Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration

Chapter One Accepting Evolution

1 chapter one Accepting Evolution The relationship beteen science and religion has long been a topic of debate and dispute, and nowhere more markedly in modern times than as it concerns the scientific account of evolution. Considerable attention is regularly given to the question of whether Darwinism and religion are in principle compatible, and in recent times distinguished contributions have been made by Peacocke, Ward, Polkinghorne, McGrath, Pope, Haught, and others that defend religion against polemical attacks in the claimed name of modern evolutionary theory.1 In a comprehensive article on evolution in the encyclopedic Christianity: The Complete Guide, GerdTheissen explains and comments on the threats that evolution is considered to pose to theology with the opening remark that“for many people the notion of evolution is an argument against Christian faith, but for others it is a challenge to formulate that faith more credibly.”2 By contrast, James Patrick Mackey is of the view that the popular animosity between evolution and religion is overrated and exaggerated, constituting nothing more than a false myth of a war to the death between science and religion . The disputes, he roundly declares in words that have a ring of truth, go back as far as Leucippus and Democritus and more recently surround Galileo and Darwin and “were not in fact disputes between religion and science at all. Rather were they disputes between, on the one hand, current establishment views representing that inextricable mixture of science and theology which has . . . been shown to be the norm in Western philosophy as a whole and, on the other hand, emerging views that, as part and parcel of the normal advance of knowledge, challenged some important part of the establishment view in each case.”3 So far as concerns the predominance of evolution in this tension between science and religion, however this is conceived, Antje Ackelén notes that“the evolutionary perspective is today taken for granted in many respects and applied in many different areas, including epistemology, 2 Accepting Evolution psychology and religion.”4 It should be noted, however, that her inclusion here of religion does not refer to the introduction of an evolutionary perspective into the study of religion, but rather to examining in evolutionary terms the causes for the development, survival, or decline of religion in different cultures or,put more simply in the words of John Durant,examining the idea“that religious beliefs may have biologically useful consequences.”5 There appears, indeed, an apparent unwillingness to consider the theological consequences that result from accepting the idea of evolution, apart from the issues identified by Celia Deane-Drummond in observing that “Darwin’s theory seemed to remove all need for a Creator God, diminish any sense of divine providence in the wake of evolutionary ills and suffering , and qualify the importance of humans by situating human life as a brief episode in a long and complex evolutionary history,” an agenda that helps to explain why “most of the debates [about religion and evolution] have focused on how far evolutionary theory is compatible with theological concepts of God as Creator, divine providence over creation, and theological anthropology, whereby humanity is perceived as being in a special sense the image of the Creator.”6 John Polkinghorne identifies several further reasons why, as he expresses it, “too many theologians fail to treat what science has to offer with the appropriate degree of seriousness,” including the reluctance to become involved in an area of detailed technical knowledge and expertise with which theology is not intrinsically connected, and in some cases, influenced by Barth, “an ideological disinclination” to find truth, or general revelation, outside the pages of divine revelation.7 catholic responses to evolution As Durant noted,religious discussions and controversies raised by the new doctrine of biological evolution focused on three issues: the interpretation of scripture, the relationship between God and nature in terms of creation and providence, and the status of human beings.8 Karl Rahner comments on early Catholic views of the new hypothesis of biological evolution: “From the middle of the [nineteenth] century until the first decades of the twentieth, the theory of evolution was almost unanimously rejected by theologians and by some it was explicitly declared to be heretical.”9 Zoltan Alszeghi chronicled the stages in the official Catholic response to the new science, beginning in 1860 with the condemnation by a local church synod in Cologne of evolution in any form as “completely contrary to Scripture and the faith.”10 That same...