Reconciling God and Evolution

Last Thursday was the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. The occasion prompted much commentary about the conflict between religion and evolution. As in the case of many scientific discoveries through history, much of organized religion resisted Darwin’s insights about natural seletion. Some conservative denominations still do.

One reaction to a clash between science and religious doctrines is to rethink the doctrines. However, the general response of organized religion has been to resist the findings of science until the facts become so overwhelming that religion has to give way. That process is underway now for evolution and will be underway some day for our understanding of creation itself.

In general, there are three broad approaches to reconciling God and evolution. One way is to reject the Darwinian conception of evolution altogether. For example, religious conservatives who endorse Intelligent Design deny that species develop through random mutation and natural selection. Instead, they argue that all species (and everything else in nature) are elements of a complex plan put into effect by a divine creator. That approach provides a beautiful and inspiring explanation of a complex organ such as the eye, but it has the weakness that it is radically inconsistent with the scientific evidence. The history of life on earth is a story of imperfect biological structures, millions of extinct species, and incremental development over billions of years. Real living things fall far short of an idealized Intelligent Design.

A second approach is to accept the basic elements of evolution but to argue that God put evolution in motion and somehow “controls” it. This preserves the conception of a divine creator God but it requires considerable intellectual gymnastics to reconcile the actual results of evolution with the benevolent control by God. Why would a loving God allow evolution to result in painful and debilitating genetic defects, a human body that allows cancer to destroy innocent children, and species, including our own, that are vulnerable to extinction? The problem with both approaches is that they are premised on the conception of God that we inherited from our pre-scientific ancestors. In other words, the challenge is not the conflict between God and evolution. It is how we think of God.

The third approach, and the one that makes the most sense, is to say that God has nothing to do with evolution. That is because God is not the anthropomorphic being that the authors of the Old Testament imagined. We should stop worrying about reconciling evolution with the notion that God created man in his own image. The truth is the reverse. Our pre-scientific ancestors created God in man’s image, whether they were the ancient Jews, the inventors of the Greek and Roman Gods, or the early Hindus who conceived of Vishnu and Krishna. In The Uncertain Believer, I explain that the essential characteristic of God is not the raw power to control nature and defeat enemies, the quality admired by our ancestors. The essential quality of God is the power to inspire us to be as perfect as can be. That leads to a very different view of God and one that is perfectly compatible with evolution and, indeed, with all of science.