Undeception

My four-year-old was given this worksheet in Sunday School posing the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism for Children. The answer (“God”, duh!) was supposed to be written on the line within the cloud…a shape that my daughter somehow visualized as a sock monkey’s head.

Answer: My ape-like ancestors God

Despite appearances, my daughter was not actually trying to make a statement in favor of common descent; I haven’t even broached that topic with her yet.

But I can’t help dreading some sticky questions coming from her PCA Sunday School teachers if they inferred the same thing I did!

…and why the Church in the East never did.

Listening to most Evangelical first-string leaders, you’d get the impression that apart from an historical Fall of Man that marred the souls of all the descendants of the ones who fell, you’d have no need for Jesus, and Christianity sails right out the window. So much more than inerrancy hangs on the question: original sin and total depravity hang on some sort of historical Fall, don’t they?

Perhaps they do (though not necessarily) — but the massive blind spot we have is that a rather large, ancient, and revered segment of the Christian Church rejected both of those teachings long before science came along and refuted the possibility of an historical first pair of human progenitors. And yet these believers still maintain that the work of Christ in atonement is absolutely necessary for every individual regardless.

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo explains:

The Schism between the West and the East is great indeed, so much so that Protestants rarely ever hear that perspective. These sorts of surprises are why I have begun to love glancing at Christian theology through the lens of the Orthodox.

I just finally got around to reading the post from BioLogos from May 31, “BioLogos and the June 2011 ‘Christianity Today’ Cover Story“. Within it, president Darrel Falk makes note that they’ve had trouble identifying theologians who affirm both the historicity of Adam and Eve and evolution. While the scientific data cannot alone rule anything out, the stance that accepts God’s selecting one man and one woman out of an early population of Homo is something Falk flags as having had little serious theological effort placed into explaining it:

The “Federal Headship” model that accepts the scientific findings while at the same time holding to the historicity of a real first couple has not yet been carefully worked out by theologians. The reason that we haven’t had many articles of that sort is because we haven’t been able to identify theologians who are looking at the question from that perspective. In general, our experience has been that theologians are in one of two camps. Either they work within the framework of a non-historical Adam and Eve or they believe the scientific conclusions will eventually prove to be deeply flawed and humans were not created through an evolutionary process after all.

That divide is something I’ve certainly witnessed, and no doubt it’s used by the latter group to demonstrate the “slippery slope”. And in this case, I think they’re right: most who go all the way to say that so many aspects of Genesis 1 and 2 are not historical or literal have a hard time drawing the line at the historicity of the first pair. The divide comes over how we deal with the NT’s treatment of Adam, who Paul especially seems to use as a key figure in his theology (I would argue that Adam is not any more key to Paul than Melchizedek is to Hebrews, used typologically). In short, it’s not nearly as much about the historicity of Adam and Eve as it is the historicity of the Fall.

Although people like Tim Keller and Denis Alexander will continue to try arguing for a first pair of souled individuals, a position that was assumed by C. S. Lewis and has recently been affirmed by Vatican theologians, my guess is that the next generation of Christians who grow up accepting evolution as a “first language” will never seriously consider it, in the same way that teens growing up today rarely crack open their parents’ books on how to install software or run basic functions of Microsoft Office. Federal headship, like most other models of the Fall, may well be a moribund theological construct.

Falk urges “caution” with the federal headship view of the Fall because there are a number of theological questions that have yet to be teased out satisfactorily. Did God only impart His life-giving spirit to two of them, who promptly turned around and “fell” in a way we might have expected from the rest of their still-animal tribespeople? How did their divinely imparted souls that separated them from their peers and ancestors get passed on to their descendants? How did their fallenness get passed on?

Given questions like these and the available alternative of understanding that the “fallenness” of humanity and its solution in Christ don’t depend on an historical Fall from an historical pair, I’m fairly confident that a denial of the historicity of Adam and Eve will become the dominant paradigm within the next couple of decades.

This prediction will lead to the question, “But what about those who hang onto inerrancy? How will they simply reject the Bible’s teachings about Adam and Eve?” Well, for one thing, I think most Christians (and in honesty, people in general) tolerate enough cognitive dissonance to the effect that this will not invariably be noticed as a conflict with an assumption of evolution. Another factor is the attempt to salvage a semblance of inerrancy by arguing for figurative language and other literary devices to account for Paul’s treatment of Adam and Eve (this was the path I took several years ago). But even more so, I think that the inevitable acceptance of evolution by the younger generations will in fact pull a modified or abandonment inerrancy along with it. As Cliff Martin likes to point out, the Church will accept evolution; it must.

The Created Evolutionist linked me over to an article in December’s Smithsonian Magazine about the important transitional links found between dinosaurs and modern birds. First I’ll give you a sample of the cool information in the article, and then a tiny rant follows:

But there was one important feature that had not been found in dinosaurs, and few experts would feel entirely comfortable asserting that chickadees and triceratops were kin until they had evidence for this missing anatomical link: feathers.

A poor Chinese farmer, Li Yingfang, made one of the greatest fossil finds of all time, in August 1996 in Sihetun village…

Despite the feathers, the skeleton left no doubt that the new species, named Sinosauropteryx, meaning “Chinese lizard wing,” was a dinosaur. It lived around 125 million years ago, based on the dating of radioactive elements in the sediments that encased the fossil. Its integumentary filaments—long, thin structures protruding from its scaly skin—convinced most paleontologists that the animal was the first feathered dinosaur ever unearthed. A dozen dinosaurs with filaments or feathers have since been discovered at that site.

By analyzing specimens from China, paleontologists have filled in gaps in the fossil record and traced the evolutionary relationships among various dinosaurs. The fossils finally have confirmed, to all but a few skeptics, that birds descended from dinosaurs and are the living representatives of a dinosaur lineage called the Maniraptorans.

via Dinosaurs’ Living Descendants.

First off, let me say that such discoveries are certainly exciting. The common descent of dinosaurs and birds makes every bit as much sense as the common descent of monkeys and humans, and it’s fun seeing more pieces fall into place.

I must say, though, that on occasion (and not just in this article) discussion of evolutionary advantages is spoken of in extremely misleading terms. An example from this article, in a discussion on the origin of feathers: “Originally, single filaments may well have been for display.”

No, the filament was not “for” anything: the question they’re really trying to answer is not what certain traits evolved for, but why those particular traits were selected for. Essentially, it’s more properly a question of what advantages those traits afforded their beneficiaries to produce offspring that outlasted those in the population without the traits.

There is hardly any substantial difference between saying “Evolution made this species” and “This feature was for this function.” Scientists don’t mean to imply the thoughtful agent and teleology that such terminology implies. But that’s exactly the popular understanding of evolution, perhaps even for the author of the article: this organism needed to be able to do X, so evolution “provided” Y solution.

This type of sloppy terminology, the shorthand jargon so commonly found in popular science articles, is usually approved or even used by experts. Its popularity is understandable: it’s much easier to say “This feature evolved to fill this need” than to say, “This feature proved advantageous enough at addressing this particular need that it was selected for and spread throughout the population.” But unfortunately, analogizing the complex process in terms of agency/teleology, while convenient, is not an altogether harmless metaphor. It has led to widespread misunderstandings of the basics of the theory among the non-scientist populace, misunderstandings not limited to religious evolution skeptics who sieze upon it to claim that the theory of evolution is scientists’ very own creator god. Any reasonable person hearing scientists speak of features developing (or, especially, “designed”) for particular purposes is likely to draw an inference to some sort of Lamarckian scenario or worse. Misconceptions like these lead to questions about why certain features obtain in a specimen, when in reality their presence may well owe more to not being selected against than any advantage they yield (e.g. certain vestigial features, non-coding DNA, etc.). This language, gone unchecked, results in misunderstandings of the theory that set the stage for honest skepticism and opportunistic grandstanding alike.

Like I said, not a huge rant, but something I wish more science writers and advocates would consider. Am I wrong?

Since at least the time of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man up until quite recently in Francis Collins’s The Language of God, as well as among Vatican theologians, it has been argued that at some indeterminate time within our species’ evolution from primates, there was a special endowment from God upon our ancestors whereupon we knew right from wrong and morality was born. Further, it is argued that natural processes cannot explain humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong (regardless of the fact that it differs somewhat from culture to culture). This “Moral Law” argument seems to be the last God-of-the-gaps holdout for otherwise progressive theologians who accept common descent.

On the other side, atheists enjoy knocking this argument down. Despite Collins’s assertion that there is not likely to be any research that shows a naturalistic explanation of human conceptions of morality, there is indeed much promising research in that regard, much of which is highly suggestive of just such an explanation, even if the details are not all filled in yet (cf. the fossil record). This is how Steve Wiggins recently summarized the naturalistic explanation:

Apes plan ahead, recognize fairness, and can even see issues from the point of view of others… They are clearly inheritors of the moral sense that evolution has crafted among all cooperative animals over the eons. Religions like to lay claim to the origins of morality: we behave this way because our god told us to. In a sense that may be true, but only if the “god” is nature itself and the instruction it gives is the way for a species to thrive. Caring for one another, all religions aside, is the formula that evolution presents as the most successful choice of natural selection.

via “Ape Versus Primate”

Is it true that “only if the ‘god’ is nature itself” can it be maintained that the cultivation of morality and ethics systems are derivative from a god? In the sense that I don’t believe there was a *poof* moment of moral clarity among humanity from some divine spark nor that morality is only apprehendable through divine revelation, I agree with the gist of his comment, but there seems to be a bit of a non-theistic overreach in his reasoning. It is quite easy to understand how one can indeed “instruct” or proscribe things through proximate causes, and insofar as theistic evolutionists do not violate logic when they state that God ordained to create through naturalism, it is wholly within the realm of possibility that God intentioned that our species develop a moral compass to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others (broadly speaking) in more or less the same sense that He intended that we should have two arms and two legs.

What I wonder, though, is whether saying that He intended our ancestors to develop a moral sense is the same as saying that “we behave this way because our god told us to”. It’s a fine line perhaps, and quite open for discussion among philosophers and theologians. But it seems science, and still less scientism, has almost nothing to contribute there. Let scientists focus on closing the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and theologians focus on closing the gaps in our understanding of the meaning of God’s gapless universe.

Christians coming to terms with evolution, including many ID advocates who acknowledge common descent, will often arrive at a midpoint of sorts between denial of evolution and all-out theistic evolution (or evolutionary creation) that acknowledges that we are by-products of evolution and seeks to hold the line on the most theologically problematic aspect of evolutionary theory: the historicity of Adam and Eve. For many, this is a comfortable resting place and they remain content acknowledging the deafening scientific consensus of common descent on one hand and believing in a literal first human pair on the other.

This is often done by positing a bottleneck of the population down to two individuals, often misunderstanding the unfortunately ambiguous terms Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The more sophisticated (but odd) way of doing this is to allow there to have been more than two at the time of Adam and Eve, but to posit that the Fall event occurred to them uniquely, and that the effects have passed down to later humanity through descent from them.

From Denis Venema and Darrel Falk at BioLogos comes a handy explanation of the relevant genomic evidence.

Attempting to square the Genesis account and common ancestry by positing a literal Adam and Eve who were the progenitors of the entire human race is, biologically speaking, looking for the most extreme population bottleneck a sexually reproducing species can experience: a reduction to one breeding pair.

Is there evidence that such a bottleneck has ever occurred?

The short answer is no, and that there is much evidence against it.

This leaves those seeking to maintain both common descent and theological concordism advocating one of the following positions (as best I can tell):

1. defining the pair as a literary representation of the entire human population at the time of an historical Fall (as C.S. Lewis did)
2. defining the Fall as something not passed down genetically, but as a metaphor for something that happened within a group of our race’s representatives (possibly even a literal pair)

Any other options I’m missing?

I prefer to just embrace the idea that the Jewish religious leaders who compiled Genesis from earlier stories used those stories to teach various theological concepts, including an etiology for sin, death, toil, the excruciating pain of childbirth, and the pitfalls of trying to live life doing “what seems right in [one's] own eyes” without due dependence on the system prescribed by those leaders. There’s more there of course, but I want to emphasize that our fundamental task in interpreting Scripture has to be to put ourselves in the minds of its human authors as best as we can given the tools of literary and historical research rather than read into Scripture all kinds of theological beliefs we already hold.

With evolution and with Scripture, we aren’t pushing God out of the picture to say that He in some sense authored both via natural processes. A committed affirmation of God’s creation by general Providence doesn’t selectively comb nature for divine signatures or other Easter eggs that will prove His authorship of it; we accept the whole creative process, warts (death, pain, etc.) and all as finding its source and being in God, with all the mysteries and difficulties this creates, resisting the urge to say, “God doesn’t do things that way, so science must be wrong here.” In the same way, we shouldn’t posit theological gems of special revelation throughout every passage of Scripture, somewhere between the lines, redeeming otherwise problematic passages. Rather, we simply do our best to uncover what it says, warts and all, and acknowledge that whatever it says, it was meant to be that way. Most of us already accept that David wasn’t speaking with the ideal level of faith, understanding, and resignation to the Golden Rule in the cursing Psalms; I’m merely saying that we should carry out that sort of evaluation consistently.

Can one be consistent in accepting both the common form of inerrancy as described in the Chicago Statement and universal common descent?

This question is something I struggle with when I observe people try to sell other believers on evolutionary theory without openly acknowledging the ways in which their own rejection of the idea of a single pair of progenitors has resulted in an often subtle yet usually profound modification of how they understand the Bible to work. I, too, have been tempted on numerous occasions to begin the presentation of my case by positing a (purely hypothetical) scenario in which accepting that early Genesis was unhistorical does not result in a revised or nuanced bibliology; if not outright dishonest, I feel that this approach is nonetheless misleading, perhaps even disingenuous, and a setup for problems later.

Rather than giving in to this temptation, I have opted to problematize their assumptions about what the Bible should be or should say. After all, this is the main problem, and one that underlies more misconceptions and naïveté than just their beliefs about origins.

Now, the fact is, there are indeed many Christians who accept mainstream evolutionary theory but are otherwise quite conservative theologically, including in their bibliology, although anecdotally I surmise that the number is far fewer of those who accept evolution and maintain an “inerrant” Scripture as taught by most of our evangelical pastors and teachers. Even when they say they accept inerrancy, they have – futilely, in my opinion – taken up the tack of nuancing “inerrant” to mean something quite different from those who take the term at face value; “inerrancy” implies more than a mysterious theological concordism, but scientific and especially historical concordism as well. But for those in the group, however small, that have (for the moment, anyway) caught their foot on their way down the slope, I understand why they can feel free to try to persuade others that they can go on believing essentially the same things that they’ve been taught they should, at least about the nature of the Bible, mutatis mutandis for the Adam/Eve part of course.

But what about the rest of us? My question is this: how legitimate is it to advertise compatibility between science and “that old time religion” while we know good and well that it’s only compatible after precisely the kind of modification to their bibliology that’s held them to their skepticism of science in the first place? Should we instead put more effort into maturing their bibliology on all fronts, and not just Genesis? I vote for emphasizing the latter and minimizing the “cake-and-eat-it-too” sort of accommodationism that misrepresents what most of my fellow theistic evolutionists have begun to conclude. Until they’re ready for a change in their understanding of what our faith rests upon and for an acknowledgment of the limitations of Scripture, I doubt they’ll go particularly far into acceptance of science no matter how cleverly we present it.

Do you agree?