God and Evolution – Part 1
OK, so I’ve been thinking about evolution lately. Prompted partly by watching the series on C4 “Inside Natures Giants”, a facinating and accessible series of programmes where each episode a ‘giant’ of nature is disected in order to show its internal workings and how specific parts of it’s anatomy make it particularly well adapted to face the challenges of it’s environment and the problems it faces due to its own size.
The subtext of the show appears to be a strong pro-evolutionary agenda and Richard Dawkins (somewhat less fanatical in his presentation than is often the case) makes frequent appearences for what is a combination of ‘The Science Bit’ and a pitch for how the various parts of the creature’s anatomies show, not deliberate, intelligent design (and therefore a designer), but rather the legacy of the random processes of evolution.
This has got me thinking quite a bit and I want to outline some of that thought here. What I want to explore here, perhaps over a series of posts is how the idea of evolution sits (if it can) with the idea of God, but more specifically, and personally, the Christian narrative. I don’t want to get deeply in to the whole creationism/evolution debate, but I do want to take an honest look at some of the issues as they appear to me and work thorugh some challenging thoughts that come to mind.
I’ve had a Christian faith in varying flavours that I’ve engaged with seriously since about the age of 17 and the idea of evolution had never caused me too much trouble for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I was not wholly convinced by the theory of evolution. On considering the wonders of nature and how we and other species are so wonderfully and intricately made, I found it extremely difficult to comprehend how complex structures like the eye, wings, brains etc. could ‘evolve’. Even given the millions of years that evolution is said to take it still didn’t feel like enough time to allow for the huge amount of change and diversity that we see in nature to have taken shape. A superficial look at the science seemed somewhat plausible and often convincing, but this was countered by an equal measure of disbelief, incredulity – not because of my faith per se, but, because there was something in me that just found it implausible. Secondly, (and this is the reason which allowed me to put the whole lot on the shelf and leave unpacking the first reason for some future time) I’ve never held to a literalist reading of the creation narrative in Genesis. A basic understanding of the universe, for me, makes that option a non-starter. I considered that even if life and therefore humans had evolved, well, maybe that was just the way God did it… until now.
It is this second reason that has been shaken and dislodged for me and which I can no longer hold to which has been the trigger for these thoughts and I’ll open this up further in the next post.
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