Christianity, Darwinism and The Fall

Noah Millman makes a good point:

I continue to believe that both sides of the Darwin vs. Christianity battle are missing the most telling point. We should all agree that religious dogma has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a scientific theory. Heliocentrism is true; geocentrism is false. There is an enormous weight of evidence behind the theory of evolution by natural selection. There is going to be more and more evidence behind new theories about the workings of the human mind, and the interactions of the human genome and human personality. All religion can do is react to these discoveries and, as part of that reaction, caution us about drawing unwarranted conclusions (political, moral, what-have-you) from the evidence. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, because I think science does have implications for the persuasiveness of specific religious doctrines, simply as a psychological matter. And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation. I think that natural selection poses similar but less-acute problems for Judaism and Islam; it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism. Again: I’m not speaking of science refuting religion. I’m speaking of scientific results making certain core religious claims less persuasive.

Of course, one reason I think it's a good point is that I just made it myself, in a review of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity for the the just-released, not-yet-online spring issue of Claremont Review of Books. The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous. The idea that the mechanism of natural selection, in which the development of man requires millions of years of strife and suffering and death in the animal kingdom, poses a specific challenge to Christian beliefs about the nature of God is more plausible, and warrants a more serious response than the "hey, evolution is too compatible with a belief in designer God" rejoinder that some Christian apologists, D'Souza included, often employ.

I didn't attempt to address that challenge in the review, in part because I wouldn't say that I have a settled opinion on the matter. It seems to me, though, that the possible rejoinders to the Millman argument fall into three broad categories. One view would hold that strife and pain and death are only evils when they are experienced by creatures who are made in the image of God; since animals are not so created, they have more or less the same moral status as machines, and the Almighty is indifferent to their suffering. In this view, evolution by natural selection poses no difficulty at all for Christian theodicy: Pain and death are natural to our animal ancestors but an evil when experienced by self-conscious beings with free will, and for that reason homo sapiens were granted immortality initially, only to subsequently lose it through disobedience to God. (This seems to be the view that Stephen Barr takes in this post, though I may be misinterpreting him.)

The second perspective the one that C.S. Lewis inclined toward; as you might expect from the man who created Narnia, he was particularly concerned by the problem that animal suffering poses for theodicy, and he argued that Satan's influence on the world must necessarily have predated the Fall of Man. Sin entered human history with the disobedience of our first parents, in other words, but it entered the history of the universe at the beginning of time, with Lucifer's disobedience. The emergence of Man through evolution-by-natural-selection, in this view, is a case of God making use of a fallen creation for His own good ends.

The final perspective - which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with Teilhard de Chardin - suggests that the Fall is both a temporal and an extra- or supra-temporal event, one whose impact on creation runs both forward and backward in time, retroactively poisoning the pre-historic development of man as well as his history. This sounds like the strangest and most implausible of the possible explanations, obviously. But given the mysterious relationship between space and time that modern physics has uncovered, and the still more mysterious relationship between space, time and eternity that obtains if Christianity's account of things is true, it may not be quite so implausible as it sounds.

Comments

Thanks, Ross. Some comments and questions:

1. "Animal suffering doesn't count" strikes me as not a good way to go.

2. C.S. Lewis' notion sounds interesting, but I'm trying to make sense of what it really implies. If natural evil is Satan's doing from the beginning, and natural selection depends on natural evil (not just run-of-the-mill killing and eating but mass extinctions and the like), then God created not only Man but all life through a Satanic mechanism. There's something powerfully appealing about the idea. I'm trying to figure out if it sounds like Christianity. (Not being a Christian, of course, I'm not the one to say.)

3. I wouldn't hang this on backward-causation. Read more straightforwardly, I think, it amounts to saying that humanity, in some spiritual sense, pre-dates creation - that we were there from the beginning, with God and His angels. I think that's a gnostic perspective, not a Christian one, but again, I could be wrong.

Of course, beyong all this, there's the point that there's no reason to believe that evolution is over. The Judeo-Christian perspective on creation is quite static; man, in particular, is a finished product, not a work in progress. But in important senses, this turns out not to be true. What are the implications?

Posted by Noah Millman | April 24, 2008 9:50 AM

Well, to crib further from CS Lewis (here's the part of "Mere Christianity" that nobody ever talks about), one possible Christian interpretation of evolution is that its next step is voluntary, and that step is totally spiritual: Christianity itself. Religion in general and Christianity in particular do run contrary to the idea that man "is a finished product" in the moral sense, at least, so perhaps the opportunity for the Christian to be perfected by God is a sort of optional devonian leap.

Mind you, I have no idea what that leap would/will look like and the concept does start to look a little dispensationalist (not to mention sensationalist) when you stare at it long enough.

Posted by Sam Thielman | April 24, 2008 10:09 AM

I'd say there's another response, which you might call the Leibniz view or the "best of all possible worlds" view. Once God decided to create the world, there were constraints on what was possible to create. Evolution by natural selection is a fundamental characteristic of almost any conceivable form of life. So some sort of Darwinian mechanism is necessary in the world.

Posted by Doug T | April 24, 2008 10:18 AM

Jews and Christians share the same scriptures concerning the doctrine of creation. So they are in the same boat.

There are a thousand sophisticated theology readings of natural selection. I see no evidence Millman has read any of them.

You can go one route with Aquinas--God's use of secondary causation. You can go another route with orhthodox Judaism--that God steps back to grant creation a certain freedom. Etc, etc.

At the end of the day, however, the idea that natural selection decisively account for the origins of life is not a scientific thesis. It is a metaphysical one. An article of faith.

Posted by Tom F. | April 24, 2008 10:27 AM

Of course you can't hold to a literal view of the events of Genesis and also affirm evolution by natural selection. However I think the author of Genesis even way back when intended the tale to be allegorical, not literal. The names "Adam" and "Eve" actually mean something in Hebrew and the Tree in the Garden was not just any old tree but the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So what we have in the tale of the Fall is an allegory of humankind coming into moral consciousness (the Tree of Knowledge...) and perhaps also moral choice, ending humankind's moral innocence. Later interpretations (that there was no death,suffering etc in the world previously) are not supported by the text of Genesis itself: obviously some sort of death existed if Adam and Eve were eating other fruits and vegetables in the garden; the plant matter they ate was not immortal in their digestion.
As for the larger question of theodicy here I tend to go with the view that the created world was necessarily imperfect, since it was distinct from God Himself. There is a medieval proof that God cannot create a replica of Himself, and if the world had been perfect in every way it would have been another God. And I also have some small sympathy for Teilhard's view (though not the precise details of his theory) in that it does not matter so much where the world has been as it does where it is going, and where we chose to go ourselves. Creation and creation's God are justified not in the past but in the future, and in the meantime we have the promise of the Incarnation to show that God is indeed mindful of the suffering he has perforce allowed here. (OK, it's Orthodox Holy Week, so I am waxing theological these days)

Posted by JonF | April 24, 2008 10:38 AM

the idea that natural selection decisively account for the origins of life

No one thinks that it does. Rather, it explains how species develop over generations.

Good discussion here.

In the end, I think that science cannot pose a threat to faith, because faith is about spirituality and how we react to the world, not the nuts and bolts of how the world works. It's not too difficult to poke holes in, say, Rastafarianism or Mormonism. Yet they persist. I don't mean to argue that this is all a waste of time, but just that there need not be a conflict, as long as the two sides don't try to interfere with each other.

Posted by anonymous | April 24, 2008 10:40 AM

I've read quite a bit of Teilhard de Chardin's work, though it's been a few years. I don't think he said #3, but it's somewhat similar to other things he did say. His view (very broadly generalizing here) was that the matter of the world is gradually becoming self-aware. Through the long hard slog of conflict and evolution we will arrive at some "omega" point in the indefinite future. There, being fully aware of ourselves and our place in the world God gave us, we'll have achieved something like the New Jerusalem.

I'm not aware that he thought of matter as particularly evil. After all, his early career was as a geologist and paleontologist, and he wrote of finding God at the "heart of matter." But he was very much aware that there is struggle throughout the evolutionary process. There are always forces holding us back from further awareness. I believe there's a section of "Phenomenon of Man" where he says something to the effect that in his darkest moments he sometimes wonders if the forces holding us back evolve to become more powerful with each breakthrough in consciousness. That's not exactly the same thing as saying that an extra-temporal Fall event caused it, but I think it's probably where you got the idea. That fear is also not surprising, given his personal experience as a WWI field medic, and given the fact that the book was completed at roughly the same time the Nazis were coming to power in Germany.

Posted by Tel | April 24, 2008 10:40 AM

The notion that 'evolution is the product of strife' is not quite true. In fact, there's strong evidence that evolution is generally the product of exogenous factors (e.g., meteors, climate change, etc.) You don't have to buy the Social Darwinist doctrine to be a Darwinist.

Posted by MattF | April 24, 2008 11:21 AM

Noah's point, as it is, sounds fine.

But all your three points sound like a lot of hand-waving to me, Ross. For whatever its worth -- and I'm no expert on Christian theology -- all these mutterings about "the mysterious relationship between space and time that modern physics has uncovered, and the still more mysterious relationship between space, time and eternity that obtains if Christianity's account of things is true" makes you sound like one of those bad post-modernists that Bricmont and Sokal satirized in "Fashionable Nonsense".

Again, for what its worth, I think there's a valid point to a "hermeneutic" view of epistemology (Richard Rorty's for instance) but there's nothing really "mysterious" about the relationship between space and time that modern physics has discovered. The language of modern physics is that of mathematics and when that increasingly complicated mathematics is translated into language, it will make almost any relationship sound "mysterious". Physicists who work on these problems tend to think of them less in terms of the metaphors they would employ and more in terms of the equations they solve. That's what made all the writings of Lacan and Jean Baudrillard so laughable -- they were taking the linguistic metaphors that physicists were employing to explain their theories to the general public almost at face value.

Posted by scritic | April 24, 2008 11:24 AM

Along the lines of JonF's comment, I think part of the problem is that these posts are expecting a scientific or naturalistic kind of explanation of human orgins from the Genesis that the Genesis itself refuses to give.

The Genesis tells a story of the moral, as opposed to the merely natural, evolution of man. It does so because, it suggests, man's desire to know, and to know aboubt his origins, is somehow inherently human and inherently problematic.

Hence man's fall and the origin of human life flow from his inability to resist eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Later, Ham uncovers his father's nakedness (the point of his physical origin), which his brothers cover up. Ham's descendants don't turn out as well as his borthers'.

In word, the stories in the Genesis are about how stories of origins are problematic (only look at them in vieled form) and an effort to educate, and restrain, those very tendencies. It would, in particular, tell man to look to the law and his possible perfection, rather than to look back solely to the natural circumstances of his condition.

Posted by rob | April 24, 2008 11:40 AM

The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous.

Oh no, not this again. Who, specifically, is suggesting this? That Natural Selection disproves all religion? There is every bit as much scientific evidence for Teh Flying Spaghetti* Monster as for any other sky fairy. Look it up, man.

Also, after blaming U.S. Liberals for 9-11, it's hard for this Reality Based, science believer to take anything he says even remotely seriously. But maybe I'm just anti-Christianist.

*Some contend that the Supreme Being is really made of linguini

Posted by ed | April 24, 2008 11:44 AM

Ross writes: "The second perspective the one that C.S. Lewis inclined toward; as you might expect from the man who created Narnia, he was particularly concerned by the problem that animal suffering poses for theodicy, and he argued that Satan's influence on the world must necessarily have predated the Fall of Man."

Yeah, right. Wolves would have been vegetarians if the debbil hadn't corrupted them.

The Rube Goldberg-like mechanisms of theology don't make underlying silliness of the task go away.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 11:46 AM

Linguini? That's a new one on me, Ed. Most FSM'ers I've heard of think it's spaghetti, though I've heard of a few heretics who think it's angel hair. ;)

The Christian God, the Muslim God, the Hindu gods, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and a lack of all gods have exactly the same physical evidence - none. The laws of science only apply to this universe. You can't prove the existence or non-existence of something that exists (or not) outside of empirical reality, using empirical means. Even atheism is just a guess that makes exactly as much sense as a Flying Spaghetti Monster. What the laws of science can do, is prove or disprove events posited within this universe.

Posted by Tel | April 24, 2008 12:25 PM

"The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous."

This is a bit confused. Evolution was never intended to "disprove" religion. This is because religion, or God more specifically, was never a part of or fit into the equation. For generations, scientists have observed and tested the evidence. Not once has there been a single scrap of evidence that of a supernatural intervention. Thus, god was not part of the equation.

We know that the Genesis story is false. We know that the Earth is not the center of anything. We know that mankind did not appear out of nowhere, fully formed; instead we evolved from a common ancestor, now extinct. We know that modern humans have existed for only the tiniest fraction of our planet's existence. We know that most of all the life that has ever existed on this world is lost to the ages.

Evolution is the best evidence-based explanation we have of, in the simplest terms, biological diversification and how inherited traits change over time. More than 150 years of staggering evidence supports the theory. Are there fierce debates about parts of evolution? Yes. Are there things we don't know? Yes. But the theory in general is sound.

Religions keep banging on the door of a party they simply weren't invited to. Faiths have a choice: they can outright ignore or attempt to sabatoge the evidence, or find ways to sculpt their faith to better reflect our greater understanding of our world. I think the latter option would better ensure the survival of any faith.

Posted by Matt | April 24, 2008 12:25 PM

Faiths have a choice: they can outright ignore or attempt to sabatoge the evidence, or find ways to sculpt their faith to better reflect our greater understanding of our world. I think the latter option would better ensure the survival of any faith.

I think not. The strongest faiths around, from my POV, have always been the ones who deny evidence. I fail to see how an understanding of how natural selection works does not weaken one's faith in a benevolent God. Isn't there a corresponding rise in atheism alongside scientific advancement?

Posted by Bill | April 24, 2008 12:42 PM

Matt writes: "We know that the Genesis story is false."

Some of the most amazing moments in my arguments with fundamentalists have come after I pointed out that Genesis states that plants were created before the sun was. Generally they don't believe me at first, but after I direct them to the relevant passage they proceed to do quasi-intellectual handstands and backflips to support their "infallible" comedic text.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 12:50 PM

In addition to the reality-based science, a trend seems to have emerged: Religion keeps getting things wrong and having to defer to science, which got it right (e.g., heliocentrism, evolution, waterboarding is bad, raping kids and covering it up is also probably kind of bad, blowing crap up in the name of Allah is bad, and many, many more). This doesn't disprove religion, but it does establish a trend. And the trend shows no signs of deviating in the foreseeable future.

This would never ever happen outside of religion. Just imagine if a bunch of talking heads, reputed experts, went all over TV to advocate invading another country which bore no provable threat and were quickly proven to have been way wrong. Those guys would never ever work again.

Posted by ed | April 24, 2008 12:54 PM

What I think C.S. Lewis was getting at in Mere Christianity was that natural selection has helped us "advance" as humans but we should not make the mistaken assumption that to be evolved in such a worldly (in the bad sense)way is to be improved. I like how Lewis points out that there is a difference between physical evolution and spiritual evolution. As humans we have evolved quite a bit over the last 2000 years, but Jesus Christ's death on the cross reminds us of how much work there is to be done for the sake of spiritual evolution. In fact, we know that we have not collectively evolved spiritually since the death of Christ because we constantly see in our lifetimes the repetition of the same horrendous human tragedies over and over again. Even on an individual level, humans have not evolved out of cheating, lying, or betrayal.
Likewise, Lewis contends that the next step of evolution is a spiritual and individual one. That is what Christians call repentance. All the political & philosophical ideologies of the day are not going save mankind from his ultimate dilemma, himself. But repenting for our sins will.

There is no inherent virtue in evolution because evolution amounts to survival and survival is simply the avoidance of extinction for either oneself or one's species. In my interpretation of the scriptures, God consoles us in our suffering, but will NEVER save us from death. God does not fear death like we do. For that matter- and I think this was Lewis's key question about the significance of Darwanism - so what if Darwanism is true? If your only purpose in life is to improve your soul, which is certainly what Jesus taught us, then all the advantages awarded to us by evolution mean very little. This is not to say that Lewis thought that no good has come out of our advances, but our advances are not the things that will ultimately redeem us.

As a final point, I feel that, and this opinion informed by my reading of Mere Christianity, Christianity should not worry about Darwanism putting it out of business because history has shown us, and my faith says that this will always be true, that no man made theory even comes close to answering the crucial questions that Christianity answers. Likewise I'm sure that those who follow other religions feel the same way about their individual faiths.

Posted by Mike | April 24, 2008 12:54 PM

Wow, shockingly good post and great comments to boot.

Posted by Jeff | April 24, 2008 12:59 PM

I don't see this sort of discussion as particularly useful because this sort of question is several steps removed from more fundamental issues that need to be resolved first.

First among these is the sheer idea of an omnipotent, omniscient being. Could such a being exist in the first place? Well, five year olds seem to have a relevant insight when they ask questions like "Can God tell himself a secret he didn't already know?". A being who is omnipotent is a contradiction in terms as the question reveals. If such a being were possible, then there would be no difference between statements that are true and statements that are false as all possible statements would have exactly the same truth value. A premise that entails a contradiction being valid presupposes that all statements have the same truth value. There's a proof of this last statement in Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Since we live in a world where statements can have differing truth values, we do not live in a world where premises that entail contradictions can be valid premises.

It may be possible to form a coherent concept of a god but that god will not be omnipotent. So, one can dismiss the Christian God pretty much out of hand.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 1:04 PM

Mike writes: "In fact, we know that we have not collectively evolved spiritually since the death of Christ because we constantly see in our lifetimes the repetition of the same horrendous human tragedies over and over again."

Yes - it's hard to believe that some troglodytes still support the death penalty, torture, and aggressive warfare, just like the authorities did 2000 years ago.

But of course many of us have moved past such things.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 1:04 PM

One view would hold that strife and pain and death are only evils when they are experienced by creatures who are made in the image of God; since animals are not so created, they have more or less the same moral status as machines, and the Almighty is indifferent to their suffering. In this view, evolution by natural selection poses no difficulty at all for Christian theodicy: Pain and death are natural to our animal ancestors but an evil when experienced by self-conscious beings with free will...

That's some pretty shallow thinking in my mind, for a number of reasons. Putting aside for a moment the classical philosophical problem of the Almighty not being indifferent to the suffering of individuals who are self-aware, the relation of this response to the facts of evolutionary history raise a number of questions that there exist no good answers for. Specifically, at what stage of human evolution did God become not indifferent to the suffering of hominids? Australopithicus afarensis? Homo habilis? Erectus? What about Neanderthals? Was that creature's suffering an evil or did God not care because he was only created kinda in his image? Maybe He cared a little bit but not that much?

The claim that God is indifferent to the suffering of animals is problematic, I think, as well. Despite the biogical necessity (at least prior to the development of agriculture) of killing and eating animals, most of us find the actual task of doing so pretty darn unappealing (the eating part is quite pleasant, sure, but actually killing another animal is for the most part pretty unpleasant; that's why no one wants to work in a slaughterhouse). We are similarly repulsed by wanton cruelty to animals, and indeed make laws against it.

This is problematic, I think, for the theist who argues that animals have no moral status in God's eyes, because they clearly have moral status in ours. Are humans more moral, then, than God? What to make of our indisputable predisposition, then, against violence toward animals?

Posted by Jeff | April 24, 2008 1:18 PM

Jeff, you've got it about right. The problem of evil (suffering if you want to call it that) is also dispositive in the case of the kind, loving, omnipotent Christian God. If the Christian God is omnipotent (one of the key attributes) then by definition that God would have an infinite number of means at his disposal to accomplish any and every end in ways that do not involve evil. This would be true by definition if that God were omnipotent. That would make the existence of evil something the Christian God freely chose. That free choice would not be compatible with that same God being kind and loving.

Christians need to face up to a logical necessity. If their God is omnipotent, then he's an evil bastard because he could have accomplished any conceivable goal he had in mind without resorting to evil.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 1:27 PM

I think the "animal suffering doesn't count" is too causal a dismissal of the first perspective. It's not that animal suffering doesn't count; it's that because of man's ability to act by choice rather than instinct, animal suffering is fundamentally different from human suffering, both for the person inflicting the suffering and the one undergoing it. Just to take one example from Rousseau, a dog hit by rock is not aggrieved by an awareness of the contempt that motivated the rock thrower, and this awareness is often the most painful part of the act.

The same goes for pain, strife, and death. Conscious beings with a moral sense experience them in fundamentally different ways -- as evils to be avoided or goods to be chosen rather than mere facts of life -- than animals. Indeed, man's knowledge of them, and the freedom of choice that follows, makes man sufficiently god-like to be different from the animals and uniquely problematic.

At the end of the day, you can make Genesis seem silly when you compare it to science and demand of it a scientific account of human development. But science and natural selection also look pretty silly when you demand of it an account of man's moral and political development. If you want proof of that, just read some socio-biology and in particular its efforts to explain altruism and man's appreciation of beauty.

Posted by johnnyD | April 24, 2008 1:36 PM

swells writes: "Christians need to face up to a logical necessity. If their God is omnipotent, then he's an evil bastard because he could have accomplished any conceivable goal he had in mind without resorting to evil."

What sort of monster would create a sentient race while arranging the universe in such a way that most of them would end up being tortured forever? The Christian god - no matter how much the theologians try to pretty it up.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 1:41 PM

But science and natural selection also look pretty silly when you demand of it an account of man's moral and political development. If you want proof of that, just read some socio-biology and in particular its efforts to explain altruism and man's appreciation of beauty.

This is an excellent, well thought out point. Whenever Science fails to explain something to me in a simple, satisfactory way which I can understand, I automatically think, WWFSMD, and dismiss Science altogether.

Posted by ed | April 24, 2008 1:45 PM

johnnyD writes: "At the end of the day, you can make Genesis seem silly when you compare it to science and demand of it a scientific account of human development. But science and natural selection also look pretty silly when you demand of it an account of man's moral and political development. If you want proof of that, just read some socio-biology and in particular its efforts to explain altruism and man's appreciation of beauty."

Genesis seems quite silly to me in the "man's moral development" department also. But talking snake enthusiasts may disagree.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 1:46 PM

Swells, I don't think it's necessarily the case that an omnipotent, omniscient being is self-contradictory; so long as the omnipotence and omniscience is with regards to one universe only.

Suppose I write a book. With regards to the book's "universe," I am both omnipotent and omniscient. I know everything about that world - I can know everything from the weight of the planet they're on, to the innermost workings of their thoughts. I'm all-powerful, too. If I say a character's skin turns green for no reason, it turns green. I can even create contradictions - halfway through the story, I could decide that an earlier event didn't happen. I could even create a very large rock in that universe, insert a character representing "me" in the story, and have that character not be able to lift it; or lift it, if I want. (I can't personally lift the rock, anyway, since to me in this universe it's an idea of a rock instead of a real rock).

Note that this says nothing about my omnipotence or omniscience in the world I actually inhabit, just in the world I created. And it certainly says nothing about whether or not I'm good, evil, or any other moral qualifier.

Posted by Tel | April 24, 2008 1:46 PM

johnnyd and ed, the point is far from excellent and well thought out. It presupposes much about evolution that simply is not true. There is nothing in evolution that selects for excellence. All evolution involves is whether biological entities reproduce or do not reproduce. Man's moral and political development is in no way prohibited by evolution unless that moral and political development puts humans at a reproductive disadvantage.

The sheer ill-fittingness of human morality is one of the best signs that it evolved. After all, an omnipotent God would have been able to make us perfectly moral beings with absolutely no ill-effects to us whatsoever. To think otherwise would be to deny that very God's omnipotence; i.e., to be thinking that there was something that God could not do.

As far as political development goes, there is nothing magic about hierarchical systems. That is one of a probably infinite number of ways politics could have evolved. The fact that we, as primates, share an odd proclivity for orgainizing ourselves in hierarchical systems is best viewed as a contingent fact of our evolution as primates.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 2:02 PM

First of all, whether or not you agree with Ross' arguments, this is a great post.

Second, I agree with MoeLarry's 11:46 a.m. post. What I would think one would want to do if one were inclined to spirituality is to construct a religious narrative from the ground up that is consistent with natural selection. I.e., if there is a God, given what we now know about natural selection, what does that tell us about God. In truth, that's what the authors of the aincient religions did. They constructed a narrative based on the world as they knew it, and ascribed it to God. Of course, it turned out that a lot of what they thought they knew about the world was wrong.

The problem is that religious believers have no interest in starting over. They desperately want to believe that the promises of an afterlife written down 2,000 years ago are true. So they do backflips and evasive maneuvers, trying to jury-rig their faith to be consistent with what we now know. And it isn't pretty.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 24, 2008 2:07 PM

If such a being were possible, then there would be no difference between statements that are true and statements that are false as all possible statements would have exactly the same truth value. A premise that entails a contradiction being valid presupposes that all statements have the same truth value. There's a proof of this last statement in Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

So. I don't know what I'd choose as the best take on the general question here (which seems to me to be less an issue of itself than a special case of the problem of evil, and posters seem to be drifting that way). Backwards causality and the corruption of creation by the angelic fall seem reasonable enough, as (in a way) "animal suffering doesn't matter" (though when I'm petting my dog that one seems like a non-starter). For one thing the Genesis account collapses and shifts causal relationships around enough for teleological and metaphorical reasons that the conflation of the angelic Fall and the human fall's effects seems easy enough.

BUT. I don't think swells knows what he/she is talking about. "as all possible statements would have exactly the same truth value" -- really? Where is this argument put forth? I've seen somewhat reasonable arguments against omniscience and omnipotence that don't (as some of these do) evaluate down to bad word games, but I've never seen that one! And Popper hardly invented the idea that a contradiction implies everything, which seems to be implied here, suggesting to me that swells doesn't know logic, but has read a Popper book and suddenly become an expert. I fear that swells may have strong opinions about Goedel's proof or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, too.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | April 24, 2008 2:08 PM

Tel, well if you limit omniscience, omnipotence to one universe then you obviously aren't omnipotent in the sense that Christians think their God is omnipotent. They do not qualify their assertions for the omnipotence of God in the way you do. They make unqualified, assertions of omnipotence unbounded by context.

Your example still however doesn't hold. Yes, you may decide mid-stream that an event didn't occur but the contradiction will still exist. An observant reader will be able to look at the book and catch you out in your contradictions and infer from that contradiction that you are not God.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 2:10 PM

Swells -- I'm not even certain you understand the theory you're advocating. Evolution doesn't select or do anything. Natural selection is merely a tag for a logical tautology whereby certain chance mutations occur and enable the "fittest" to survive, the "fittest" being defined as those that survive. See, we can play these omnipotent-type logical games all day and it doesn't advance the ball one inch.

But human life, however much it is subject to chance, does not seem to be merely governed by chance. No one seriously believes that, and most if not all of our ethical, cultural, and social systems are predicated on our lives and acts having more moral valence than they would ever have if there were just the products of chance. That part of the human experience, as well as how we physically became who we are, needs explaining. And as you admit, the theory of natural selection is silent on that point.

Posted by johnnyD | April 24, 2008 2:18 PM

Marquis, the dismissive style is probably a good rhetorical trick but really, I'm hardly to be held accountable for the fact that you aren't acquainted with some fact. I don't have my copy here right now, but it's in the Routledge-Kegan Paul edition of Popper's work. And yes, Popper did not invent the notion that contradiction implies everything. What he did do, in the work I mentioned, is to present a proof that contradiction implies everything.

If you can offer up a reasonable basis for believing that a contradiction implies everything that is materially different from all possible statements would have the same truth value, I would humbly beg you to do so. After all, there is no benefit I can imagine that would justify my holding a incorrect belief in this matter.

And, by the way, I do have some takes on the implications of Godel's Proofs. I don't invest the Uncertainty Principle with much philosophic significance however.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 2:20 PM

johnnyd, you are almost certainly correct that I don't understand the theory I am advocating very well. At least compared to people who work in the field, I suspect I am a rank neophyte. However, one doesn't have to understand some theories particularly well to see some of the their most basic implications. For instance, I can see some implications that follow from E=MC2 without being able to build a hydrogen bomb. And, we are certainly discussing the very most basic implications of evolutionary theory here.

For instance, one of those basics is that evolution does not proceed by chance. Mutations may well arise by chance but the concepts of a mutation and evolution are not coextensive. Evolution does not proceed by chance. It proceeds by selection and retention. In short, there is a ratchet effect to evolution that makes all the difference in the world between what evolution actually is and what it actually does and your naive understanding that it is all chance.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 2:27 PM

MLJ -- If's religion is sham, and I suppose in your view all moral systems, and it's all just natural selection and chance -- if that's the deal, why are you outraged at torture? Why are you so outraged about everything Republican do? What reason do you have to expect anything better of anyone?

Posted by johnnyD | April 24, 2008 2:28 PM

johnnyD writes: "But human life, however much it is subject to chance, does not seem to be merely governed by chance. No one seriously believes that, and most if not all of our ethical, cultural, and social systems are predicated on our lives and acts having more moral valence than they would ever have if there were just the products of chance. That part of the human experience, as well as how we physically became who we are, needs explaining."

Inventing an explanation does not mean you have explained it, though, and there's no reason to think Genesis (or any other part of the bible) is anything but fabricated myth.

Your entire "chance" argument seems befuddled. Our social systems are no more magical than those of the bonobo. They're just more complicated and calculated because we have bigger brains than they do.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 2:29 PM

Swells - I'm not discussing what Christians or anybody else says about their particular omnipotent being. I'm just looking at whether or not the idea of an omnipotent omniscient being makes any sense at all.

To the second point, the reader exists in my universe, not in the book's universe. I'm not omnipotent with regards to him, I'm omnipotent to the things within the book. The characters would never know about the change, unless I wanted them to know.

Posted by Tel | April 24, 2008 2:35 PM

MLJ -- Bring me the Bible of the bonobo, and I will read it.

As for the "truths" of science -- come again? I thought that science was all about developing hypotheses and theories, testing them, finding ones that explain the facts better, and then arriving at new ones. I guess physics is a false religion because it shifted from Newtonian to Einsteinian to quantum mechanics. When did natural selection become the gospel?

Posted by JohnnyD | April 24, 2008 2:46 PM

johnnyD wonders: "MLJ -- If's religion is sham, and I suppose in your view all moral systems, and it's all just natural selection and chance -- if that's the deal, why are you outraged at torture? Why are you so outraged about everything Republican do? What reason do you have to expect anything better of anyone?"

These are very stupid questions that only a theist would ask, Mr. D.

I'm outraged by torture because I'm a sentient human being who has been raised in the Western tradition and I've chosen what I think are the best aspects of that tradition as my guiding moral principles. Your inane harping on "chance" is irrelevant once the notion of choice settles in.

Theistic morons like to pretend that atheism - or even secularism - inevitably leads to moral vacuums, but that's only the case in your fevered little imaginations.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 2:48 PM

johnnyD, Your assertion that some things need explaining is a good one. I do not personally think evolutionary theory is as advanced as it needs to be to account for human morality, etc. That isn't the same as my saying I don't think it can ever account for it. There was a logician who once said that science is a boat we have to constantly rebuild while keeping it afloat. In short, science itself seems in some non-trivial way to be an evolutionary process. However, I don't hold that as a negative. I think it is a positive and the reason the scientific method is far superior to other means of forming beiefs. It is a self-correcting, self-expanding enterprise.

On the other hand, it is not only the mental realm in which new forms of order can occur, that exhibit properties not previously existing. There are chemical solutions for instance, where two solutions can be put together with a result of an oscillating system that changes color in a periodic cycling. The periodic cycling didn't exist before the combination of the two solutions and so is what is called an emergent property of the system of that interaction. Nothing magic about that. I suspect that if one felt it necessary that it could be understood at the level of physical chemistry.

I think the best we can say at this time is that human consciousness is, in some way, a similar kind of emergent property, one that we don't understand very well yet. But, progress is being made and appeals to the supernatural probably are not going to be necessary to explain it.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 2:51 PM

MLJ -- Hhmm ... and I wonder what parts of the Western tradition lead you to condemn torture? Sure wasn't those Greeks, who gave us science. Those pagans had not qualms with slavery, torture, killing the conquered.

It seems like there really is some Jesus in the MoeLarryAnd Jesus. What a blessed day!

Posted by JohnnyD | April 24, 2008 2:55 PM

Johnny says: "As for the "truths" of science -- come again? I thought that science was all about developing hypotheses and theories, testing them, finding ones that explain the facts better, and then arriving at new ones. I guess physics is a false religion because it shifted from Newtonian to Einsteinian to quantum mechanics. When did natural selection become the gospel?"

When did creating straw men become the preferred argumentative tool of traditionalists?

"MLJ -- Bring me the Bible of the bonobo, and I will read it."

Just read the Republican Party platform instead.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 2:56 PM

"Natural selection is merely a tag for a logical tautology whereby certain chance mutations occur and enable the "fittest" to survive, the "fittest" being defined as those that survive. See, we can play these omnipotent-type logical games all day and it doesn't advance the ball one inch."

Um, wrong. Please play again after reading a few books. Thank you.

Posted by James F. Elliott | April 24, 2008 2:58 PM

Tel, I'm trying to take you seriously here but it's not a question I want to spend a lot of time on. You are welcome to spend as much time on it as you wish. I would still point out that I was talking about the omnipotent God of the Christians which is not related to the kind of omnipotence you are talking about.

I would still argue that you would not, indeed, be omnipotent in relation to your book. For instance, you cannot write your book and not write it at the same time. Either choice you made would have consequences for denizens of your book that would be different for them depending on which choice you made.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 2:59 PM

Re: Isn't there a corresponding rise in atheism alongside scientific advancement?

Hard to tell. It could just be that as religious institutions cease to exercise any real social control (either through explicit laws or through softer means like ostracism and disapproval) atheists are more willing to come out their closets. How many atheists would have admitted to it publicly in, say, 16th century Spain?

Re: If the Christian God is omnipotent (one of the key attributes) then by definition that God would have an infinite number of means at his disposal to accomplish any and every end in ways that do not involve evil

This is not true, and it represents a very shallow understanding of the term "infinite" (as implied by "omni-"). Consider the set of all even numbers-- infinite, no? But can God make the number "1" belong to that set? The "omni" in God's omnipotence means only that God can do anything that is logically possible. He cannot do things that are logically impossible like make an odd number even. I propose that creating a finite, independent world that is without imperfection is one of those logically impossible things as well.

Re: What sort of monster would create a sentient race while arranging the universe in such a way that most of them would end up being tortured forever?

While you can certainly find Christians who believe that way, it is not universal Christian doctrine. Since ancient times there have been Christians (including some renowned theologians) who have argued for the possibility of universal salavation.

Posted by JonF | April 24, 2008 3:15 PM

Well, it is just an analogy, but I do think that it's a pretty good argument against the idea that omnipotence is self-contradictory (whether for the Christian God, the Muslim God, Chuck Norris, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster). I do have to follow the rules of this universe when I write the book (or not). I can't write and not-write it at the same time. But the book's characters don't exist if I don't write it.

Posted by Tel | April 24, 2008 3:20 PM

Johnny replies: "MLJ -- Hhmm ... and I wonder what parts of the Western tradition lead you to condemn torture? Sure wasn't those Greeks, who gave us science. Those pagans had not qualms with slavery, torture, killing the conquered."

Nor did most Christians, of course. If you've actually read the bible you'll find your sky fairy ordering more than one slaughter - including the genocidal (down to the last quivering infant) killing of the Amalekites.

The current pack of American torturers are sky fairy enthusiasts, too, which is no shock.

But in fact Socrates is very much a part of my pantheon. Start there, forget your silly myths, and perhaps someday you too will condemn torture and mean it.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 3:20 PM

Tel, understood. The argument did give me pause and made me think. That is always a good thing. I need to be clear about my own premises here. I am operating on the assumption that reality is one whole and that everything is connected to everything else, even if in a multiplicity of universes sort of way. That assumption may not be warranted. I've held it ever since reading David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

It is a premise I need to rethink.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 3:26 PM

T&S Mormon Discussion:

http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4519

Posted by Adam Greenwood | April 24, 2008 3:33 PM

Jon F, I did say earlier that it might be possible to form a coherent concept of God. The sort of god I was ruling out is one not bound by logic which is what I understand most Christians to be asserting for their god.

A god bound by logic might be one place to start on that. I do have to ask myself though, that if a god is bound by logic why not just cut out the middleman and go straight to logic. One response could be that it would keep one from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again. That's a good point. When I read the bible for instance, I try not to throw the baby out with the bath water. There's a fair amount of good stuff in there. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you for instance. The whole stone somebody if they touch a pig's skin stuff doesn't, however, qualify. So, as far as Christianity is concerned, I try to live by what's good of it and let the rest slide away.

Posted by swells | April 24, 2008 3:38 PM

JonF quotes and replies: "Re: What sort of monster would create a sentient race while arranging the universe in such a way that most of them would end up being tortured forever?

While you can certainly find Christians who believe that way, it is not universal Christian doctrine. Since ancient times there have been Christians (including some renowned theologians) who have argued for the possibility of universal salavation."

Yes, of course. But what I wrote has been (and remains) the mainstream Christian tradition. A few outlying theologians don't change that.

I do applaud the efforts of some Christians to distance themselves from some of the more disgusting elements of their religious tradition, though.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 3:45 PM

I agree completely with Dilan's comments at 2:07.

While it's fairly ridiculous to claim that evolution disproves the existence of God or the divinity of Christ, it's even sillier to claim that modern science is fully compatible with a straightforward reading of the Bible. (I'd argue that the Bible itself is internally incompatible with a straightforward reading, but that's a separate discussion). Catholics, who believe in the value of the Church as an institution, seem to handle these contradictions more gracefully than evangelical protestants, who tend to focus more closely on scripture as revelation.

But if one feels the need to graft an evolutionary account into Christian theodicy, I think the first explanation (attributed here to Stephen Barr) has a certain symmetry to it. The Fall works rather well as a metaphor for hominid evolution -- representing the point in history when man achieved sufficient self-awareness to possess free will and the point where God began to hold us morally accountable for our actions.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | April 24, 2008 4:12 PM

LFP writes: "The Fall works rather well as a metaphor for hominid evolution -- representing the point in history when man achieved sufficient self-awareness to possess free will and the point where God began to hold us morally accountable for our actions."

Yes, but only to a point. Remember that the god of Genesis punishes Adam & Eve for eating from the tree that gives them the knowledge of good and evil. Thus they're punished for doing something they lacked the capacity for understanding as a wrongful act.

This would be like sentencing a dog (and all of his descendants) to suffer and die for jumping on the couch after being told not to.

In Christian theology god is presumed to be good, but the god of the underlying mythology is of very questionable character.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 4:28 PM

MLJ – Start with Socrates? How? Which one? Last I checked, Socrates didn’t write anything but was rather a character in the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon and the plays of Aristophanes.

And I don’t recall him being, in any of these incarnations, a nice peace-loving, human rights respecting Christian gentleman -- as I understand you to be from the tone and tenor of your incessant moral scolding. Plato's Socrates entertained these strange ideas like philosopher-kings and noble lies that seem very illiberal and to smack of the sort of foul play for which you condemn the Republicans.

And what about his pupils, who, as you advise, started with Socrates? Look at Plato and that little teaching job with the tyrant of Syracuse; Xenophon, who led a band of mercenaries to replace the tyrant of Persia with another tyrant, Cyrus; Alcibiades, leader and instigator of that Sicilian expedition, and who also had stints serving Sparta and Persia; or Critias, who led the group of Thirty Tyrants who overthrew the Athenian democracy. They started with Socrates but didn't exactly end up where you are.

And if you actually read the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon (which is a dialogue with a tyrant), you would see that that there was a certain affinity between Socrates and tyrants. The inconsistency of his life and conduct with democracy and civil society generally was the reason, after all, why the Athenians put him to death.

You really have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?

Don’t worry Socrates would have loved a moral scold and avowed Bible-thumper thumper who, it turns out, was unwittingly motivated by Christian morality and tripped all over himself when he tried to explain himself.

Posted by JohnnyD | April 24, 2008 5:00 PM

Actually, the ideas of evolution explain a small part of reality, mainly the micro-evolution by natural selection within species. Beyond that they don't come close to explaining the "origins" of species or life. The Darwinists who move metaphysically beyond this to a materialist explanation of life bring us no further than Democritus and other materialists who wrote over a two millennia ago.

Moe, Larry, and Jim in condemning torture merely upholds C.S. Lewis's thesis that right and wrong prove the meaning of the universe is essentially moral, resulting from a created structure. Otherwise his view of torture is merely opinion.

People bogged down in naturalistic views of the universe should read The Beginning of Wisdom:
Reading Genesis by Leon R. Kass, a brilliant 728 page explication of Genesis.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | April 24, 2008 5:05 PM

I have little interest in jousting with the atheist potshots addressed in Theology 101, but I have to object to the sloppy usage of "universe" that posits many universes.

If we're going on the definition of the universe as "All that is," there can be only one. Talk of "other universes" destroys a very useful catch-all concept.

Posted by Kevin Jones | April 24, 2008 5:22 PM

Johnny replies: "MLJ – Start with Socrates? How? Which one? Last I checked, Socrates didn’t write anything but was rather a character in the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon and the plays of Aristophanes."

I'm not familiar with the writings of Jesus, either, chuckles. Are you really this stupid or is it an act?

"And I don’t recall him being, in any of these incarnations, a nice peace-loving, human rights respecting Christian gentleman -- as I understand you to be from the tone and tenor of your incessant moral scolding."

From your own posts I understand you to be a clueless fool, but then that's what you are. Meanwhile I'm certainly not a Christian.

"And if you actually read the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon (which is a dialogue with a tyrant), you would see that that there was a certain affinity between Socrates and tyrants. The inconsistency of his life and conduct with democracy and civil society generally was the reason, after all, why the Athenians put him to death."

Putting him to death was an act of tyranny in my thinking, but apparently not in yours. I dispute your characterization of his thinking - he was a critic of the democracy of his time but he wasn't a supporter of the Thirty Tyrants, either.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 5:25 PM

More leavittry: "Moe, Larry, and Jim in condemning torture merely upholds C.S. Lewis's thesis that right and wrong prove the meaning of the universe is essentially moral, resulting from a created structure. Otherwise his view of torture is merely opinion."

Of course Petey Leavitt doesn't think torture is wrong, since he fully supports Dumbya & the Bushpigs. This upholds my thesis that most Christians are full of shit when they claim to have a developed and non-relativistic moral structure.

Petey's morality is essentially that of Herod.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 5:33 PM

Kevin Jones says: "I have little interest in jousting with the atheist potshots addressed in Theology 101"

Of course you don't. And which theology was YOUR 101 in?

One man's theology is another's mythology. It's amazing how you can have a field of study based on nothing.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | April 24, 2008 5:39 PM

in the work I mentioned, is to present a proof that contradiction implies everything.

Popper first proved this? I'll take your word for it, I guess, but I'd have imagined it was a trivial proof even in Euclid's day, really. Certainly, if nobody proved this once symbolic logic entered the picture I am thinking that my intellectual predecessors are a bit overrated.

Seriously -- anyone with basic knowledge of logic can prove this, you don't have to cite Popper as some super-authority. It suggests something fishy rather like citing Russell and Whitehead for 2+2=4.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | April 24, 2008 6:08 PM

What I would think one would want to do if one were inclined to spirituality is to construct a religious narrative from the ground up that is consistent with natural selection.

There's something odd here. This statement is rather like Dilan saying "What I would think one would want to do if one were inclined to miniatures as a hobby is to construct a dollhouse from scratch, not to start from a kit, because you'll get a better house than if you build some old design like a Victorian or a Tudor. I mean, they didn't know much about architecture then!"

It first seems to imply that this is all sort of a "hobby" for those "so inclined." But it also assumes one epistemology to rule them all, really, and that the knowledge from empirical science useful in thinking about natural selection is very relevant to this whole enterprise in a way that it probably isn't.

It's strange. Beyond our obvious differences in other aspects, Dilan (and Moe) (who certainly have more legal knowledge and training than I do) seem to be inclined to use "empirical science" (which they don't seem to have much deep background in) as their one hammer for nailing everything (in a sense), while the somewhat more scientifically knowledgeable Hector and I are not "so inclined."

I really think some of this is the problem Newman identified of people, whether scientists or theologians or whoever, to dislike having to manage multiple epistemologies (with somewhat overlapping subjects presumably drawn from one underlying reality), and just picking one (theology or their notion of the empirical method) and stickin' with it.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | April 24, 2008 6:20 PM

Marquis:

You are assuming too much. I am agnostic, not atheist. I do think that any posited God needs to be consistent with what we know. And we know more now than we did in the past.

Thus, whereas thousands of years ago, I am sure many were prepared to believe in the Genesis creation stories and that God created the animals after Adam and had him name them, nowadays that sort of thing is not really consistent with the fossil record.

That's an obvious one. Ross' post is really good because it points to a less obvious one-- how evolution calls into question basic Christian beliefs about the nature of sin and the fall of mankind.

I think you are eliding two different concepts: (1) excluding all possibility of knowledge based on faith rather than science, and (2) excluding the possibility that science is wrong about observed and tested hypotheses and that religious texts written thousands of years ago by comparatively more ignorant people were right.

I endorse (2). I think anyone who believes, for instance, that evolution or the big bang must be incorrect despite all the evidence for these things because the Bible says so is making a gross error.

However, I have never endorsed (1). It seems to me that so long as the bounds of scientific knowledge are respected, one can posit theological explanations for things we don't know.

What I criticize is the desire to meld thousands-of-years-old beliefs to implausibly fit the bounds of science, rather than taking what science has well established as a given and taking a fresh look at what else may be out there without the baggage of old, wrong religious beliefs.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 24, 2008 6:41 PM

Thus, whereas thousands of years ago, I am sure many were prepared to believe in the Genesis creation stories and that God created the animals after Adam and had him name them, nowadays that sort of thing is not really consistent with the fossil record.

Ok, thanks (genuinely) for the clarification. I think Moe's more in the Asimov-on-a-drunk mode (which I can respect in a man, really).

I guess my problem is that there's not much bending needed on some of this -- St. Augustine didn't see Genesis as literal empirical event history, and had a fairly "sophisticated" understanding of metaphor and genre in Scripture. As metaphor for events that are utterly impossible to describe in terms comprehensible to the folks of those times and that I suspect are STILL impossible to describe in useful ways other than pure mathematics plus very broad (abstractive rather than "correct") terms to moderns, Genesis does just fine.

That is, the Biblical account isn't _trying_ to give literal narratives of anything science has since changed. The evolution issue IS interesting, in that it's not a "factual dispute" (almost impossible here, though not quite), but more of a "does this feel like it fits with that?" problem. I still think the evolution problem is much the same as the basic problem of evil, though, and not really raised (or helpfully answered by) anything we know now we didn't know then. Does that make sense?

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | April 24, 2008 6:55 PM

That is, the Biblical account isn't _trying_ to give literal narratives of anything science has since changed. The evolution issue IS interesting, in that it's not a "factual dispute" (almost impossible here, though not quite), but more of a "does this feel like it fits with that?" problem. I still think the evolution problem is much the same as the basic problem of evil, though, and not really raised (or helpfully answered by) anything we know now we didn't know then. Does that make sense?

It makes sense. I think Ross is right, however, that the evolution issue is more than simply the problem of evil but is rather an issue about the history of mankind. The Bible tells a narrative which uses history to render a conclusion about morality and sin, and Ross' post intimates that the history is wrong, so why should we believe the conclusion? That's different than simply saying "how could a good God allow evil?".

I also think you are minimizing how much is clearly wrong in the Bible. Noah's Ark, for instance, clearly didn't happen. Abraham, if he existed at all, assuredly had a background and life quite different from what is portrayed in Scripture. And it would be one thing if this were just armchair philosophy, but these issues actually play out in the modern world-- a lot of damage is done, for instance, by the belief that God permanently "gave" the Jews Biblical Israel.

But I accept your main point, which I take to be that if one doesn't think the Bible is that inconsistent with what science is telling us, my point carries less force.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 24, 2008 7:26 PM

Re: sort of god I was ruling out is one not bound by logic which is what I understand most Christians to be asserting for their god.

While there are anti-rationalist sects out there that might agree with your notion of a God not bounded by logic, traditional Christianity most definitely does not. As I mentioned, medieval Christian theologians came up with various proofs of what God Cannot Do, and the Church did not condemn them as heretics-- indeed, one of them is the official Roman Catholic theologian. More recently Pope Benedict stirred up a huge brouhaha when he pointed out that Chraitisnity's God is bounded by reason while in Islam (and in some Protestant sects) God is not so bounded, as you posit.

Re: if a god is bound by logic why not just cut out the middleman and go straight to logic.

You're close to something here. Logic is not independent of God: it is an emanation of his very nature. God cannot be illogical because God is logic.

Re: A few outlying theologians don't change that.

Um, they're not outlying, though I admit they're little read in the West. But some of these guys are among the ancient Doctors of the Church.

Re: This would be like sentencing a dog (and all of his descendants) to suffer and die for jumping on the couch after being told not to.

Would you not devise some punishment for disobeying you? And of course a reward for obeying. However, there is another viewpoint here: the punishment was not arbitrary at all, but rather was the direct consequence of the act itself. Rather like telling a child not to eat something poisonous because he will suffer and die as a result.

Re: Abraham, if he existed at

What about Abraham strains credulity? I'll grant you his age and Sarah's, and the miraculous conversations with God. But the secular details don't seem too very far off from what we know about the era in that part of the world.

Posted by JonF | April 24, 2008 10:11 PM

As a liberal Catholic, evolution forced one huge re-evaluation of my interpretation of my faith. Once I read Robert Wright, it was immediately obvious to me that many things that I'd attributed to fallen human nature were better explained as the fact that evolutionary pressures built human beings with a built-in tendency to diverge from modern Judeo-Christian morality. (Examples: (1) the difficulty many men have in being monogamous, especially if the man is high status or the wife is post-menopausal (2) the temptation many stepparents seem to have to make the home unfriendly to their stepchildren, to the advantage of their bio children (3) genocide of people of other ethnicities. There are plenty more examples.)

Basically, it became impossible for me to believe that some human decision (eating the apple!) was responsible for our "fallen" nature. It became clear to me much of the problem was due to evolution, and evolution seems to be the engine of our creation chosen by God.

Posted by Anne E | April 24, 2008 10:32 PM

JonF quotes and replies: "Re: This would be like sentencing a dog (and all of his descendants) to suffer and die for jumping on the couch after being told not to.

Would you not devise some punishment for disobeying you? And of course a reward for obeying. However, there is another viewpoint here: the punishment was not arbitrary at all, but rather was the direct consequence of the act itself. Rather like telling a child not to eat something poisonous because he will suffer and die as a result. "

No, I would not punish the dog. I think anyone who would is... what's the technical term... oh, yes, "fucked in the head."

I would chase the dog off of the couch repeatedly. Sooner or later it would get the message, I think.

Applying the punishment (back to A & E) to the descendants ad infinitum is both arbitrary and rather insane. But then I think the Fall story is simply repulsive nonsense - and it smells like a set-up on the part of old Yahhoo besides.

It's actually hard to take such intense bullshit seriously enough to talk about it seriously. These stories are interesting on many levels, but the theology arising from them is idiotic.