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The miracle of evolution: part of creation

Regular Network Norwich and Norfolk columnist James Knight talks about how the wonder of evolution is part of God's creation in the final part of his series on Bringing Christianity and Science Together.

Here we reach the end of my series on bringing Christianity and science together.  Having shown the importance of such a subject and (hopefully) brought to bear greater awareness of some of the more interesting aspects of science, I now want to take it even further by stating that, far from evolution being one big heretical myth, I think God actually speaks to us through evolution, and that we can take our minds on a special and awesome journey if we think about evolution as God intended us to think about it. 

Evolution was one of those topological secrets – a fact that remained a mystery for so long - perhaps one of those great surprises that God knew He would reveal when the time is right.  For when we look closely, there were hints of it all along – hints that the grand story of creation, death and resurrection are intimated in evolution itself.  It is because living things die that new things can be born, for as genes pass themselves on and bodies die – new life begins.  And just a natural selection requires this process for evolution to work, so too does the nature that God created require life, death and rebirth for His story to be completed.  This is the simulation of an even more astounding fact about reality – that just as species are always transitional – so too is nature.  The vast history of evolution, with all its subtleties and increments, slowly points towards something even more glorious.  This is God’s miracle of evolution; a miracle observed in its finest depths only by those who He created specially to observe it – men and women created in His image.

Evolution reveals an awesome God

When I look at the vastly complex parts of evolution and the vast nexus of evolutionary activity, I find myself more in awe of God, not less.  If quantum mechanics shows us that reality must always be partially veiled (there are hints of this in Job 36:29, Ecclesiastics 11:5, and Isaiah 5:9), the vast evolutionary activity shows us that God has more to say to us through the intricacies of nature than we ever previously realised.  For those that choose to look, there is an incredible story in evolution - I can see God working for the good of our own psychology - the story is more stupendous than we perhaps realise.  The eternity that God has set in our hearts has in it some sense of the desire to praise God for all that we are.  God in fact stirs our heart so that we enjoy praising Him.  Our hunger is not fed until it is fed by Him. 

We can see even from our own human imperfections a story in evolution.  The human eye is not ideally evolved; many human beings have poor vision or lose their good vision at a relatively young age.  Light does not ideally reach the rods and cones without passing through blood vessels.  Our spine is not ideally evolved, neither is our jaw, wisdom teeth, the appendix (which it seems beneficial not to have) - this on the face of it does not seem like the most intelligent of designs, until we see the real reason why.  Everything is running down - we were never meant to find the whole story in nature alone - her imperfections were part of her essence, and so are ours. 

Whatever nature has thrown our way, there is better to come, much better.  If this nature provided the condition for God to humble Himself as a man, the next will be a new creation altogether, a creation in which all His glory will be made known.  We should not be surprised to see God working through a developing process.  Nature is herself full of precursors, there are many events that occur before we predicted they would, and the whole history of animal progression is only one example of this.  Proto-man is to man what nature is to the Heavenly realm - a precursory fact.  Just as the miracles of Christ came before His own grand miracle, the resurrection - the miracle of evolution was decided long before God’s grand miracle in Adam.  When we see miracles we see God telling nature exactly what He wants it to do. 

You must in one sense give up thinking about objections to evolution because of what you hold onto spiritually, for in fact, in the strictest sense every atom is a miracle - it is magic being perceived through our own magical perception.  Every human activity much less every sub-atomic movement pales in comparison to the glorious Divine activity that will be thrust upon our souls when His glory is revealed.  How could anyone think that physical activity should be objected to as an affront to Christ’s work?  There is matter in your body that was once a part of a stellar explosion, matter that was once in a fish, and a dinosaur, even a carrot.  This is the nature of creation, it has no material distinction when broken down; it is the supernatural activity which generates its Divine power. 

Nature is a series of many events, none of which tell a complete story.  The wind blowing across your face and in your eyes is a passed event the moment it stops or the moment you turn away.  But the wind has no end in sight; every event resulted from a preceding event and sets off another subsequent event.  We must not ascribe silly human limitations to God’s creation.  Nature is only limited in the sense that God does what He wants within the framework.  The whole of nature has within it a message; every event and every fact tells us something about the system, and furthermore what we are to become.  Every part of nature’s imperfection can, if we are being attentive, offer us a glimpse of a perfect alternative - we know that we were created for something better than nature herself. 

Those who misunderstand the importance of evolution are so often guilty of seeing things either as profane or pious - and if they set their minds towards the latter they can allow no reasoning when it comes to the former; that is, they will not accept anything to be true of nature that does not shine a pious light in their eyes.  If evolution is true it is as supernaturally created as anything else in creation - for the whole of creation, from the first self-replicating organism right through to the last man born before Christ’s return, will all have been carefully supervised, the laws and regulations for which would have been underwritten long before man developed enough cognitive faculties to take umbrage at his own evolutionary lineage. 

The evolution of cells and organisms is a relatively ungrand system compared with the one that is happening right before our eyes now.  Nature is being rebuilt, day-by day God is turning her (and us) into what He wants it to be.  He is reconfiguring the matter to suit His own plan.  Why should we be so surprised that what went on before us was a reconfiguration of a more primitive nature, a nature which shows how glorious this modern day nature is?  Perhaps the man that thinks about the world and tries to comprehend vast evolutionary timescales and then thinks about what it has become does not look upon our own daily time with feelings of great fortuity and great blessing and privilege.  Surely the man who thinks about the primordial soup can’t help but feel very blessed that God saw to it that the whole trajectory of earthly activity was organised with him in mind. 

Of course, we will not know until the end precisely how physics and metaphysics blend together - you cannot know the value of a five pound note until you understand the British monetary system.  Perhaps it has never occurred to some people how much we can learn from our observations and knowledge; that as regards properties of each, men and beasts share the majority of their own make-up.  How far we have come thus far with such knowledge, and how much further we can go - the multitude of scientific disciplines that are predicated on the fact that all creatures are part of the same large evolutionary tree or web open up immense scientific potential. 

The splendour of science

Those young earth creationists and anti-evolutionists who are prepared to step away from their intransigence and see for themselves the splendour of science and all its achievements will find themselves inside a door they had thought previously was too hard to unlock.  And you can be sure of one thing, our Lord made it so stupendous on purpose, for He knows how much of a glorious liberation knowledge of creation can be, what wonders it reveals to us and what edification it provides for us.  When He gave us the faculty of reason and presented us with the whole history of evolutionary activity on this earth He showed us part of the majesty of creation.  The sinuous twists and turns of natural selection, the species that died out, the species that prospered - all this is part of a big picture, a picture painted for our own benefit. 

What constrains we place on ourselves when we look right through it.  The ancients, when worshipping the celestial bodies, and even when worshipping animals and trees, were wrong; that is, the worship really belonged to the Creator Himself.  But in one way they did feel a little bit of what needed to be felt if the Lord’s wonderful creation was to be seen as it deserves to be seen.  For the whole of creation is one glorious miracle.  And just as we have disgruntled looks at those who direct their worship towards the wrong thing, we see an equal disgruntlement if the opposite happens; for it is only when we begin to sense how awesome God is and how far above creation He is that every bit of matter in the universe, including the physiological human body, seems almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of eternity.  We are even told that the body itself won’t make it past nature. 

Therefore why do people get so offended to think that ‘body’ itself is linked to a chain of evolutionary activity which involves every other physiological creature in creation?  Why do you think that we are more special than the rabbit or the swan?  In fact studying organisms reminds us that in physical terms alone we are not the grandest of God’s creatures - the giraffe, the blue whale, the elephant, the hippopotamus, and of course the dinosaurs, to name but a few - were much more grand in stature.  No, what sets us apart from them is that God so decided at one point in history that He would put Himself into man, that the next stage of the evolutionary process was ready to begin with the first Adam. 

We know full well that the new Heaven and the new earth will only take in that which God has supplemented into the interlocking system.  There have always been hints of it, the wonderful devotional poetry, some great pieces of classic music, the majestic pieces of landscape, true love between two people, the times when numinous awe for the Heavenly realm came across without any earthly distractions, these feelings were hints of it, but they were not quite the real things, not just yet.  And as soon as we try to imagine what the ‘Heavenly’ will be like we immediately destroy the image with some earthly invasion into our thoughts.  And just as we cannot imagine the perfect image, the ideal inner-reification through a thought process, equally we cannot quite see (or some people cannot quite see) the real glory and beauty of nature - beauty, paradoxically, shown through some of the worst parts of nature, for all the time the beauty was to be found shot right past the real reified horror of physical matter. 

As regards a man’s inability to see the real truth behind the evolutionary story, I think his outlook might be like that of a mother’s son who when told by his mum about Heaven asks ‘Will I get to play my computer games as much as I want?’  Upon hearing that there will be no need for computer games in Heaven, her son might regard this fact as the predominant fact about Heaven and look upon it with disappointment.  Of course he will grow out of it.  But at the moment he knows ‘computer’ to be the highest pleasure, he does not know about the strength of the pleasures that need no computers to enhance their quality.  In fact, as he grows older he will of course find such pleasures on earth.  To me the young earth creationist or anti-evolutionist is a little like that, he can’t let go of what he has because he can’t anticipate the real pleasure of a better revelation.  Where revelation waits, he sticks with the circumscribed approach to rationality.  Of course YECs and anti-evolutionists will not be asked to surrender their beliefs in order to see the new creation, only those who are beaten sinners will throw down their weapons.  But I am as certain as I can be that when Christ said He came to give us a full life, He was in favour of our taking on board good evidence when it came, after all He knew that for people of future generations, such as now, good evidence was going to be something which Christians themselves would cite as their principal reason for believing that God did became man and walk the streets of Palestine 2000 years ago.  Is it too much to ask that we confer a similar respect to other kinds of good evidence when they are presented to us?

We are asked how we can reconcile death and extinction seen in evolution before man, with God’s creation?  Well, the whole of creation has been set up for just that.  Even when the supernatural invades the natural and colonises our cognition we see death and extinction happening, we see the death and extinction of all those unhelpful things in nature happening every time we let one of the bad parts of the self die, for we know that Christ is about to fill the vacancies with something more glorious.  In a sense the whole picture of death and rebirth was laid out in allegorical form every time we look at the evolutionary history of biological activity in nature.  The figures of us - death and rebirth, the literal and the metaphorical, extinction and longevity, rationale and foolishness, nature and spirit, mind and matter, truth and falsehood, are all cut apart by the spiritual activity in the interlocking system, for without the generating engine - the driving force behind the system - there are no distinctions between any of these - everything is bound up in the knotted texture of matter. 

But in the case of the former there are opportunities for the creaturely minds to connect with the Divine engine, so that nature and supernature are seen as they were really meant to be seen.  God did not create this long story so that we could live in the dark ages, He created the system so that we could grow into it enough so that we could leave it behind - the system, or simulacrum of the Divine realm, is here for the purposes of a Divine relationship; and in the vast complexities of that system it is, I imagine, tempting to disregard science in favour of an atavistic one 2 one between creature and Creator.  But it need not be the case, for the Lord has so much to reveal about Himself through the complexities of nature, even more so, He has so much more to tell us about the majesty of Heaven from the unmajestic realities in nature herself. 

Those who see evolution for what it has to say are those who are able to see the great paradoxes in nature, for they are one chapter of the whole story.  Evolution has thus far given us hints of all of the great paradoxes and all of the chasms in creation - the evolution that eventuated in man has shown us in variable proportions - death and rebirth, the literal and the metaphorical, extinction and longevity, rationale and foolishness, nature and spirit, mind and matter, truth and falsehood, and most importantly, spiritual activity in the interlocking system - activity between nature and supernature.  But you have to look to the most primary parts of nature, the primordial days of evolutionary progression in order to see the wonders of the Divine working in more advanced creatures.  The vast array of evolutionary activity, which included death and extinction was, in my view, God displaying a blueprint for what creation would later become when the spiritual was added to the physical. 

And if we look carefully we can see, just as the simulacrum of nature is a reflection of the Divine realm, the pre-human evolutionary activity is but a reflection of what nature is to become before she is cast aside for the Heavenly glories.  Everything that happened in a literal sense in evolution; death, extinction and rebirth, happens both metaphorically in the later creation and, when the literal and the metaphorical are harmonised, in the new creation too.  The whole of creation started at the finger of God - it will end in His hand, and in between, the whole rush of natural activity is set out in the blueprint.  And as nature reveals more of herself to us, aided by the Holy Spirit within us, we see that the incipient stages of His creation were to set the patterns for our own death and rebirth.  The interlocking system of nature, including all of its evolutionary history, is the melody which brings together the Spirit and the flesh; therefore Christ and man are brought together too, and out of which will arise, eventually, the instrument for eternity that will wipe away every tear in the world and supplant it with the new creation. 

I am very sorry when I hear young earth creationists saying ‘Does it really matter whether God used evolution or not? - after all, we Christians are all saved anyway if we come to know Christ’. To ask this is to answer your own question at the same time.  To the truly implacable, one feels such sorrow in having to say to them, ‘If science distracts you from following Christ then do without it’ - but what a despairing admission for those that know Christ and find fascination in the beauty of creation. 

To the young earth creationists and anti-evolutionists (if there are any on here) I would like to say this.  If you are the sort of personality who feels threatened by innovation and discovery you will have to close your eyes and ears when they come into your stead.  But there is a price to pay, aside from the ridicule and the ostracism as you wave goodbye to reason and rationality, as you drift off owing science and philosophy and, yes, theology, a big apology, you will, in my view, misrepresent the glorious state of Christian knowing, you will have created a chasm (as many already have) that need not exist; a chasm that our Lord Himself never intended to exist (It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way. Proverbs 19:2). 

For me, the real nature of free devotion comes with the knowledge that ascetic devotion will only impair genuine growth and elucidation.  Where our progenitors looked towards the horizon and saw haze and fog, thanks to an age of genuine scientific enlightenment, we are beginning to see further skies.  Of course I do not mean that this necessarily helps men to become Christians, in fact, it seems the opposite is true.  But the man who is most blessed is the one who has been looking for the clearer skies all the time while at the same time progressing towards them with every desire in his heart to follow Christ towards the horizon, putting Him first every step of the way.  Science will give him, along the way, moral dilemmas (embryology, cloning, etc) but he will know that throughout all this Christ has the answers.  To limit yourself to scriptural doctrine and fail to look outside of that for supplementation is to abandon part of the self, or at least depart from the self’s real needs.  To close our ears and eyes to God’s story in evolution is as if we ran away from education instead of learning.

As for Christians, it is important not to be quarantined from rationale and genuine progression; after all, who will trust us with a fortune if we cannot be trusted with a few pennies?  Who will believe we have the truth about eternity if we fail so gratuitously in simple truths about nature herself?  Nature herself has lots to say to us in her simple form; but we have progressed much further now, nature is no longer simple.  We have progressed so far because we have not been happy to sit back and leave her alone.  As GK Chesterton once remarked, “If you leave a white post alone, it will soon be a black post”. 

I have written this to let you know how much it saddens me that so much Christian worship seems to involve the abandonment of science and rational philosophy.  But I also want the atheists and agnostics to know that from where I’m sitting (and many like me) the Christian faith is based on something wholly rational and that not all of us wish to be immunised from good scientific progression.

We are, of course, still awaiting the true marriage of the self to the Heavenly realm – true blessing has yet to be conferred fully.  But we all know of the hints in nature, and also the hints creeping from outside of nature.  Even the staunchest atheist is not impervious to the disquietude when he is faced with a genuine hint of a ghost; equally, even the strongest man of faith is not impervious to feeling of ‘What if all this is in my imagination?’.  But every experience and doubt and conviction gives us an expression of how real it all is, for we should expect to find pure unadulterated conviction only in things that we have convinced ourselves must be true outside of genuine logical truth (as is the case with many of the cults). 

This is where C.S Lewis and I would part company.  He makes the claim that most of us will never experience a miracle in our lifetime.  No, I think a great many of us experience miracles every day, without perhaps realising the true spiritual state of activity occurring.  In the act of salvation and Divine revelation each one of us has experienced a miracle, and each day as our Lord blesses us with knowledge, wisdom, intelligence, devotion, faith, commitment and the multitude of other abilities without which we would not have the slightest hint of the trajectory of our growth and progression on this wonderful journey - none of them could be factual without the miraculous occurring every step of the way, for nature herself is the miracle in which we can receive that which God has, and wants desperately, to give.  It was always a great error of man to think that that didn’t apply to the multitudinous tenets of human knowledge and understanding that so many Christians desperately attempt to avoid at all costs.

As I finish this off, I can see out of my window on this particular day a sunny spell has broken through the clouds after a day of sporadic rainfall.  I myself can attribute to the weather the effect it has had on my own cognisance and how it has either interrupted my plans or added to them.  But to omniscience, there is much more going on in a sunny day than one individual perspective, for in bringing out the weather for the day, God would have in His plan the moods, activities, feelings and emotions, of everybody affected by it, all the creatures too, perhaps even every atom in range.  Perhaps one rainy day in Norwich is interlocked so as to be inextricable to every event within the interlocking system.  We are, of course, going beyond what we can know.  But one thing of which I am fairly certain, if we are ascribing to God a level of thought which, when brought into earthly activity, affects us as much as I have just said, then we can be quite certain the vast history of evolutionary progression, from abiogenesis, cellular life, natural selection, death, extinction, to the vast array of proto-creatures that preceded the creatures we have today - all of these facts about creation have by being there something that was foreseen by the Divine - some interrelation with our own cognisance; emotions, moods, activities, all of which add something to the system of nature, from which we can learn so much about ourselves, about creation, and, most importantly, about God.