Evolution and Emergence

Abstract

It is an extraordinary thing that an idea that in Darwin’s time (and to Darwin himself) appeared so alien to and indeed destructive of Christianity should now prove so fruitful for the purpose of finding an expression of Christian faith appropriate for a scientific and secular age. The idea of evolution and the emergence of new forms of being – not simply in the biological sphere but in the cosmos as a whole and in human history itself – has in fact provided Christian theology with a new paradigm within which to conceptualise such basic elements of faith as the notion of creation, the doctrine of God’s incarnation in Jesus, the indwelling in us of the Holy Spirit, and the function of the Church in the world. My aim in this article is to outline the steps taken that have made this possible, and to provide a sketch of the theology that results. In my recent work I have relied on many thinkers in this project, especially on the work of Karl Rahner and his “Christology within an evolutionary view of the world”, but also visionaries such as Teilhard de Chardin and, in more recent times, Brian Swimme. The opposition to Darwin’s ideas when they first appeared, particularly that of public figures such as the Bishop of Oxford, has become so notorious that any sympathy with them from those who felt them to be compatible with Christian faith has been largely overlooked. Yet from the very first this was forthcoming, in spite of public opinion. One must remember that at the time Christian orthodoxy was almost universally held to imply what is now seen to be a seriously mistaken view of biblical inerrancy, as well as being bound up with the soundness of the design argument as advanced by Paley and others. Hence any acceptance of evolutionary ideas had somehow to be fitted in to the notion of design as well as a revision of one’s attitude to scripture. One even finds Darwin himself writing, in a letter to Asa Gray the Harvard botanist, “With respect to Design, I feel more inclined to show a white flag than to fire my usual long-range shot…If anything is designed, certainly man must be” (Clark 1984:121). And in the Origin itself: “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.” To which, in the second edition, he added “by the Creator” (Clark 1984:150). Very soon after the publication of Darwin’s “dangerous idea” attempts began to be made to see in evolution God’s method of creation, or at least as God-directed, whether by intervention or not. And some thinkers, such as Alfred Wallace in particular, made a distinction between the evolutionary origin of the human body and the immediate creation by God of the human soul. A letter from Sir Charles Lyell, the famous geologist, to Darwin is very revealing in both these respects: I reminded him (Alfred Wallace) that as to the origin of man’s intellectual and moral nature I had allowed in my first edition that its introduction was a real innovation, interrupting the uniform course of the causation previously at work on the earth. I was therefore not opposed to his idea that the Supreme Intelligence might possibly direct variation in a way analogous to that in which even the limited powers of man might guide it in selection, as in the case of the breeder and horticulturalist. In other words I feel that progressive development or evolution cannot be entirely explained by natural selection. I rather hail Wallace’s suggestion that there may be a Supreme Will and Power which may not abdicate its function of interference, but may guide the forces and laws of Nature (Clark 1984:134). It would be some time before Christian theology was able to detach itself from the argument from design, and even longer before it felt able to abandon the idea of an intervention in world process by God in the case of the creation of the human soul, let alone the Incarnation. But the compatibility of the evolution of new species and Christian faith was an idea that only strengthened with the passage of time. This is exemplified by the following passage from a sermon given to the University by Charles Gore, later Bishop of Oxford, in 1894.