolution with the Bible. Along the way, it gives us a way to make sense of what philosophers and theologians call the "problem of evil," also known as the "problem of pain."
Let's look at pain. Significantly, there is no pain involved in the creation story we find in Genesis 1. Nothing in the process by which God created everything over the course of six days entails pain or suffering. God experienced no pain, even if he did see fit to rest on Day 7. Nor did any of his freshly minted creatures suffer in any way whatever.
Not so, though, in the second creation story in the Book of Genesis.
This is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Everything was idyllic for them ... until they were tempted by a serpent to do precisely what God had instructed them not to do. Once they ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God had no choice but to evict them from Paradise, telling Eve that all of her female descendants would accordingly suffer what we today call "labor pains" whenever they do exactly what God later on was going to tell the biblical patriarchs to do: be fruitful and multiply.
So if we read between the lines just a little bit, the second creation story is as fraught with pain as the first is pain-free.
That second creation story introduces Satan (the serpent was the devil in disguise) and sin. Believers in the Judeo-Christian God call the sin of Adam and Eve "original sin" and say that it besmirches the souls of all of us descendants of Adam — with the important exception, if you are a Christian believer, of Jesus and his mother, the Virgin Mary.
Now, if you even begin to go along with my aforementioned analogy between satanic activity as religion talks of it and chaotic change here on earth — a kind of change unknown in heaven — you may be able to see why I think the "edge of chaos" that some scientists speak of is extremely important.
The "edge of chaos" is a poetic way of referring to a fourth type of behavior that dynamical systems can undergo. We have the two types of order, static and cyclical. We have a third type of behavior: chaos. And we have Type IV behavior, as what goes on at the edge of chaos is called.
Type IV behavior happens at the edge of chaos. Systems that exhibit it combine the surprise and unpredictability of chaotic behavior with the graceful stability and dogged persistence of orderly behavior.
Life on earth, as it evolves, is just such a system that exhibits the generation of surprising novelty along with graceful stability and dogged persistence.
To be precise, the earth's biosphere is a nonlinear dynamical system whose behavior — not its fundamental character, its behavior — is Type IV. Because the biosphere's behavior is Type IV, it operates at the edge of chaos and is capable of both graceful stability and unprecedented novelty. If it couldn't generate novelty, new species could never originate. If it didn't exhibit graceful stability, new species could not survive.
Nonlinear dynamical systems that exhibit Type IV behavior are said to be "complex adaptive systems." Their behavior exhibits "complexity," as distinct from "chaos." As such, their behavior is "adaptive" — meaning that a system exhibiting such behavior "evolves" in such a way as to "keep on keeping on," no matter what sorts of threats it faces to its survival.
Think of the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. At that time, reptiles ruled the planet, and our mammalian forebears were but small rodent-like critters. Then something catastrophic happened. We are not totally sure what it was, but it may have been an asteroid impact that kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere that sunlight couldn't get through to keep most plants alive. Many dinosaurs depended on plants for their diet, while others who were meat-eaters ate other plant-eating animals. Result: every last dinosaur starved to death — except for those that had evolved into birds, which survive to this day.
But, let's get back to how the biosphere responded to the chaos that it was presumably thrown into at the time of that initial catastrophe, whatever it was. Complexity theory has it that a system thrown into chaos — a system which engages in Type III behavior — can be capable of restoring itself to the edge of chaos, which is Type IV behavior. As that happens, the system generates new ways galore of keeping itself going. When such a system is a planet's biosphere, those "new ways galore" amount to the advent of new species.
In the wake of the extinction of the dinosaurs there was a rapid burst of speciation, the term scientists use to refer to the origins of species. New mammal species appeared in particular, which led to yet more new species of mammals ... which, many millions of years later, led to us.
The origin of species and the post-catastrophe return out of chaos to the fecund edge of chaos are two ways of describing the same thing. The same system — the earth's biosphere — is capable of either Type III behavior, which is chaos, or Type IV behavior, which is evolution.
Neither type of behavior is found in God's own kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. We are talking about events here on earth. But clearly, God prefers Type IV behavior (evolution) to Type III behavior (chaos). Here is another reason to say that there is a strong analogy between chaos as science talks about it and demonic activity as religion construes it.
But Type III behavior (chaos) is something that any system which is capable of Type IV behavior (evolution) is also capable of. It is as if there is an intrinsic moral dimension to the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems.
Notice that a complex adaptive system's seemingly magical ability to evolve new strategies of survival and thus to find its way back out of catastrophe and chaos does not imply that it has a mind or is capable of making conscious moral choices.
At the same time, we know that evolution has over the millennia generated creatures that do have minds and can make conscious moral decisions, for we ourselves are such creatures.
We also know that the tree whose forbidden fruit Adam and Eve ate of was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Before they ate the fruit, they were like complex adaptive systems as science studies them: unaware of the moral choices they were, willy-nilly, already making. And they experienced no pain ... just there is no reason to think that a biosphere-in-progress which suffers a catastrophe that wipes out its reigning (reptilian) forms of life undergoes any conscious suffering as a result.
Yet that same biosphere eventually produces conscious, morally aware creatures (Homo sapiens) who have definitely eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, who definitely are prone to sin and the blandishments of Satan ... and who definitely undergo suffering and experience pain.
These, then, are the lineaments of my thinking about how the theory of evolution (as augmented by the sciences of chaos and complexity) not only doesn't contradict the Bible, it upholds and reinforces the Bible! I'll have more to say in later entries in this blog ...
