What If Evolution Is Just God's Creative Strategy?

- © Peggy Whiteneck

The year 2009 marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (born the same day as Abraham Lincoln, in fact). It seems an appropriate occasion to take to task the underlying assumption pitting Charles Darwin's theories of evolution against the belief in a divine Creator - with both extremes of the argument coming, ironically, to the same conclusion: that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible.

In every communications and news medium from newspaper to National Public Radio, this assumption is allowed to stand without question, and it drives me crazy. The fact is we live in the midst of the miraculous: life as we know it is composed of countless species of plants and animals (and let's not even talk about the micro-organisms), many of them so elusive and so exclusive to remote locations that they are not yet even known. Why should evolving life be considered any less consistent with belief in a Divine Creator - any less miraculous - than instantaneous life (i.e., creation in seven days)? And why am I any less miraculous if I evolved from apes over thousands of millennia than if God had snapped God's fingers and made me out of thin air?

As most artists and inventors will tell you, the flash of brilliant insight that causes one to produce a work in a white heat is the exception to creativity's rule. The creative process is usually quite a lot more arduous, more similar to the theory of evolution: one does an initial draft of the work, and then one changes it until the creator has a sense that it's finished. That whole process, from initial conception to finished work, usually takes a lot longer than seven days. Not uncommonly, one work can evolve over an entire lifetime. Ultimately, only the strongest creative works will survive history's scrutiny. So, humanity having been created, as the Scriptures tell us, in the image of God and with many divine qualities, why should it be so difficult to believe that the Creator's creative process is as "evolutionary" as is human creativity?

Whether llamas and their surrounds resulted from an overnight creative process or one that took millennia of evolution, would either strategy make the llama itself less miraculous? [Photo © Peggy Whiteneck]

A few decades ago, an Episcopalian priest wrote a then-influential book entitled Your God Is Too Small. That book had a profound influence on me when I was a college student, and its title has continued to resonate in my adult consciousness - for example, whenever I hear believers insisting that Darwin is just short of the anti-Christ. After all, Darwin's overarching thesis is that life ceaselessly arises from death (sound familiar?) as species disappear and give rise to other species. The evidence suggests that Darwin was not just scientifically but spiritually moved by this awareness, whether or not he ever achieved its synthesis with belief in a divine Creator. The dangerous scientist is the one who isn't awed by what s/he discovers, not the one who is.

I have little use for Biblical literalism that refuses to recognize the poetic and metaphoric import of Scripture as, for example, in the story of the world's creation in seven days. (What appalling hubris to think that, for all the Biblical warnings to the contrary, our sense of time, our sense of "days," must necessarily be God's own!) Nor do I have much use for scientific literalism that refuses to recognize the deeper truth in poem and metaphor, the truth bigger, broader, and deeper than mere "fact."

Maybe your God is too small…¦ [Photo © Peggy Whiteneck]

So, puh-leeze! Enough of this false dichotomy pitting science against religion. If you think your God, so mighty He/She is capable of having created the world in a week, couldn't just as well - and just as intentionally - have created the world by evolving it, delighting in the process of doing so, then maybe your God is too small. And if you think your Science, so limited that it can't explain all the mysteries of the universe, won't allow for the possibility of a divine intelligence behind those mysteries, then maybe your Science is too full of itself.

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