A Creationist Error

I.

We live in a world of many remarkable characteristics, and one such characteristic of this world is that it contains honeybees. Whence did these delicate and complicated little creatures come? Biological research in the past hundred years or so has discovered that creatures such as honeybees emerge through a stunning process of variation and selection that accumulates over generations. We might imagine other explanations, though. Perhaps great magi from the lost city of Atlantis designed honeybees through an arcane art, or aliens from afar sent them to this planet in suspended animation on a spaceship.

These different explanations have a noteworthy feature: they exclude one another. If flower-loving aliens designed honeybees using advanced biological technology and planted them on this planet, then they did not emerge from related terrestrial insects through a process of biological evolution (and vice versa).

II.

What about God? Here we enter into a different ontological realm, for the Christian account affirms God's transcendence. Clever aliens and natural selection are both examples of natural causes -- physical entities or processes in the world which push up against each other in complicated ways. Natural causes may act in combination or isolation, but to the extent that one is causally efficacious, the other is not. The Christian belief in God, however, is an affirmation of that which is not creature but transcendent creator. God is not one cause among many causes, like unto it in kind, which is occasionally operative; rather, God is the "first cause," as the tradition says: the ground of all being.

Consider the rosebush, which blossoms beautifully. Does the rosebush cause itself to blossom, or does God cause the rosebush to blossom? The question is nonsensical, for it confuses two orders: it either mistakes the rosebush for something very much like a god, an alternative Prime Mover competing with God in the blossoming business, or it mistakes God for something very much like a rosebush, an alternative set of chemical processes that could commandeer the blossom. We must say that the rosebush blossoms of its own nature, and this is precisely the way in which God is the cause of its blossoming.

While this is a feature of a Christian religious sensibility, it is not necessarily a feature of all such sensibilities; we might imagine a religious outlook for which this is not the case. Someone who worships Zeus, for instance, might believe that Zeus is a part of the natural world, one creature among other creatures. If Zeus, strolling through the garden and displeased with the bare and thorny bush, invokes his magical powers and forces a blossom to appear, we would be quite right in saying that Zeus, not the rosebush, caused the blossom; the previous season, when the bud burst open naturally, we would not attribute it to Zeus' power. Zeus is the sort of "god" who is the same type of thing as a rosebush, or a clever alien, or a process of natural selection (albeit a rather powerful member of this broad type).

III.

The other day, I viewed part of a recent film that rehashed some familiar anti-evolution tropes. Reflecting upon it afterward, I am bothered by a more fundamental error upon which the general approach of the film seems predicated and which much of the anti-evolution movement seems to share: the assumption of a mutually exclusive antagonism between God and nature. For such people, if honeybees have natural causes, then they are not created by God. But such a view totally misunderstands the activity of creation and the distinction between creator and creature.

IV.

Take the following two facts:

• The Scriptures clearly teach that God is the creator of rainstorms: God causes the rain to fall.
• Modern meteorology claims that rain is caused by various differential atmospheric forces (pressure, temperature, etc.).

What are we to conclude? If you are the Zeus worshiper mentioned above, then one of the two is wrong. Modern meteorology is antagonistic to your religion, for Zeus is the master of thunder and lightening. You might reject meteorology entirely, believing the word of Zeus to be a surer foundation for knowledge than the methods of the sciences. Alternatively, you might begin a research program intended to demonstrate that the meteorologists are all wrong: if we do meteorology the right way, we discover that thunderstorms are far too complicated to be the result of natural processes, so rainfall really points to the activity of Zeus, etc. You will be distressed to discover that some of your children, recognizing the antagonism between "secular meteorology" and belief in Zeus, choose to reject the latter instead of the former, and you will redouble your efforts to inculcate absolute fidelity into your young. You will start campaigns to keep meteorology out of schools, or at least to "teach the controversy" between meteorologists and worshipers of Zeus.

If you believe in the Christian God, however, your situation is entirely different. The Christian God is not a cause among other causes, but rather the ground of causality as such. God does not bring rain in the manner of differential pressure zones, mad scientists with weather machines, or Zeus' thunderous wrath, but in the manner of creatio ex nihilo. That modern meteorology has discovered some of the causes behind rainstorms is of no theological consequence to the Christian. Contemporary science studies the interactions between created things, among which God, as creator, is not numbered.

V.

Christian theology notwithstanding, when some people learn that honeybees emerged into this world through a process of biological evolution, they think that this threatens or excludes God's creative work -- that divine and natural action are mutually exclusive and antagonistic. (Some respond to this by rejecting Christianity; others respond by rejecting biology.) But if such people are right, then God does not cause rosebushes to blossom, since we have natural causes for that. God is not the creator of German Shepherds, since even the most committed opponents of science recognize that species to be evolved from wolves. Likewise, God does not cause the rain to fall (or, alternatively, every evening weather report is an assault upon religious truth).

Christianity has always insisted upon the struggle against idolatry, against gods made by human hands in our own likeness. I worry that those who see a fundamental exclusivity between the activities of divine creation and the activities of the created order have inadvertently slipped into the trap of conceiving God as something very much like Zeus: a thing among other things in the world, and ultimately a hyperbolic projection of ourselves.

There may or may not be scientific difficulties with modern biology, and there may or may not be theological difficulties with modern biology. Ultimately, however, to insist that God created honeybees neither confirms nor denies, neither simplifies nor complicates, their evolutionary history.