When God Began To Create
Theological
reflection on Darwinian Evolution
“When God began to create …” So begins the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the beginning of the epic of God and creation. “In the beginning God created …” is the translation that most of us have grown up with. Yet the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1 has a much more dynamic, process sense to it. Creation is not a bounded act of God. It is an on-going act of God’s eternal, never-failing, extravagant love.
Creation did not stop on the Sabbath day. God rested from creating and invited humanity, a little lower than the angels, to join God in continuing the creative process. We see this co-creation unfold in the great epic of God’s love and forgiveness. God makes a new people out of a wandering tribe … but they had to agree to the novel status that God endowed upon them with all of its privileges and responsibilities.
And God reached a profound cosmic point in the creation when another new people was created at the Resurrection of Christ … but Jesus had to agree to join that creative process with its trails, terrible suffering, and overwhelming joy. And his disciples had to continue that creation.
And to this day, we continue to co-create with God. In each of our creative moments we have the choice to invite God into the process and thereby enrich the divine creation. God has given us free will to go it alone or to work with God. And over the generations we have had a mixed response to this great gift of God. We have struggled with our faith in God. We have often forgotten or ignored God and gone it alone. Nowhere in creation or in human experience does God reveal the divine-self so obviously that we must know God.
We know the reality of water we drink and the air we breathe. We can feel them. We know our bodies and feel the joy and suffering they bring. But God is not visible and is not feel-able. God chooses to be hidden to guarantee the divine gift of free choice. There can never be a proof of God.
God loves us and loves the creation and wants us (i.e., all of the creation) to love God. But God cannot insist on that love, for then it is no love at all. We must have the choice to turn away from God, because only then our turning to God in love is our free choice and we truly love. Love cannot be coerced and so God does not coerce. God must even allow us to deny God’s reality. And so God cannot be so clearly and obviously revealed that an atheist would be diagnosed as psychotic.
Not we yearn to be sure about God and we go seeking proofs for God. We look to nature to find God. We often look for miracles that science cannot explain and say “there is God for sure”. But then science finds an explanation for the miracle. What we thought proved God does not and so this God of the gaps shrinks. We will never definitively find God in nature or in human experience. The Mystery of God is hidden and open to us by faith alone. No matter what we experience or what we discover we can by faith see God or by denial not see God and be equally sensible.
Yet if we are faithful we can enrich our understanding of God’s mystery by looking deeply into nature. For if we have faith, we can discern the beauty and wonder which God has created in our diverse, complex, ever-novel creation.
The Theory of Evolution has been very efficacious in describing the process of nature over the ages. In a nutshell, the theory affirms:
1) The creation of the earth and its species occurred over a lengthy time span, possibly as long as five billion years.
2) The process of evolution takes place gradually and uniformly for the most part, and without supernatural interventions from the outside.
3) Species evolve gradually and in accordance with natural selection, that is with their ability to survive, flourish, or change in a particular environment.
4) Species undergo random mutations resulting from a variety of causes, such as cosmic radiation and chemicals. Most of these mutations simply die out. But some provide a survival advantage and flourish. The accumulation of mutations overtime allows the diversification of life into a plethora of species.
5) Species are in continuity with one another and evolve over time as a result of the mutations from the simple to the complex, as a way of adapting to their environment. This adaptation involves both competition (“survival of the fittest”) and cooperation (finding a supportive environmental niche.).
6) Humankind is part of nature, and has evolved over millions of years from its primordial ancestors in the ape family.
Scientists can easily make a case that this theory is a self-propelled engine that results in the beautiful diversity and complexity and self-organization of nature without the least bit need for God’s influence. But if we have faith we can also view this theory has a revelation of God’s creative method. It is a revelation that does not break God’s covenant of free will with us, but yet reveals the Divine in ever deepening richness to those who have eyes to see.
There exists no detailed divine plan, but rather God presents a general framework of process and development. We see this framework in nature’s generative drive for diversity, complexity, and self-organization. Events do not unfold according to a pre-determined plan, but with unpredictable novelty (i.e., free choice) driven by random mutation. Results are unpredictable, yet they tend towards diversity, complexity, and organization. It is in these tendencies that we find God’s involvement in the on-going creative process of evolution.
God is the ground of all possibilities. The stuff of the world is endowed with creative potential. Chance – random mutation – is God’s radar beam sweeping through the possibilities. The random mutations so often spoken of in the Theory of Evolution are in fact not evenly random, but biased towards the framework tendencies. If a possibility contributes to the potential for diversity, complexity, and/or self-organization, it is favored. The actualizations of these possibilities then occur under suitable conditions. Indeed, God is experimenting and improvising on an open-ended process of on-going creation.
God’s Love is the thread that weaves all of life together. From the Big Bang through all of the cosmological and biological evolutionary processes, all of life is radically, ubiquitously, and completely interconnected and interrelated. Nothing is an island unto itself. Everything is related to everything else through space and time. It is God’s Spirit that upholds this web of connections and it is God’s grace that infuses it with the generative processes of evolution.
We, today, our intimately related biologically and spiritually to all of God’s good creation. We are indeed “brother and sister” to every human on earth and to even the animals and plants. The evolutionary process re-enforces and emphasizes what the prophets and what Jesus proclaimed over and over again. Everyone and now with biological evolution everything, is our neighbor. We are called into a web of life and love that is divinely, richly, and mysteriously motivated towards ever-increasing complexity and ever-increasing diversity. It is as if the creation is evolving ever-deeper understanding of the divine, if only we will open our eyes and souls to it.
So we return to the Genesis creation story. It is not the story of how God created. It is the story of the beginning of God’s relationship with the creation. God creates not out of need, not out of greed, not out of power, but out of love. God is love and the creation is the product of that love. All of this wonderful universe is an expression of God’s suffering love … God yearned for love and took a risk with that love to create us to love and be loved. Love is not easy. Love demands patience and understanding and letting go of our own power. So it is with God. God lets go of the divine power to control us and lets us be free. And the creation continues in its beautiful and flawed journey.
And God ever-faithfully pronounces that the creation is good. No matter how broken it may be, in the end God loves the creation and in the depths of our souls we are good.
Bibliography