Did Darwin Kill God? Conor Cunningham on Creationism and Darwinism
Wherever did the idea that evolution is a problem for the Christian faith come from? The standard narrative simply presumes the conflict was automatic. The contemporary creationist view is taken to be the standard view of pre-Darwinian Christianity and contemporary Christians who do not espouse that view are seen as compromising their faith with science.
This is all non-sense. Creationism is an entirely modern phenomenon, one that holds a picture of God that is very difficult to square with the broader Christian tradition. Intelligent Design, which tries to reconcile God and modern science, is perhaps even worse in this regard. Its attempt at reconciliation makes a mockery of science and theology. In my view, that is the necessary outcome of trying to reconcile two things that are not at odds.
I wrote a paper a few years back about creationism and ID as bad theology, not just bad science. I had toyed with the idea of turning the basic ideas in it into something for publication, but now that Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea is out, that seems superfluous. Nevertheless, I will probably share it here at Vox Nova in the near future.
In any case, Cunningham’s basic ideas have been turned into a one-hour BBC special that I thought might be of interest to our readership. Cunningham shows that the standard narrative we have been given about evolution as a challenge to the faith is historically untenable and theologically suspect. While a one-hour popular special will obviously be forced into superficiality at points (e.g., many Catholics would like more nuance on what it means to read the Bible “literally”), I suspect Cunningham’s book goes into much more depth. Though I have not yet read it, the endorsements alone (from luminaries like Slavoj Zizek, Charles Taylor, Robert Sokolowski and Stanley Hauerwas) give one reasons for hope.
Here is a quote from the special to whet your appetite:
“It is my contention that Darwin’s theory of evolution did not challenge God in the 19th century, nor did it challenge God in the 20th century, despite claims made by creationism. The only reason people thought it did was because of the noise, furor, and cacophony caused by creationists. But I don’t think that creationism is a true heir to the Christian tradition. Rather they are a modern anomaly, an aberration, a product of 20th century anxiety.”
The special is here broken into 4 parts. The final 3 are below the cut off.
As a complete side-track, is there anything that so clearly demonstrates the proximity of societal collapse as the commentary available under videos such as this on Youtube? Egads.
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one.
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I agree with you, strongly, that creationism and it’s pretentious cousin Intelligent Design Theory are peculiarly modern constructs, not in keeping with a traditional understanding of Christianity, and that evolution and Christianity are not in conflict. That said, one part of the “where did this come from” is very easy to answer: Darwin himself.
Obviously, I think he was wrong in seeing his scientific discoveries as grounds for gradually losing his Christian faith, and that the reasons for his losing that faith have to do with the particular weaknesses and intellectual fads found within the Anglicanism of that time, but Darwin’s own wistful abandonment of religion and his supporter Thomas Huxley’s much more bulldog-ish anti-religious arguments founded in evolution provide a pretty clear source for the narrative.
I am looking forward to watching this with a completely open mind—this evening, with luck. I’ll wait until after I have seen it to point out how wrong Conor Cunningham is.
Of this I have no doubt.
When was “the beginning of the history of man”?
Who were our “first parents”?
It seems to me that to truly believe in evolution, one can’t believe there was a beginning to the history of man and that it all started with “first parents.” God picking two (or thousands) of proto-humans and fundamentally altering them in a supernatural way to create a new kind of creature is not a part of Darwinian evolution. Sure, if you “fix” Darwinism in this way, then it is not incompatible with Christianity, or maybe I should stick to Catholicism. It is not difficult for me to imagine that God created a universe in which evolution took place and I am one of its outcomes. But that is not what the Catechism says. It basically says our first parents were not Adam and Eve who ate forbidden fruit, but two other people who did something very wrong. (If there were in fact two historical figures, the parents of the human race, who did something really wrong, I would like to know who they were and what they did rather than have a figurative story about it.) We have discussed before what a difficult problem evolution creates for the doctrine of Original Sin. It seems almost insoluble to me.
I have only seen the first half so far. Actually, there’s some pretty good stuff in it. I have been spending a fair amount of time over at First Things, where there are a lot of biblical literalists (or very close to biblical literalists). I think they would be rather outraged at this documentary.
David,
You may be interested in this book:
Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation
I just picked it up myself and haven’t read it yet, but if it is half as good as the last Schwager I read, it will be well worth your time.
About the First Things writers being outraged: David Bentley Hart, who writes there from time to time (and has written on the issue of the new atheists) is one of the many, formidable minds who endorsed Cunningham’s book. Hart writes:
“Cunningham has taken the time to immerse himself in the literature of contemporary evolutionary biology (of which he provides a far better and far more probing general treatment than does, say, Richard Dawkins), and as he is deeply grounded in the whole tradition of philosophical theology, he produces an argument that casts a brilliant light on the innumerable and inevitable intersections between evolutionary theory and metaphysical speculation. This book is a signal achievement, a wonderful antidote to the tiresome caricatures and diatribes constantly generated these days by the preening apostles of doctrinaire materialism.”
Well, who am I to argue with Zizek? But seriously, I think one thing that is a problem is if Scripture can be only figurative on one level on such an important thing as the origins of the universe, why must it be so darn fundamentalist on who I can sleep with, or whether tab A needs to go into slot B, and so on? Even JPII, at the beginning of the theology of the body, talks about Genesis being a “myth”? Well, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, if it’s a myth, the hell with it. I think centuries of people thought that there cosmogonies were literal, otherwise, they’re worthless. This is the case with the Aristotelian theory of the universe: if he was so wrong on that account, why believe him in terms of ethical or epistemological questions? The ancients didn’t separate their philosophies in terms of ethical questions, scientific questions, and so on. If you are so lackadaisical about one part of the Bible and eager to point out that it’s only a symbol, and so on, then how can you be so darn literal about Christ’s resurrection, or sodomites going to Hell, and so on?
Agreed, the Dawkins crowd are poor philosophers who don’t understand religion (Zizek doesn’t either, but that’s sort of beside the point). And creationism, like other fundamentalisms, is a modern creation. But if religion cannot really give answers to the nature of reality (or physical reality, same thing) then it is no longer the de facto gatekeeper of truth, which makes the whole Vatican whining about secularist hegemony all the more pitiful. It is clear who the trend setter is now, even for the common man, and it doesn’t wear a mitre.
This strikes me as a totally false problem. If it is not clear from just looking at them that Genesis requires a different hermeneutic than Romans and that they both require a different hermeneutic from Revelation, I’m not sure what to tell you. Now, that doesn’t mean that every single question about what to take literally is easily answered (the question about homosexual acts, for instance, requires careful work, not proof-texting), but the basic framework is pretty clear. The suggestion that the Bible should be literal on the question of the origins of the universe if any moral teaching is to be credible strikes me as a total non-sequitur.
And why “to hell with myth”? What’s wrong with myth? I’m far more inclined to think that the first few chapters of Genesis are useless if they are history. Surely the people who edited chapters 1 and 2 could see that there were blatant contradictions in the timeline!
While I don’t go as far as Bald, I see the dilemma here. I’ve often thought along the same lines – we’ve re-interpreted so much of what was once considered objective truth in light of new revelation, that it does beg the question of what we will be re-interpreting in 100 or even 1,000 years? The resurrection? Jesus’ existence itself? You can create a completely coherent mathematics of Christianity without believing in any of what we consider fundamental today.
If yesterday’s truth is today’s myth, then what does tomorrow bring?
But the people who wrote (and edited) the first few chapters of Genesis knew they were writing myth. That is patently obvious to me. Could we say that about John the Evangelist?
Oh, and since when is myth not truth? Yesterday’s myth is today’s truth!
Isn’t that exactly the problem? Genesis’ figurative language is patently obvious to you, but you have the benefit of centuries of scientific and historical development to help form your opinion. I would wager very strongly that most of christian history assumed the opposite – at least with regards to Adam and Eve, which apparently is still as issue (see David’s post above).
Yesterday it was taught that Adam and Eve were individuals. Today there is significant evidence to suggest the opposite. Today it is taught that the resurrection was a historical event. Can we really be assured that the resurrection won’t be interpreted figuratively in 100 years?
Yesterday’s myth may be today’s truth, but as a consequence that also means that what we believe to be historical today may in fact be myth. In the grand scheme of things that may be ultimately irrelevant, but then wherefore do we feel qualified to spread a gospel we cannot ultimately be sure we even have right?
But even St. Paul used Genesis figuratively. See Romans 5-6. Whether or not he thought Adam was a historical character doesn’t seem to change what he does with the text as a piece of theology. It may be the case the the bulk of Christian people have read Genesis as history at times when the vast majority had little to no education, but the broad Christian tradition has never read Genesis as if it needed to be literal history in order to be true.
I’m really not worried about what will happen to our belief in Resurrection in such a system, because I don’t see the radical change you’re seeing on creation. The continuity far outweighs the discontinuity here and the theological point remains the same as it always was. And besides, Resurrection has already been “de-mythologized” by such luminaries as Joseph Ratzinger. I don’t think Resurrection will go the way of a literal reading of Genesis for two reasons: one, there never was a literal reading of Genesis in the manner that moderns imagine and so the change is much less than we think and, two, Genesis and the Gospels are two different kinds of literature as is clear not simply to modern people, but to the Christian tradition right back to the people who wrote them.
Oh and specifically regarding John the Evangelist, can you in all intellectual honesty read the account of what happened after Jesus’ death (saints rising from the grave and appearing all over the place; curtains being torn in half; earthquakes) and really think that was intended to be a purely historical account?
I’m sorry, did I say John was a purely historical account? I certainly didn’t mean to. What I said was that John was not writing myth. Surely there are more options available than newspaper report and pure mythology. John is certainly a much more theological and poetic rendering than the synoptics, but that doesn’t make it myth. Whatever its embellishments, it is a story about historical people and historical events written by a witness to those people and events (or his follower). Myth takes place outside of history. John takes place in history, even if it includes many aspects that are more theological than historical.
Of course this means, as Christian tradition has recognized, that John is a different kind of text than the synoptics, even if it is closer to them than, say, Genesis is to 1 Corinthians.
Actually, now that I think about it, there is nothing in Scripture that would be the genre that we call history that, though it had antecedents, basically emerged in in the 18th and 19th centuries. I remember reading Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History in undergrad and realizing how different writing history was understood at the time of its composition. We would certainly never dream of calling Eusebius a “purely historical account” by our standards.
That means that it takes some work to get at the author’s intentions, thus the great value of the historical-critical method, but I don’t think it means everything is open for complete re-interpretation with each new generation. In fact, any re-interpretation’s real aim is to get us back to the original meaning that may have been lost to us as the culture changed. Hence, Athanasius’ use of a previously condemned term in addressing Arianism. The term, which at one time obscured the Church’s faith, was now the best way to express it.
A theologian’s work is never done.
“But if religion cannot really give answers to the nature of reality (or physical reality, same thing) then it is no longer the de facto gatekeeper of truth, which makes the whole Vatican whining about secularist hegemony all the more pitiful. It is clear who the trend setter is now, even for the common man, and it doesn’t wear a mitre.”
So true in many ways – but really this is not one or the other – religion has always been carried forward from generation to generation by generic human beings – if there is any divine spark in this we can perhaps find it in the fact that from the beginning of times our kind has gone forward instilled with a very deep desire to express ourself also in terms of our believes.
Frankly I think Dennett got it exactly right ‘Religion as a Natural Phenomenon’.
Religious believe evolves like everything else – go figure – plenty of space for the true divine indeed.
For me folks like Dawkins et al. that see Darwin and Science as some sort of Demigod’s are fundamentally not all that far away from the very religious Fundamentalist they so deeply despise. They both so deeply need a rather rigid framework of certainty – in my view a laughable quest.
I just saw Noam Chomsky speak here in Toronto. One hopeful secularist in question period tried to get Chomsky to kiss and make up with Hitchens, but Chomsky disappointed the militant atheists in the crowd by calling Hitchens and Harris religious fanatics.
Thanks for the article. I think that some of the reaction that you are seeing from amongst Christians [and other faiths as well] has more to do with the hegemonic rhetoric that is often espoused by scientists themselves. In light of this modern dilemma: Science is the only means to “know something”, many religious groups have attempted to stem this tide or plug the leak that feel exists in their theologies. Perhaps if science were to release its white-knuckled grasp on “knowing”, we might see the waters recede from this argument.
The problem is identified by Tennyson, Brett.
Are God and Nature then at strife?
He goes on to note:
“So careful of the type? but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, A thousand types as gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go…
Persons of Tennyson’s era, who had believed in God’s omnibenevolence, were faced, in light of the geological advancements, with the question of why God would employ such an exceedingly wasteful plan for those he presumably loved.
In discussing the movie “Creation” at my blog, I note how proponents of Intelligent Design (which, like creationism, I reject) will be challenged by Darwin’s rather sarcastic observation regarding “the love he [God] shows for the butterflies by inventing a wasp that lays its eggs inside the living flesh of caterpillars.” Referencing Malthus, and Malthus’ observations regarding the way in which epidemics, famines and wars keep the world’s limited resources in balance with those who would consume such resources, Darwin asks “why this exceedingly wasteful plan?” In light of a Creator often associated with goodness, why does it have to be, as Tennyson describes, nature “red in tooth and claw”?
The problem of evil is certainly a big one, but I’m not convinced that evolution makes it any more of a problem than it was when Job was written.
Very cool, thanks.
Hey Brett! Thanks for posting these vids. I’ll have to take a look see. I recommend also Edward Feser’s blog — he has spent a lot of time arguing against ID. If you’re going to be Sask-side in late July, we’ll have to go for beers!
Could you give us a link to one of his better posts on the topic?
Sorry I won’t be Sask-side until later August. Though I’ve been thinking about asking you what it’s like for a Canadian to live in the States since i will be looking for work soon and the US is the biggest market.
I just watched the whole series. Fantastic! I wrote a review in a the same spirit (http://www.edrev.info/reviews/rev953.pdf ), but this is much more clear and straightforward. Thanks!
Sam
One explanation for creationism and biblical literalism that I have heard is the following explanation:
If you were to divide the hemispheres between east and west where Rome and west of Rome was west and East of Rome East you have different contributions to civilization. Philosophy came from Greece or East Hemisphere. The Abrahamic faiths came from the Middle East/East hemisphere. The religions of the Orient came from the eastern hemisphere as well. The scientific and technological revolutions came from the western hemisphere. The new tradition of biblical literalism comes from the part of the world where literal interpretation is the only way to understand concepts. My instruction manual on my cell phone has to be without error and without metaphor in order for my phone to work or the manual is useless to me. Unfortunately, this mindset is being used for biblical study.
Here’s the key point I would make: Cunningham’s ideas, at least as presented in this documentary, are incompatible with Catholicism. Shortly after the 7-minute mark in Part 3, he says the following:
As I read this, not only does God not intervene in evolution. He does not intervene in history. Now, there are all kinds of problems with talking about a God who is outside of time intervening in history, so it is a more complicated issue than I am going to make it here, but the idea of Catholicism without God somehow intervening in history is impossible. God’s selection of “first parents” to receive immortal souls and start the human race, God’s revelation of himself to the Jews, his laying the groundwork for the Incarnation, the Incarnation itself, the ministry of Jesus, his death and resurrection, the inspiration of the scriptures, the Holy Spirit watching over the Church, the immediate creation of a spiritual soul for each new individual conceived, miracles at Lourdes and Fatima—all these things and many more involve a God who could most definitely “intervene and stop child abuse, stop famine, indeed stop genocide.” Catholicism accepts a God who can intervene but chooses not to. Cunningham apparently doesn’t.
Cunningham makes evolution acceptable—and solves the problem of evil, to boot—by positing a God that it would be futile to pray to, because a God who does not intervene in history is a God who does not answer prayers. I actually think, for me, this may be an acceptable solution to many of my own problems with what I was taught about God. But I don’t see how Catholics can accept a God who does not (and apparently can not) intervene in history, and I am not quite sure how you explain Jesus and the Incarnation if God does not intervene in history.
This is something that I would expect gets more play in the book, but it is not a matter of God not intervening in the sense you lay out here. It is a matter of how God intervenes. Christianity has affirmed that God is a different kind of (for lack of a better word) ‘thing’ than the other things in creation. A necessary being relates to contingent beings in different ways than contingent beings relate to one another. The Catholic faith certainly affirms that God impacts human history, but not that God tinkers with it as one more thing inside the box. In fact, that would undermine most of our proofs for God’s existence. We have traditionally said that there must be something outside the box, to explain the box. Once God is in the box, and only in the box (we do believe in the Incarnation, as you point out), God stops being God. God intervenes in such a way as to work through human freedom and the processes of nature, not as to overrule them. Inspiring the Scriptures is a good example in terms of a comparison with evolution. God worked through human freedom and personality, God did not override them (as is clear in the texts themselves) when producing Scripture. If you have a God who overrides natural phenomena in directing creation to its end, you have a God who works in a different way than the God who inspired the Scriptures. Now, the fundamentalists who believe in creationism or ID also tend to believe that God dictated Scripture, but that is not the Catholic position.
By the way, even in the Incarnation, Christology affirms that God did not override the freedom of the man Jesus of Nazareth, but worked through it. This is why montheletism is a heresy. I think Ratzinger does a nice job on this in Behold the Pierced One, though I’ve read so much Ratzinger lately I may have my books crossed. I’ll try double-check for you.
God intervenes in such a way as to work through human freedom and the processes of nature, not as to overrule them.
How do you square this with the requirements for a miracle for beatification and a miracle for canonization? Does a miraculous cure as a sign of sainthood not require an intervention of God of the same type that would end a famine? Don’t we pray to God for rain? I will grant that trying to deal with the issue of God being outside of time is very difficult, but a great deal of “popular” Christianity is based on the idea that God does indeed intervene in the world, often at the request of human beings. John Paul II, for example, was convinced that the Virgin Mary had saved his life when the attempt was made to assassinate him. While the Church does not insist that anyone believe in particular cases of private revelation, it nevertheless takes the concept perfectly seriously.
It is not necessary to diminish one’s freedom in order to intervene, although if we are to believe Paul was knocked off his horse and blinded, that seems like pretty heavy handed intervention not wholly consistent with personal autonomy. But enlightenment of someone writing scripture certainly seems to me to be intervention from “outside.” What is the difference between a writer who is divinely inspired and one who is not, if there is no intervention.
And of course the Catholic belief that God created the human race either by creating Adam and Eve directly or by letting pre-humans evolve to a certain point and then giving them spiritual souls is about as dramatic an intervention in evolution as one can imagine. Like God being outside of time, a spiritual soul is a very tricky topic, but unless you can come up with a different definition of a spiritual soul, immediately created by God, which leaves the body at death and waits somewhere for the resurrection of the body, it seems to me there is a problem. It will be interesting to see if Cunningham in his book buys the idea of God picking a moment in history to infuse souls. From what he says in the documentary, I am betting he does not, and this puts him at odds with Catholicism.
David,
I think you just asked me to write several books! Fortunately more qualified folks have already written them.
Have you read Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity? It may be a touch “liberal,” but I think it would be a useful starting place for many of your questions. The great thing about reading Ratzinger, apart from his genius, is that you can be pretty sure his solutions aren’t going to be ruled out of court by the CDF.
Also, I don’t think the Bible says Paul was knocked off a horse, that’s small ‘t’ tradition. ;)
From what I understand, Lonergan has done interesting work on miracles and probability.
It seems to me that every serious biblical scholar (which I am not) will have dealt with the question about inspiration and human freedom. Anyone else know a good book to start with?
Also, have you read any James Alison? His The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes would probably be right up your alley.
Brett,
Using Amazon’s “search inside the book,” I found this passage on page 172 of Darwin’s Pious Idea:
It would of course be very dangerous to base my arguments on so little evidence from the book, but it appears to me Cunningham is maintaining man evolved in the same way that butterflies or elephants or, as he says, mushrooms evolved. With no intervention. Evolutionarily speaking (if this is so) the idea of “first parents” makes no sense. Also, it would seem to make no sense for God to create an immortal soul for each individual human that comes into existence. Cunningham seems to me to be saying that we are humans because we evolved to be the way we are, not because God intervened and “infused” a soul.
I understand these are very difficult concepts to talk about in the limited time and space we allow ourselves in a forum like this, but I do believe I have pointed out a problem with Cunningham’s approach that at least raises problems for the popular understanding of Catholicism. And from the little I have seen of Benedict’s speculation on matters like Original Sin, it is far removed from the popular understanding. In fact, it is so far removed that some (not without a certain justification) regard it as heretical. This is not to say it is heretical. But it would mean that the popular understanding of basic doctrines is far removed from the actual doctrines themselves, or at best the popular understanding is such a dumbed down version that it is like saying an atom is like a tiny star with planets orbiting around it. Any science book written for intelligent adults that uses the planetary model of the atom will make it very clear that it is grossly inadequate to describe what an atom really is.
Thanks for all the book recommendations. Nothing makes me happier than getting book recommendations.
I quite like Cunningham here.
One of the reasons I like reading Ratzinger so much is precisely because he is able to articulate things that are far removed from popular understanding, but does so in a way that the vast majority can see that he is faithful to the tradition. Ratzinger is even quite Teilhardian on questions like where man came form and what the infusion of a soul means, but manages not to get himself in trouble. What a great fellow to elect as Pope!
It certainly is the case that popular religiosity is often quite at odds with theological understanding. I think this is a serious problem, but maybe not as serious as professional theologians like to believe. The fact is that holiness does not require great theological articulation. And more than once I have stumbled across uneducated holy people who, when presented with a nuanced theological explanation, look at you as if it were just common sense. Not that they could have said it themselves, mind you, but that’s not the point.
Also, you’re welcome re: the books. Turns out there is very little that makes me happier than giving book recommendations. I’d really love to hear your thoughts on Alison once you’ve had a go at him.
Brett,
Would you say that humans are special in God’s creation not because we have been given spiritual souls, but rather the idea of the soul is an inadequate way of trying to concretize in what ways humans are special? I think we could do without the soul as an nonmaterial entity that is created and “infused” in a person at conception, and exits the person at death, to await reunion with the body at the time of the resurrection of the dead.
I am far too traditional to put it quite like that (I wouldn’t, for instance, call the idea of a soul per se inadequate except in the way that all our language is inadequate), but I think I agree with the general thrust here.
The fact is that we struggle to get reality (esp. spiritual reality) into words and concepts. In Introduction to Christianity Ratzinger deals with the question of the soul by pointing out that Greek ideas about the immortal soul could only be taken up by Christianity once utterly transformed by the biblical idea of a whole spiritual person. Of course, he would acknowledge that much of what later happens in Christianity looks more like the Greek than the Hebrew and to that extent could use rethinking.
Hi David,
I double-checked my notes for you re: montheletism. I have returned the book to the library, but my notes suggest that if you’re interested in how God relates to human freedom in the Incarnation, check out Ratzinger’s Behold the Pierced One, pp. 38-42 and 91-93.
Brett,
Thank you. I would not have believed it likely a few years ago, but I am amassing a Ratzinger/Benedict library.
Introduction to Christianity
Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life
Jesus of Nazareth
Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection
Light of the World
Pope Benedict in America: The Full Texts of Papal Talks Given During His Apostolic Visit to the United States
The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger by Aidan Nichols
Opening Up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation by Jose Granados, Carlos Granados and Luis Sanchez-Navarro
The first two on your list are my two favorites!