Been reading and pondering and arguing a bit on the web regarding the steady shift among Christians toward either theistic evolution or some form of progressive creation. See in particular numerous posts on Jesus Creed regarding evolution. It seems more and more University educated Christians who may have come from fairly Bible centered backgrounds are abandoning not only young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism but even a broad view of Intelligent Design.
For the moment I won’t argue specific details regarding this or that specific element of the ID vs evolution debate, nor debate the meaning of specific phrases in Genesis 1-3, nor the necessary distinction that must be made between creationism and ID. What I will question is the assumption those Christians who make this concession to naturalism may have. That concession is that God used “natural laws” including natural selection as his method of creation. Here’s my main beef:
The “common-sense” reading of the text of scripture posits a Creator-God. Consider that and only that for a moment. We are told that God existed “in the beginning” or even before the beginning. We are told God created the heavens and the earth. We are told He is the “beginning and the end”, implying, at least, He is not bound by time. We are told he will one day destroy the world by fire and bring into existence a New Heaven and a New Earth. If all this is true, then time, space, and the laws of nature in no way are binding on God.
So then, it seems to follow that it is God who created the laws of nature; else, those laws would be higher than God. This seems a fundamental assumption of belief in a creator.
The second thought is this. We are presented in both the biblical text and the long history of Christian theology with a God who works miracles. Again focus on that thought.
This is a second fundamental point of the very definition of God in historic orthodox Christianity. By definition, miracles are events that are out of the ordinary, suspensions of the normal workings of nature. Changing water to wine bypasses the normal frame of time it takes to grow grapes, crush them, package them and allow the process of fermentation to work. The laws of nature as we know them would have to be superseded in the miraculous acts of a God who is above nature. Healing of a man who is blind or lame from birth is a bypassing of the normal path to healing, or at least an acceleration of it. Curing someone of leprosy by a touch is a manipulation of reality that goes beyond the laws of nature.
So, the laws of nature are laws which God can supersede at any time. The laws of nature do not bind God in any way in the past, present or future, in the New Testament miracles of Christ, the Old Testament miracles of the Exodus, nor in the early chapters of Genesis. Again this is a fundamental implication of the very concept of a “creator-God”.
Put the two ideas together:
If this picture of a creator-God is accepted as a definition of the very term “God”, then to try to explain either a miracle or the acts of creation in terms of natural laws, to try to uncover “how God did it” in terms of natural law alone, is to miss the point entirely. He would obviously not need to follow the laws of nature to create the laws of nature. To reduce what is by definition the “miraculous” to a set of natural causes and effects is to deny the very concept of the miraculous. And to say that the miraculous cannot take place is to say that God is not God.
The very starting point of Christian faith, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen”, is a God who is outside of nature, who created nature, who is not bound by nature and who can at will supersede the laws of nature. This, it has always seemed to me, is the starting assumption of Christianity. God exists and created ALL THINGS.
But the starting assumption of naturalistic science is the assumption that all things must be explained according to natural causes and only natural causes. Christians who accept this definition of science either by choice or simply as a result of absorbing unexamined assumptions, who use naturalism to explain “how God created” seem to saw off the branch on which they sit as professed Christians. The initial tenet of theism, the most foundational of all theological truths is seemingly set aside by those who accept the full naturalistic explanation of origins and try to wrap Christianity around it. At best, God is somehow behind the big bang, but every other event in the history of the universe is assumed to be fully explainable by natural processes alone.
There is a caveat in that some suggest God is active in the laws of nature, so the supernatural is not completely dismissed, but the overall effect is still to insist that all we see can be explained in reference to natural law. Certainly, it may be theoretically possible that God “used” the mechanism of natural selection to “create”, but it seems to me that such a view also imprisons God in the straight-jacket of “natural law”. Did God need to use natural processes? The answer should clearly be “no”. The follow up is “why then have you chosen to believe He did use only natural processes in reference to origins?”
The answer usually comes down to something like, “because to practice science requires that we limit ourselves to what can be observed in nature” or some other response that fails to answer the theological question. They have become beholden to the details and arguments of a “science” that is naturalistic by definition and a definition of science 180 degrees in opposition to the supernatural.
And here we reach an impasse. Since science is almost always defined in the last 50-150 years as 1) the study of natural phenomena, 2) explained in terms of natural law; it is asserted that no explanations that appeal to something other than natural law can be permitted in the sacred sphere of what is called “science”. Hence, ID, which is distinct from creationism precisely because it uses religious dogma neither as a starting point, a source of evidence nor even a necessary conclusion, suggests simply that natural law is insufficient to explain certain phenomena, therefore even Christian supporters of neo-Darwinian notions emphatically declare that ID is not science, or worse ID is merely “god of the gaps” creationism.
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One commonly stated reason for the closed definition of science is the assertion that once one appeals to something beyond nature as an explanation, that explanation is not falsifiable because no one can test whether the supernatural was in fact the cause. Such an allowance for something outside of nature would supposedly destroy science by appealing to things not testable by science.
This is a bit of a straw man, because the idea that an omnipotent God can supersede natural law in no way denies that natural law exists. Exceptions do not invalidate a rule, particularly when it was the One who authored the rule who effects the exception. Early scientists, most of whom were theists, believed in an orderly universe governed by natural law precisely because they believed that a God created the universe with purpose, order and that such a universe could be studied. They founded much of what we now call science by “thinking God’s thoughts after Him”. Miraculous events on rare occasions may supersede natural laws as exceptions, but in no way obliterate them.
By the same token, it is often theists themselves who debunk superstitions and false claims of the miraculous. That which can be explained by trickery or slight of hand is willingly dismissed by the theist and exposed precisely because the theist believes the universe was created by an intelligence. The theist only accepts as "miracle" that which cannot be explained in reference to natural law. In fact, it is the very existence of natural law, “the way things normally work” that gives definition to that which would be considered miraculous. A virgin birth would not be a miracle unless there was a natural law that a virgin birth might supersede.
But does no one see that if the only explanations that can be offered for everything that exists are naturalistic explanations, then the central premise of naturalistic science can itself never be falsified? How does one verify that all things are explainable only in reference to natural law? No matter how reasonable such a premise may seem, one would need something akin to omniscience to verify the claim, and in the case of the science of origins, the events in dispute, events well beyond the reach of recorded history, are beyond the reach of observation.
Now I fully understand how secular scientists who may be atheist or agnostic would insist on purely naturalistic explanations. Such a view is at least logically consistent, even if ultimately unverifiable. Agnostics and atheists say that they see insufficient evidence to believe in a God and thus conclude the universe is best thought of in terms of naturalism. That is consistent.
But is it consistent for those who describe themselves as Christians, who believe that God is the Creator, who apparently accept the first assumption that God created all things, who usually accept the resurrection and often accept the virgin birth as examples of the miraculous, to then turn around and embrace a view that philosophically does not allow God to act outside of natural law or to perform creative miracles in the science of origins?
To do so, seems to me, is not only inconsistent, but serves in practical terms to give up the very first building block of the Christian faith, that there is a God who stands as creator and Lord over all creation. Such a person seems to say he believes in God as creator with one hand, but then he seems to take away all God’s power to miraculously create with the other. God is allowed to be the engineer behind all nature and the author of natural law, but He is bound up within the constraints of the natural law He created once the events are set in motion. It is to profess theism and believe theism completely irrelevant to the study of origins! I suppose deism might be the best synonym for theistic evolution and its various cousins.
I simply cannot accept such a view. If we believe that God can create an entire universe, it is not at all logical to deny that he can work within that universe, to raise Christ from the dead, to turn water to wine, to heal the blind, deaf and lame. Why, if we believe God is big enough to accomplish the big bang, and set billions of stars in motion, would we not believe that at least in theory, he could rain manna from heaven, part the water of the Red Sea? Is the possibility that God might judge humanity by a massive, even global flood and create human beings as unique individuals from the dust of the ground something to be excluded from the faith? How is it in the minds of these Christian advocates of naturalism that the creator God ceased to act as God during the very days of creation?
This is a fundamental question. So many have surrendered the meaning of the initial statement of Genesis, the gospel of John and the Nicene Creed and yet still profess to be Christians. I do not see a cogent, logical reason for such a stance. If one accepts naturalism without qualification, then agnosticism or deism is the logical position, not a wrapping of naturalism in the language of faith.
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