Reasoning Evolution with Theology?

With all of the fanfare and controversy in the news surrounding Darwin's bicentennial, I've been toying with various thoughts on evolution and how evolution seems to fit God's overall pattern of behavior.

Re-reading Augustine's On Christian Doctrine recently, I was struck by the sections where Augustine explains that God could directly reveal Himself to every individual if He wanted to, but that He chooses not to. He could have pre-programmed us all with the ability to read without having to learn to read, but He chose not to. He could have angels appear before to interpret the Bible for us instead of having us rely on scholars and preachers, but, again, He chose not to.

And, of course, God could have miraculously written the Bible Himself, if He wanted to but chose not to.

Instead, in all of these cases, He chose the lesser being, Man, to do the creation, the writing, the reading, the interpreting, and the teaching.

And this seems to be a fairly consistent pattern for the God who raises up the lowly.

God might be the inspiration, the Divine Muse if you will, of the Bible, but the Bible arose out of a process of evolution. For all we can tell, it's creation was subject to all of the randomness, competition, adaptation, and, eventually, selection before it reached its current form.

The creation of the Bible was a messy process that yielded a final body with some awkward vestigial organs dangling here and there that we don't quite know what to do with anymore, nor do we even know their original function (and our own vestigial organs are one of the best indicators of our own evolution, according to biologists).

God might have been the Prime Mover of the process of creation, and He certainly keeps His hand involved as a living God, but it seems entirely consistent that He would allow us to be shaped by natural forces the same way He allowed the Bible to be shaped by human forces.

Analogy:
Animals are to Man what Man is to Bible.

It is a miracle is that the canonical texts of the Bible were still recognizably the inspired word of God despite being produced over centuries of human scribbling and squabbling, just as it would be a miracle that Man is recognizable as being in the image of God despite being the product of millions of years of reproductive competition and selection.

Consider even that the authors of many of the Biblical texts may have been no more aware that they were composing what would be considered the Word of God than our animal ancestors were aware that they were producing a species that would some day be shared by the Son of God.

Comments

[Alan]

Peter,
I can't say that I'm immediately very sympathetic to the argument, but perhaps it's because I've misunderstood. However, it seems to me (based on the rest of the post) that your analogy should be something along the lines of:

Animals are to Man what Histories and fables written by men are to the Bible.

[PeterTerp]

Alan,

I'll be the first to admit my analogy has some kinks in it, but I'm not sure "histories and fables written by men" quite captures what I am getting at. Perhaps instead of animals, I should have written "evolution." I was thinking more that selection often (but not always) involves animals taking actions that reshape other organisms -- usually by accident. Animals weren't intending to lead one another to "adapt" into what eventually became man. It was accidental from their perspective (although in hindsight, we can see the hand of God in this).
In the analogy, I was more interested in the force of change than in the object of change. "Histories" and "fables" don't so much lead the changes as have changes thrust upon them. Man affects these stories the way evolution affects bodies. "Animals" was perhaps a confusing term because animals can be both the force of change and the object of change.

[Alan]

I think I see what you mean. I had thought the first term in each part of the analogy was meant to be the "raw material" which, under the influence of Divine Providence, evolved into the second term.

[PeterTerp]

Actually, I was thinking more about this on the drive home, and I think I might want to revert back to "animals" in the analogy, after all.
"Evolution" might be too abstract a concept to balance the concept of man, although I'm still hedgy on "animals."
Maybe the reason that the analogy starts to break down is that animals as a force of evolution don't really create, whereas man does create.
That is, evolution is a process of an animal breeding mutants and subsequently weeding out genes. The mutation is not conscious or willed; the weeding is an unintentional effect of feeding. That isn't quite equivalent to the process of generating texts, editing texts, compiling texts, then canonizing texts...but I think my point is that animals' natural processes of consumption end up unintentionally generating more advanced creatures; man's ancient process of writing religious history unintentionally produced divinely inspired texts. Neither animal nor man quite knew they were instruments -- they were making choices (whether based on instinct or social needs), but what they didn't realize was that those choices providentially yielded a Divinely-willed product.

Of course, there are non-animal factors in evolution, but as I thought more about it, there were also non-authorial/editorial processes involved in the creation of the Bible (wars, fire, decaying manuscripts, linguistic problems, typos, etc).

Really, my point is to argue that we shouldn't expect to be able to point to a particular moment of creation or history and say "Aha! That's the physical evidence proving supernatural intervention!" We can explain pretty much any given part of the Bible or any given part of human anatomy through scientifically sound methods.

We realize God made something or inspired something not by looking at individual parts of its creation process, but by looking at the finished product and recognizing a reflection of God's image in it.