2

Systematic theology is often critiqued as being a totalizing discourse, one in which anything inconvenient, heterodox, or experiential is flattened out under its almighty sweep. But evolutionary theory has also been a totalizing discourse, ironing out all the mystery of life in a kind of anti-theology and anti-teleology—what Tim Ingold, later in this volume, calls “evolution in a major key.”[1] Both theology and science can be modified and enlivened by types of wisdom which also enhance the conversation between them. Some of this anti-theology is explained by Paul Nelson, who argues that for Charles Darwin and subsequent evolutionary writers, “evolution” is contrasted with “creation,” often using unexamined assumptions about the way a creator would act. Nelson writes that “The theory of evolution was born in a turbulent embrace with theology, and it has yet to relinquish that embrace.”[2] He contends that for many years biology tried to be metaphysically neutral by ignoring implied metaphysical and theological questions, or its theological side, while nevertheless making covert theological arguments. Theology, meanwhile, attempted to proceed without taking the evolutionary story into account. It is no wonder that dialogue was difficult and always unsatisfactory. The reasons for all of this were and still are complex. While the biblical book of Wisdom presents subtle understandings of God’s workings, biologists harbored unsubtle theologies of God’s action in the world; and theology, sensing that it was now (scientifically) unnecessary because it could be brought to bear on neither the gaps in natural law, nor holistic renditions of nature, avoided nature as a revelatory source.

We are, however, entering a new phase. Anthropologist Agustín Fuentes and others have articulated a new and revised theory of evolution, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), a chastened, much more interesting, and less totalizing set of lenses on our history—somewhere between what Ingold calls the “major and the minor keys.” In this chapter, I hope to show what theology lost in the old dispensation by comparing the book of Wisdom, contemporary theologies of wisdom and nature, and the theology of Jonathan Edwards with the arguments made around Darwin in the mid-twentieth century. I will then look at how the EES might allow for a new conversation between theology and science, and how, in this new dispensation, both can become more open and less totalizing, and be enriched by the borrowing of metaphors, especially with regard to wisdom and freedom.

There are other signs that the evolutionary paradigm is now opening up. We can see this not only because colloquia, workshops, and conferences are taking place in academia, but because some of the deeper questions of evolution are being raised in more popular venues. The New York Times’ philosophical blog “The Stone,” for instance, recently ran a column asking whether the evolutionary process is guided.[3] This would have been unthinkable even ten years ago, unless the author was a creationist of some sort. But author Robert White quotes evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton: “I’m also quite open to the view that there is some kind of ultimate good which is of a religious nature—that we just have to look beyond what the evolutionary theory tells us and accept promptings of what ultimate good is, coming from some other source.”[4] Another example of the easing around this discussion is the recently published revisionist history of Darwin by the erudite generalist polymath A.N. Wilson.[5] Wilson had planned a standard biography, similar to his other volumes on Jesus, Paul, Hitler, Iris Murdoch, and Leo Tolstoy, until he discovered during his research that he thought Darwin was wrong. Not, of course, about evolution itself, but about natural selection; Wilson believes that recent evidence shows that natural selection is a positive, creative force. All of this is cause for thought. It means that the evolutionary paradigm, which has been very rigid until recently, is breaking open.

This has huge repercussions for theology, which never sat easily with a totalizing evolutionary theory’s description of an impersonal algorithm, nor with understanding everything from language to morality as only a particular kind of fitness-enhancing trait. Theology is an exercise in understanding all things as taking their meaning from God’s intentions for and creative force within the cosmos, understanding all things from an anticipatory future, in and through God, and from the story of redemption and creation in Scripture. For Christians, God is always at work, and the work of creation is a part of God’s larger story—or Wisdom. Jesus announces the Kingdom of God, for instance, before that Kingdom is fully realized, because God’s future is what gives meaning to the present. Darwinism works the other way, explaining what has come to be only in terms of past fitness, potentials, and survival mechanisms. In reflecting on evolution in light of this turmoil, I am arguing that where Darwinism seems to put a stranglehold on theological explanations and readings of nature, the EES opens up nature to the possibility of this downward proleptic explanation for many reasons, not the least of which is that evolutionary theory is no longer a discourse interpreted through a single lens.

Wisdom

I want to start with an excerpt from the book of Wisdom. It is one of the most potent descriptions of God’s downward/outward, ongoing action through the tantalizing personified figure of Wisdom:

There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted…all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty…. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of God’s goodness. Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets. For God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom (Wisdom 7:22–28).

This text is helpful for us today as we contemplate the subtlety of nature, both from a faith perspective and through scientific lenses. Wisdom is presence, rather than conventional causality. Wisdom is both a virtue in humans and the reflection of God’s goodness. Wisdom is a road less travelled in the science/systematic theology interface, where Genesis is the preferred text except for Celia Deane-Drummond and other eco-theological sources.[6] Theologians and philosophers from previous generations often turned to nature for evidence of God, seen in the resonances and patterns that repeat throughout creation, and in its startling beauty and sense of depth. One example of this is the work of Jonathan Edwards, who saw nature as the pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.[7] Edwards had many theological faults, but he paid attention.[8] He perceived lesser forms of virtue in the symmetries of plants and even societies, echoing the “True Virtue” of God and what he called God’s “consent, propensity and union of heart to Being.”[9] The petals of a flower, for instance, are inclined toward one another in a lower form of love. Also, creation is pregnant with deep symbolism, which Edwards considered to be the “images or shadows of divine things.”[10] Edwards discussed “true virtue” in his treatise by that name. In this work, he constantly mined the physical and social worlds for examples of beauty that shadowed in some way the moral sphere. Thus, he said:

Yet there is another, inferior, secondary beauty, which is some image of this, and which is not peculiar to spiritual beings, but is found even in inanimate things: which consists in a mutual consent and agreement of different things in form, manner, quantity, and visible end or design, called by various names of regularity, order, uniformity, symmetry, proportion, harmony, etc.[11]

True virtue is indeed also relationally defined as:

the cordial consent or union of being to Being in general. And as has also been observed that frame of mind, whereby it is disposed to relish and be pleased with the view of this, is benevolence or union of heart itself to Being in general, or a universally benevolent frame of mind.[12]

For Edwards, it is love or benevolence that is guiding the expression of life in all its magnificence. That guidance is all-embracing but obviously somewhat subtle:

All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being.[13]

And:

It being evident that the moral world is the end of the rest of the world. The inanimate and unintelligent world being made for the rational and moral world, as much as a house is prepared for the inhabitants.[14]

Edwards understood every level of nature to be interconnected (or entangled) with and dependent on every other. Nature had meaning at every level. Virtue moved it all toward the benevolence of God. Nature shone with the light of benevolence. Edwards’ mystical vision was compatible with the inwardness and depth of nature, with Lady Wisdom’s presence. This vision has survived in some eco-theologies, some phenomenologies of nature, and some Eastern Orthodox understandings of God and nature. The environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz, for instance, argues that there has been a tradition of nature writing in which spirit is discerned in nature, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry.[15]

Evolutionary Arguments Against God

However, this romantic vision did not really survive what Ingold calls “evolution in a major key.”[16] One of the reasons is that evolutionary biologists habitually interpret data as evidence against God, even when the same data was previously viewed as evidence for God’s presence in creation. Nelson claims that Darwin made arguments for evolution, as opposed to creation, on the basis of imperfections in so-called design, but also on the basis of homologies.[17] These sorts of arguments are still made today. Both are theological and thought to undermine the association of nature with God’s presence. Homologies, for instance, defined as the way in which limbs in a variety of animals are obviously similar, were interpreted by scientists as evidence for descent and, at the same time, as evidence against God. Early scientific thinkers assumed that the perfect God, creating as they imagined Genesis said God did, would create with more variety than this homologous pastiche. These scientists believed that a perfectly creative God would make different models of marine animals, land animals, and insects, all perfectly fitting into their habitats. Similarity across all these creatures, they argued, was proof that no God was involved. The somewhat subtle arguments for God made by Jonathan Edwards’s generation had been turned around and were now considered evidence against the possibility of a creator. We can now see how the same data suddenly changed focus and altered its meaning. It is homologies, and similar repeated morphological patterns, that Edwards discerned as evidence of God’s involvement. Edwards saw wisdom in a world that was able to integrate great diversity in simple unities of function. Darwin, and many after him, assumed that a creator would do things quite differently, creating species de novo from completely different building blocks.

Even deeper than the confusion of these arguments was the concept of natural selection itself, with its sometimes stated, and sometimes unstated, assumption that evolution was unguided and impersonal. After Darwin and the ferment of the late nineteenth century, and under the influence of genetics, evolutionary theory hardened. As an example, take the famous 1995 dogmatic phrasing of the US National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT):

The diversity of life on Earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

Theologians and people of faith could not do much with this except carry on without nature in sight, weaving stories that were more and more at odds with the deep grammar of evolution in the major key. Whatever else Wisdom does, she must supervise and guide, however subtly. The words “unsupervised and impersonal” have now been taken out of the biology teachers’ statement, but the spirit of these words often lingers in academic science communities [18] Ingold very helpfully separates the minor and major keys (or lenses) of evolution in his chapter in this volume. He argues that language and assumptions like those of the NABT are not the only ways of seeing the evolutionary process. Deeper, more interior, more fluid lenses, which are more akin to wisdom, are also evident for those who pay attention.[19]

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

What is interesting about the EES is that it tackles evolution through a variety of different lenses. None of them require covert theological arguments and, in fact, they are more open to theological meaning than the old form of Darwinism that insisted natural selection was a creative force. The old totalizing discourse of natural selection alone has given way to a multiplicity of understandings and approaches. The newer understandings allow more subtlety of interaction with theology and more resonance with the book of Wisdom. In this new paradigm, theology can be partially integrated with biology and vice versa. For instance, it is possible, as Marcus Baynes-Rock argues in this volume, for a paleontologist to keep looking for meaning.[20] The multiple lenses of the EES allow for the creativity, concrescence, and interiority that Ingold has marked out as the essence of life and wisdom, as opposed to the objectivity and exteriority of knowledge and evolution in a major key.[21] Some of these lenses include the following:

Parallel Evolution

Parallel evolution or convergence gives us hints that something, as yet hidden, and perhaps subtle, is guiding evolution toward certain similar evolutionary goals. Evolutionary Developmental Biology, often known as Evo Devo, which contrasts the purposeful development of the embryo with evolutionary development, is similarly invoking as yet unseen dimensions of nature. No one is suggesting that Wisdom sits in these gaps, only that the guiding process makes evolution look like a much subtler process, more mind-like, and perhaps infinitely deep. Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris says of evolution that “it is in need of continuous interpretation…it is both riven with ambiguities and, paradoxically, is also rich in implications.”[22] This restores depth to the descriptions of evolution and makes interpretations possible in both directions: as emanating from Wisdom, and simultaneously as the result of natural causes that can be partially observed.

Niche Development

Niche development is a controversial scientific idea, but it is at least a fruitful metaphor for theology. It has a resonance and dynamic quality that allows for becoming and mutuality with the environment. Niche development seems to allow for the interactions of deep ecology and interdependence. For this reason, Fuentes says, “humans construct ecological, technical, and cultural niches that influence the structure of evolutionary landscapes.”[23] A niche is a place into which life flows and where it can exist at different levels, from chemical to social and cultural spheres. The niche precedes the animal, but every niche becomes modified by the life within it: sea water becomes acidic and saltier air changes its composition of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and so on. Niche development allows us to imagine a dynamic interchange between the physical environment—other species, as well as climate and geochemistry and culture—that would make for a model of interdependence. Niche development gives us a much more dynamic evolutionary process, one in which the environment is forming life.[24] As Fuentes notes, “organisms are constructed in development, not simply ‘programmed’ to develop by genes.”[25] He continues: “living things do not evolve to fit into preexisting environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems…evolution is a synergy of multiple processes…they are genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic.”[26] Niche development applies to all plants and animals, including humans, for whom important aspects of our existence do not really exist unless they are named in language. The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has recently described how emotions are constructed. In naming emotions, she argues that we are not simply naming a pre-existing neural pathway, but rather “constructing” the emotion—an affective and rational phenomenon—in speaking. Thus, different cultures will have different emotions available.[27] The “constructed emotion theory” is very similar to niche construction in the way it describes the human agent as the important co-creator of almost all aspects of our growth and experience.

Physics and Chemistry

Life itself is still a mystery that has often been understood as existing on top of inanimate nature, almost in defiance of it. Philip Ball explains how fractal patterns and chaotic systems have guided life and left its imprint in the many exquisite forms of skin patterns, hive architecture, cell divisions, and so on. In his three books, Shapes, Branches, and Flow, Ball explains many of the mysteries of life and the way in which life flows into and out of physics and chemistry. In Shapes, Ball explores the visual similarities between trees, lightning bolts, river tributaries, and many other natural branching patterns. According to Ball, nature will choose “to create at least some complex forms not by laborious piece-by-piece construction but by harnessing some of the organizational and pattern-forming phenomena we see in the nonliving world.”[28] Life does not evolve on top of inanimate nature, but in close embrace with it. This is more consistent with the theological insight from Wisdom (and Edwards) that the same divine imprint can be seen at different levels.

Morality

Then, of course, there is morality. The other way in which evolutionary theory has changed is that it is now recognized that the emotional and cognitive precursors of what is understood as human morality (and wisdom) reach deep into our genetic past. The way in which nature seems predisposed to life, to self-organization; the way in which life embeds within other life, coheres and evolves with other life; and the way in which nature is seemingly guided in a similar way to development, all resonate strongly with Edwards, and with older theological visions of nature.[29] There has recently been a lively debate concerning morality. Do high levels of empathy, sympathy, and even a possible theory of mind in some animals constitute morality? Or is morality in humans something completely different? Most scholars agree that human morality does not work against our basic human nature, but rather modifies and, at times, perfects it.[30] The presence of personality and empathy in other life forms may just be fitness enhancing, but it might also be evidence of Lady Wisdom working at all levels of the evolutionary process. Although nature cannot prove God’s existence, it can be said to be more coherently transparent to God than it once was.

I want to turn now to one of the repercussions of these developments for our understandings of virtue, compassion, altruism, wisdom, and freedom. How did this strange evolutionary process produce human wisdom? Edwards was sure that nature spoke of wisdom already existing in the natural world, and he also assumed that observing nature was a moral process because it was a way of paying attention to God’s benevolence, and therefore of paying attention to God. Interestingly, Ingold makes a similar point today, arguing that “wisdom is about attending to things, both opening up and responding to their presence.”[31] We still do not know what life is, or how it creatively adapts and changes, but the multiplicity of ways of describing and understanding it—the continuous interpretation that Morris speaks of, or the trailing minor key that Ingold describes—allows us to claim the compassion that is deep in the evolutionary tree as hints and shadows of the altruism of which humans are capable. It opens up nature to be again transparent to the signs of divinity in matter.

The EES enables us to reclaim nature as a theological source, observing deep connections between species and individuals, as well as strong interspecies interdependencies, while still affirming the seamless web of evolutionary history. Natural causation is much wider and, at times, more elusive, more like mind—and more interior—than previously thought. Wisdom is a complex mix of symbolic language ability, consciousness, and sensitivity to others and the divine. It comes out of a profound sense of self, as well as a sense of our interrelatedness. In ideal circumstances, humans might be said to be free (and I am assuming in this context that one meaning of freedom is as a correlate of wisdom) in part because our consciousness allows us to see into the past and the future, and because we can withdraw from the sensory into ourselves for reflection. Freedom is paradoxically correlated with the ability to do the right thing naturally. All these capacities, hormonal inheritance, and neural circuits have deep evolutionary roots, even if they are not fully represented in any other animal. Bacteria, for instance, have both interoceptive and exteroceptive capacities. The existence and development of serotonin and oxytocin can be understood as the lower reaches of Wisdom, promoting prosocial and cooperative behavior in lower animals and anticipating higher forms, even as they can also incidentally be understood as compatible with life, fitness, and fertility.[32]

If we are theists, however, then it is increasingly reasonable to say that one of our niches is the divine. As Celia Deane-Drummond says, “eventually, the capacity for revelation, for direct relationship with God, opens up a new social world, one where God features human morality in self-aware humans.”[33] The EES has extended the understanding of “niche” to the social and cultural niches of the human. It makes sense to see the social and cultural space of the human, together with language, consciousness, and deep compassion, as the scaffolding which enables human consciousness to enter the divine niche—the divine milieu. Again, some evolutionary theorists have posited that belief in God is a quaint accident of our cognitive development which we can now overthrow. Others recognize that belief in God and our conviction that we interact with this God was what made us human.[34] This would mean that the God/human interaction is one that allows the freedom and wisdom of God to be forming the human more than any other animal, in the same way that water is forming of the whale, and air is part-creator of the wing. However, although Wisdom is our niche it is not our possession; Divine Wisdom is not a part of nature. Humans mark a transition to a niche that combines heaven and earth and warrants the transgressive naming of the human as Imago Dei. At the same time, the “God niche” is like any other human niche because it requires a human constructive element. Humans must name God and be a part of communities that name God for God to be real for us. We are not constructing God, but language remains the co-creative medium whereby any niche becomes accessible to us.

It is possible, then, to borrow the metaphors of the EES, especially that of the niche, to show why it makes sense to see lower forms of love and virtue at all levels of the evolutionary tree. In other animals and plants, it shows the imprint of the creator. In humans, there is a genuine, direct influence of the creator on the creature, the God-niche-inhabitor. Scripture, churches, prayers, and rituals are all a testimony to the aspirations of the God ape, to speak with God and be spoken to, and finally to embrace God in the flesh as Word. But after the emergence of the human, all animals inhabit the God-niche through the human, as well as through nature. For animals and plants, this is at one and the same time terrible, transgressive, and also potentially healing, especially in the God/human Christ who is the parallel of wisdom. If we are in the niche of Wisdom, then by interaction with God we take on the characteristics of God. One understanding of both wisdom and freedom is the ability to act virtuously, almost naturally. In terms of our understanding of the human brain, it is the training of the fast unconscious or preconscious aspects of our brains to the higher purposes and values that might be inculcated by language, imitation, liturgy, and moral communities—or the outworking of love. This can be seen as the creation of freedom in the niche of the community of saints and God. The corporate dimensions of human freedom are revealed.

Conclusion

To summarize, I started by showing that evolutionary theory is in ferment. Where it was once a totalizing theory, it is now more open, with many invitations to interact with other disciplines, especially theology. I went back in time to show how nature was once understood as a window to the divine, a source of revelation and meaning, and how this understanding changed with Darwin and Neo-Darwinism. I then made some tentative steps towards a cross-fertilization between theology and science; science can be plumbed for metaphors, especially that of the niche, which fund imaginative theological explorations of wisdom and freedom. Theology is changed too, and becomes less totalizing itself, as it learns to pay attention to nature as a theological source.

NICOLA HOGGARD CREEGAN is a theologian and co-director of New Zealand Christians in Science/Te Kāhui Whakapono ki Nga Kaipūtaiao o Te Motu. She is an adjunct professor at St. John’s Anglican College in Auckland, New Zealand. Hoggard Creegan is the author of Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2013). She participated in the Templeton-funded Human Distinctiveness Summer Seminar program at the University of Notre Dame in 2015–16. 

 References

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