Evolution, Theism and the Dissonance Which Lies Between
Ernst Mayr, renowned biologist of the twentieth century, once wrote, “It can hardly be doubted that biology has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems.” Mayr was referring to the vast cultural influence evolutionary biology, and the communication thereof, has had on Western society and beyond. Because of how its ideas force us to reconceive our relationship with the natural world, the penetration of evolutionary thought has left its mark on organized religion and established faith traditions. We can press this notion further by asking the following: does the evolution of life as it unfolded on earth pose problems for theism more generally?
When we survey the modern religious landscape, the question seems to answer itself. After all, resistance to evolution has been confined almost entirely to the religious community. The Church and its laity have systematically balked at the idea, despite its considerable evidence, since the days of Darwin. Pushback was strident on both sides of the pond — though concentrated more strongly on this side — with its earliest proponents suffering threats of hell, fire and brimstone for their untrodden ideas.
More than a century and a half later, the spurning of evolution still is intimately related to accepting a religious-based alternative. Its longstanding entanglement with social and political life actively works against public consensus, and its enduring polarization stands as a testament to the schismatic nature of this most foundational of scientific ideas.
For a variety of historical and theological reasons, Christian fundamentalism and intransigence toward evolution go hand in hand. Indeed, for biblical literalists, evolution poses the intractable task of assimilating its contra-Genesis “doctrine” with parochial theology. A worldview committed to taking the Bible at face value will always face great difficulty in accommodating modern science, however settled or mature the science becomes.
But organized religion is not synonymous with theism. While the former is commonly associated with a specific set of texts, theism writ large is more about belief in a personal God in the broader sense. A theist need not incorporate convictions about the Bible or any other set of canonical texts to identify as such. Apart from its mutual exclusivity with inelegant interpretations of Bronze Age texts, then, is a full-featured understanding of evolution at odds with the popular conceptions of God?
Beyond provincial debates over ancient tomes, many feel evolution is corrosive to faith because it uniformly revokes any “special” status humanity once claimed for itself. The notion that we are somehow privileged in the natural order or a teleological endpoint of the cosmos is all but bankrupt. The results are in: we are half a chromosome away from chimpanzees spinning on a garden-variety planet orbiting a relatively ordinary star tucked away in an unexceptional suburb of a lone galaxy among billions. What we once assumed was preternaturally divine has consistently turned out to be mere mediocrity.
Owing to discoveries made in the last century, we have further established that humans are one relatively short-lived peg in an unfathomably vast chain of life extending back to precellular material and to the interstellar maelstroms from whence it was forged — an infinitesimal whimper in a 4 billion-year chain of existence that, if compressed to a single year, would see man emerging within the final fifteen minutes of the calendar. Were we to transport to random points along this timeline, chances are superlative that we’d find ourselves wallowing in microbial muck barren of intelligent life. On what evidential grounds are we to assert cosmological priority?
Those billions of years, moreover, unfolded through endless violent conflict and untold pain and suffering as organisms were put through natural selection’s paces. The loving and merciful God imagined by most theists must have ordained and sustained this cycle of horror and bloodshed across the ages of deep time. We can’t remove God’s capacity to intervene without discarding omnipotence, and we can’t remove God’s foreknowledge of these circumstances without discarding omniscience. But then we are left with asking how a loving and merciful God could allow such atrocities to take place on its watch.
As a devout Catholic once wrote to the New York Times: “Pope John Paul II’s acceptance of evolution touches the doubt in my heart. The problem of pain and suffering in a world created by a God who is all love and light is hard enough to bear, even if one is a creationist. But at least a creationist can say that the original creation, coming from the hand of God was good, harmonious, innocent and gentle. What can one say about evolution, even a spiritual theory of evolution? Pain and suffering, mindless cruelty and terror are its means of creation. Evolution’s engine is the grinding of predatory teeth upon the screaming, living flesh and bones of prey…If evolution be true, my faith has rougher seas to sail.” Indeed, to maintain faith coordinate to that of past generations surely requires deeper reserves of theological provisions.
To further expose the problems evolution generates for theism, we might turn to the late Stephen Jay Gould. A good starting point is found in his 1989 work, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History and subsequent essays. Often regarded as iconic in scientific circles, the passage encapsulates precisely the dissonance created by a 10,000 foot view of evolution.
“The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so-roughly .0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of earthly time–and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.
Moreover, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind back life’s tape to the dawn of time and let it play again from an identical starting point – and you will never get humans a second time.
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.”
—Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Within Gould’s prism, the staging of the cosmos, particularly man’s role within it, appears far removed from the realized vision of a designer — at least one suggestive of foresight or regard for the preservation of our species. The evidence intimates that humanity, rather than representing the climax of some storied cosmic production, is instead an accidental scene in an otherwise haphazardly produced drama. The privileged plank on which so many religions place humankind is irreversibly deposed through the lens of evolution.
The details of natural selection — the primary mechanism of evolution — help illuminate the dissonance more fully. To the layperson, Gould’s words may seem to stand in contradiction when he says that the pathways which led to us are “improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable” while in the next breath stating that “evolution is not random.” Let’s take a closer look to understand what’s going on.
My personal favorite definition of evolution comes from Richard Dawkins:
When Gould speaks of “unpredictability,” he is referring to gene mutations, the alterations which occur in DNA code. These rewrites can arise spontaneously from natural cell processes (e.g., routine errors from DNA replication and repair) or from interaction with outside agents (e.g., direct exposure to certain chemicals and mutagens or prolonged exposure to cosmic and other radiation). Each of these modifiers rearranges the order of the nucleotides in random and unpredictable ways.
The new sequences, once dispersed within a population, then rise and fall according to their relative influence on the fitness of the organism. Natural selection is only concerned with fitness, a measure of a species’ capacity to survive and reproduce in a given environment. Selection pressures may range from predation and swings in climate and natural habitat to viruses and other pathogens. The mutations which most increase fitness have the highest probability of spreading through the population. In a sense, the calculus of natural selection works much like winning the lottery.
Most adaptations are products of this basic formula. The evolution of the eye, the toxic acid produced by vultures, or the camouflage physiology of the squid, octopus, cuttlefish and chameleon were all the result of a stepwise sequence of random mutations that survived in response to specific evolutionary pressures. If the associated mutations hadn’t emerged, these species might have died out or been pushed down an entirely different genetic track. Hence, the appearance of mutations may be spontaneous and chance-derived, but the reasons for their staying power are anything but.
When Gould goes on to say that “human evolution is not random,” he is referring to after the fact, given scientific hindsight. That is, given the set of mutations operating within a population and the episodic catastrophes for which we have evidence, specie evolution can be explained quite readily. However, were we to rewind the evolutionary tape, we would see a different set of mutations and circumstances, resulting in different evolutionary outcomes, which could then also be explained according to the unique selection pressures in place. Absent the historic cratering that curtained the Cretaceous and with it the reign of the dinosaurs, perhaps our mammalian ancestors would never have been granted their day in the sun.
The reason these biological realities have deep import for theism should be transparently clear. Life on earth, to say nothing of human existence, is radically contingent, subject to the terms of evolution and the uncertain cataclysms that bechance over geological time. The evolution of Homo sapiens is as improbable as the evolution of any other living thing. That our being here sensitively depends upon the stochastic conditions of evolutionary history is difficult to reconcile with the personal God of classical theism.
What’s more, if the products of evolution were all part of a premeditated plan by a higher intelligence, the evidence on hand reflects quite disadvantageously on the Architect’s adequacy. Nature is replete with examples of maladaptiveness (e.g., the female birth canal, the bifunctional nature of the throat), traits that are useless to certain species but useful in others (e.g., vestigial features like the tonsils and appendix in humans, hip and thigh bones in snakes and whales, male nipples), useful traits found in some species yet missing from others (e.g., vitamin C gene, limb regeneration), and traits which are clearly sub-optimized but still get the job done (e.g., the amusingly circuitous RLN, reduced photoreception and olfaction genes in humans, the panda’s thumb).
A token example is the architecture of the eye. Much can be said about the patent inefficiency of our inverted retina, an arrangement we share with most other vertebrates. Incoming light has to pass through several inner layers of neural apparatus before reaching the photoreceptors (i.e., rods and cones). From an optical engineering perspective, such a form is overtly dysteleological, not merely for its wastefulness — it would be like packing a number of additional substrates in an LCD panel, thereby cutting light transmission unnecessarily — but because it results in a blind spot. Nor is this blind spot common to all organisms. The rods and cones of cephalopods, for instance, are affixed to the front of the retina and the optic nerve to the rear, allowing for the unimpeded transmission of light.
Of course, evolution is able to account for each of these gaffes, as such phenomena are precisely what we would expect. Natural selection does not optimize for perfection, only to configure a species for increased chance of gene flow. It is not a top-down process indicative of an “intelligent designer” but a bottom-up process where genetic configurations can only be understood post hoc. The cephalopod’s camouflage and first-rate vision demonstrate how evolution selects for traits that confer an adaptive edge, if you are lucky enough to mutate those traits in the first place. The more we study the physiology of other life, the more curious ‘designs’ we find, each of which evolved along separate evolutionary turnpikes from our own.
If we wish to posit the guiding hand of a superintending agency, the many examples of poor and suboptimal outcomes observed across nature suggest one of three things: an absurdly incompetent designer, a malbeneficent designer or, more parsimoniously, no designer at all. This is not to say evolution is by itself a definitive disproof of theism, though if one wants to stake belief in “God-guided” evolution, one must come to terms with these processual aberrations, along with the shoddily crafted theatrics of the overall cosmic story.
The fabled ichneumon wasp, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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