Creator God, Evolving World

Chapter 6

103 ChaPtEr 6 implications for human living: Moral agency and Emergent Probability N OVA is an American television show on matters scientific. In 2009 it produced a three-part series entitled “Becoming Human: Unearthing Our Earliest Ancestors,” which traces human lineage through its many and varied species over millions of years. One exciting moment stands out: Meave and Richard Leakey, in 1984, uncovering an almost complete skeleton of a young boy who died 1.6 million years ago. Found near Lake Turkana in Kenya, he was quickly dubbed “Turkana boy.” The documentary shows Meave Leakey, years later at this famed site, recalling how excited she was to realize the profundity of what they had found.1 This image, of a matron of paleontology waxing eloquent about the skeleton of a young boy who had lived almost two million years previously and its role in aid of understanding of our ancestry, serves as an icon of what it means to be human. Only humans can ponder our own heritage. Only humans have expended entire life careers digging in the dirt to uncover clues to what came before us. A second and equally profound moment came in 2010, when a collaboration of scientists from around the world was able to extract a small segment of DNA from a bone specimen from a Neanderthal skeleton. While these bones are not as old as those of Turkana boy—a mere thirty thousand years—this magnificent accomplishment, only recently possible, involved sequencing the creator god, evolving world 104 genome of this ancient relative.2 The ability to sequence nucleotides in human DNA has only been available in the last decade. That scientists could apply this technology to human remains that are over thirty thousand years old is truly a remarkable advance in human understanding. These examples of humans seeking to grasp the complexities of their own history illustrate what makes our species—Homo sapiens—so distinctive. As Erich Fromm once put it: “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem he has to solve.”3 Indeed, the very writing and reading of this book illustrates exactly this fact: humans have evolved to the point at which they are self-reflexive enough to ponder their own existence and raise questions about what kind of Creator, if any, might be the source of it all. In the previous chapter we introduced the conundrum of human freedom and, at times, its malicious effects. In this chapter we will continue to explore the human as agent—as actor and contributor to her own future. Initially, we will examine the nature of human emergence and how emergent probability operates as an aspect of culture. We will then go on to show how the intersection of chance and order works out in human living—delineating an “ethic of risk” in relation to an “ethic of control.” We will provide examples of how certain human actions can and have established new conditions of possibility for transformation. Finally, we will elaborate how this ethic of risk can be understood as a co-operation with God’s providential will and the implications this has for resolving the problem of evil. homo sapiens: What Makes Us so special? As we have mentioned earlier, what is striking about human genetics is the degree to which our DNA is similar to that of other species. The nucleotide pairs in the human genome sequence are in the same order as those in chimps 98.8 percent of the time. The genetic similarity between humans and mice is 96 percent. So what makes us so different?4 It seems that our physical evolution has occurred in the same way that it has in other mammals. Specifically, we are descended from apes, our most recent common ancestor being chimpanzees. Over many, many thousands of years, incremental changes in our tool kit of genes, combined with external environmental forces, have culled our ancestry in the direction of adaptive traits. Specifically human features include upright posture, large brains implications for human living: Moral agency and Emergent Probability 105 (relative to body size), symbolic language and speech, opposable thumbs, as well as the development of tool use and cultural expression. Approximately six million years ago (from here on abbreviated as MYA) the hominin line (human ancestry) split off from the hominid (humans and apes) trajectory. Even so, it took another four million years for the genus...