5
August
Terratheism: Looking at God and Evolution, and Science and Religion, in a New Way
Today I want to share with all of you some of my own religious views, which I call terratheism. This religion will argue that matter is not dead and passive, but alive and full of feeling. This religion will suggest that science discovers the facts for our religious inspiration, but it will also argue that religion tells science what, in general, a fact is. This religion will accept Darwin’s theory of evolution as true as any scientific theory can be. But this new religion will teach that, without God, Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot fully explain biological life.
Finally, this new religion foresees a whole new member of the arts and sciences: the study of God’s own life, God’s own motives, intentions, sufferings, and failures. My goal this morning is to be interesting; it’s a satisfying hot summer day, the Boston Red Sox are in first place. Let’s go!
I want to begin by confronting the argument of those for whom the truth of evolutionary theory proves the falseness of God. As best as I can tell, the argument runs something like this… Just as Newtonian mechanics completely explains the movement of the heavens, so Darwin’s theory of evolution completely explains the variability, the changeability of life, and the emergence of life. Random mutation or chance explains the accidental emergence of new types of life. The necessity that each species successfully reproduce explains the persistence of species and of life generally. The long time span of life on the Earth, about 4 billion years, gives plenty of time needed for random mutations to cycle through uncountable numerous different genetic combinations and thus find the many millions of successful genetic patterns expressing the full variety of Earth’s types of life. So where’s God? Darwinian evolutionary theory has passed every test offered it, without recourse to God. Since ‘God’ usually means the one who creates life, and evolutionary theory explains the creation and variability of life without God, God must not exist.
Why, in my opinion, is this argument wrong? Let me be clear what I think the argument says. The argument says that if evolutionary theory is true, then God doesn’t exist. I want to argue that the conclusion, God’s falseness, doesn’t follow from the premise. I accept the premise that Darwinian evolution is true.
When Dawkins or others argue that Darwinian evolution proves God doesn’t exist, just what do they mean by God? I think what they mean by God is the same thing biblical literalists mean by God. This God is understood as the only creator of the world. God completely determines all the facts, or, God is completely responsible for everything that happens. What Darwinian evolution shows is that worldly things – molecules, cosmic rays, geology, ecosystems – these things help to create life and life’s diversity. But the Calvinist God is a God that can only create without help. I agree that Darwinian evolution provides empirical evidence that the Calvinist God is bad theology.
But what if God just influences things, persuades things, inspires things, rather than controls them? Darwinian evolutionary theory may bury the Calvinist God, but it seems silent on the truth of a co-creator God. I said earlier, it is the job of science to provide facts for religion. Well, here is the science of biology telling religion, the facts falsify the Calvinist God. But do the facts of Darwinian evolutionary theory falsify God in every conceivable way? No, the facts of Darwinian evolution instead say, if there is a God, it must a co-creator God in some sense. The rest of my talk will elaborate my own take on this co-creator God option. If my proof is successful, or even interesting, then a world with Darwinian evolution and a co-creator God together is quite reasonable.
The Calvinist God produces a way of thinking about being. Everything in the world is determined by God from the beginning of time, so worldly things have no creativity or initiative of their own. The world is, in effect, full of passive things, dead things. To speak of matter is to speak of dead stuff. To speak of nature is to speak of the order of dead things animated strictly by God; nature becomes a machine. To speak of science is to speak of the description and prediction of nature’s mechanism.
But Darwinian evolution, not to mention some solid philosophical arguments, has put the Calvinist God to rest. And it has also helped to put to rest the mechanistic view of nature and of being. As science has advanced from the mid-19th into the 21st century, what do the facts say about the nature of being?
So I’m going to write down two equations. The first equation comes from Newton’s mechanics. It tells us that the position of something depends completely upon where it was in the past, what it’s velocity is, and how much time it spent at that velocity. Notice how deterministic, how mechanical, the equation is. If you know the past position, and the past velocity and time, you can know the present position with perfect precision. The past determines the present. It’s the LaPlacean Demon; if you know all the facts at the beginning of the world, you can determine the entire course of history. That’s mechanism; that’s the view of the Calvinist God.
Final position = (initial position) + (velocity)(time)
This second equation comes from quantum mechanics. It also expresses the position of something, but it tells a very different story than the Newtonian equation. It says that the mass of something times the variation in its position times the variation in its velocity is always around plank’s constant, which is a very small number. But it isn’t zero, so if you try to lessen the uncertainty regarding the velocity of, say, the particle, you have to accept more uncertainty about the position of the particle. You don’t get to know the position of the particle with perfect precision by knowing the past velocity.
Plank’s constant = (mass)(change in velocity)(change in position)
So it seems that the particle is unpredictable. Newton was wrong; the past doesn’t determine the future It seems, instead, that facts actually emerge creatively rather than deterministically. Every new fact responds to the past, but is also self-creative.
Now, here’s where this notion of the self-caused fact gets really interesting. If facts emerge creatively, rather than get determined by the past, then we need two kinds of explanation to explain a fact. We need the familiar causal explanations. But you can’t explain creative output completely by referring to the past; to explain creative output, you also have to evoke vision, inspiration. The fact of my mood, the fact of some sub-atomic particle’s position, is the product of some hope of what I could feel, some hope about where that particle could be. Nature, being, the stuff of reality: it is not dead, but alive. It is not passive, but purposeful. To speak of being is to speak of psyche: feelings and purpose.
So if matter is alive and self-caused, rather than dead and inert, then what happens to God and evolutionary theory? Well, the claim made by the atheistic evolutionists, the claim that “if evolution is true, then God is false” doesn’t work anymore. If matter isn’t dead, then God cannot be all-powerful. If even the tiniest bit of matter, say a quark or string, can create itself to some extent, then the most God can ever do is persuade.
My proof for God’s existence requires a proof for the pan-psychic view of matter. ‘God’ is assumed to be a term for ‘most perfect or maximal expression of what being means.’ So my God is the most extreme expression of the view that matter is a creative, self-caused response to other things. What would the extreme expression of this panpsychic view look like? God is the being that responds not just to some of the universe, like me or like the atoms of my body, but to all of the universe. So God is most responsive, the most accepting, the most suffering, the most joyful, creature in reality because God’s psyche responds to all of reality. And because God responds to all of reality, God is present in the reality of every other creature. The cells of our body respond to the moods of our personality; we know this to be true. Well, the whole cosmos is God’s body, and each of us, from people to lightwaves, respond to God’s moods, God’s pain, God’s hopes, God’s fears, God’s love.
So if panpsychism is right, and the pan-psychic view of God is right, then God must play a role in the evolution of life on Earth because God must play a role in the emergence of anything. The question is, if God must play a role, then why can’t we see it? And my answer is, God’s role is more inspirational than causal. God is not so much determining what happens as God is trying to inspire things to create themselves in ways God likes.
I understand Darwinism as a theory which accounts for the biological facts provided a ‘fact’ is understood in a mechanistic way: the fact arises strictly from the deterministic causality of prior facts. ‘Adaptation to environment’ represents a pattern found in the biological facts, and ‘reproductive fitness’ or ‘natural selection’ are general terms for the causal mechanism explaining the adaptive pattern. If Darwinian evolutionary theory shows how chance, necessity, and time give rise to Earth’s biology, then ‘adaptation’ and ‘natural selection’ express the ‘necessity’ and ‘time’ aspects.
But if I am right that a ‘fact’ is not deterministically created, but is self-created in a way responsive to prior facts, then Darwinian evolutionary theory is true only to the extent that the self-creation of biological facts looks like a deterministic process. The hard sciences especially often express a procedure which asks, if I assume determinism, will this assumption work? And of course, the answer is yes, the assumption of determinism often does work. The psychic, or self-created, element in fact is often rather minimal; if you want to describe the motion of a planet, you really don’t need to introduce the psychic element, it’s so minimal. So the methodological exclusion of the psychic element in fact can be entirely appropriate; attempting to include a psychic element in the formation of the biological facts will not help us to learn any predictive laws of biology – like Darwinian evolution – nor help us develop new technologies.
So there is nothing wrong with assuming determinism for certain scientific purposes, especially if the goal is predictive or technological. But I suspect that the way this assumption of mechanism has so vastly improved our control of our environment – and isn’t that the dream of any species which struggles to survive, to control the environment – that the tremendous power we’ve acquired assuming a mechanistic world, has lead us to forget that mechanism is an assumption rather than the whole truth.
If pan-psychism is closer to the whole truth, then the relationship between religion and science is not a conflict to the death, nor is it a form of separate but equal, nor is it some form of wishy-washy compatibility. To me, anyway, the relationship is one where science provides the facts for religion, and religion tells science what a ‘fact’ really is. Religion tells science what a fact really is because God is the most extreme set of facts, so much so that God’s facts become part of every other kind of fact, including the facts of Earth’s biology.
When science assumes mechanism, it never observes God, that’s true. But let’s run a thought experiment. What if we try to pay attention to the psychic, rather than the deterministic, element in the biological facts? Could we then find some evidence of God’s activities? As far as I know, no one has really tried serious to explore this question. When I talk about terratheism, this type of questioning is a part of what terratheism means. Terratheism includes re-working especially the hard sciences, with an idea to focusing upon the psychic element in the facts of physics and biology.
In my opinion, Darwinian biology identifies the psychic element when it speaks of ‘chance’ as a factor driving evolution. But Darwinian biology avoids comprehending chance. To speak of genetic mixing by sexual reproduction, to speak of random mutations, to speak of genetic drift, or lamarkian influences upon DNA – all of these things label types of chance rather than explain why chance happens at all. To me, ‘chance’ expresses the degree of freedom, or self-determination, found in the biological facts. Darwinian evolutionary theory is a theory about how chance is disciplined by reproductive fitness; it is a theory about the deterministic limitations the environment sets on the creativity of living things. Darwinian theory in effect says to the living facts; be as creative as you want, but you must be able to reproduce yourselves.
What biology is waiting for is, a theory about the creative story life expresses within the deterministic limits of reproductive fitness. It is quite debatable what this creative story even is; to me, I see a persistent tendency to evolve species which are increasingly complex physiologically and mentally, I see a tendency to evolve ecological communities of the highest possible diversity and complexity, I see a tendency to evolve a desire for benevolence. Darwinian evolution explains the persistence of these things on Earth, but not, I think, their emergence.
If God is going to help explain the creative story of evolution, then we must be able to find evidence of God’s work. Terratheism includes this whole new avenue of human exploration and adventure; if God exists, and if God’s life is a series of cosmic facts, where is the evidence of God’s activity in the universe. In biology, I suggest we take a look at benevolence.
By benevolence I mean the love of human beings simply as humans. Benevolence is especially the love of strangers. Darwinian evolution easily explains the persistence of benevolence; if it confers reproductive fitness, or simply doesn’t detract from it, then benevolence will persist in the environment. But why does benevolence exist at all? We feel that obviously the happiness of two people is better than the happiness of one. Why? When we say ‘better,’ we are talking about a way of feeling. Why does benevolence feel the way it does? We know that sex feels good because it’s the reward for reproducing. But benevolence and kindness and love of beauty, these things feel good, too, but not in the way that sex feels good. These benevolent feelings; why do they feel the way that they do?
If God exists and if panpsychism is true, God is the creature that takes all of the joys, failures, pains, and sufferings of the world and creates itself out of these worldly facts. So God’s life is a life devoted to taking its intimacy with reality and finding something creative to do with it all. The whole cosmos in some way, then, is filled with God’s own creative response to the world. So it makes sense to say that, for God, the happiness of two people is better than the happiness of one because then God will experience more happiness itself.
But if Darwinian evolution is supposed to explain everything Earthly life does, then it doesn’t make any sense for us to feel that the happiness of two people is better than one. Granted, benevolence toward kin and neighbors confers a reproductive advantage. But the idea of general benevolence – benevolence toward humanity as such, the benevolence of the Good Samaritan – strikes me as substantial conceptual departure from kin altruism. The way general benevolence feels as a good feeling is quite an emotional departure from the pleasurable feelings of reproductively fit activities like eating and having sex.. Concepts so radically different from reproductive fitness and good feelings so radically different from pleasure are still biological facts that need explanation.
Yet the idea of benevolence and the importance of moral feelings enjoy, in my opinion, not just a casual persistence in human life, but even slow a slow and wandering tendency toward greater and greater dominance in our civilization. For all of our problems, I think we human beings do treat each better now than we did in the past. Yet our adaptive fitness is, if anything, weaker now than it ever was. We are now much more likely to disappear as a species than we were when we kept slaves and practiced authoritarian government. What’s going on? The concept of benevolence and the good feelings of moral truths are still biological facts that need explanation.
Well, if God is the fact that responds to the whole cosmos of facts, then it is very much to God’s advantage for benevolence to enjoy greater expression. The more we each love each other, the more God’s own experience includes love rather than dull indifference or painful hate. I suspect that human benevolence is a hope of God’s that God has expressed for a long time, waiting for us to take it up. Because we, unlike God, have to struggle just to survive, because we have to conform to reproductive fitness, benevolence for us is a hard sell. But God is persistent, and we humans are as romantic and ingenious as we are hateful and narrow-minded.
Here is another possibility for evidence of God’s activities in the biological facts. The slow build-up of successful mutations by chance will make the environment more diverse, and a more diverse environment creates new niches, including many niches for cooperative behavior. But the existence of a niche does not explain why something filled the niche; to say, chance filled it via random mutation, is really to beg an important biological question. There is still the question, why did the idea of cooperation come be at all? Reproductive fitness doesn’t require life to be cooperative, but life on Earth is increasingly cooperative. Look at the cells in our bodies, look at the complexity of a rainforest ecosystem.
It is very much to God’s advantage for cooperative behavior generally to enjoy greater dominance on any planet. Cooperative behavior favors intimacy, while competitive behavior favors rejection. It is the job of God to gather the universe of creatures into its own intimate experience, and when the creatures themselves are intimate with each other, God’s self-creation becomes easier. So I also suspect that the symbiotic and cooperative behavior we see in Earth’s ecosystems, and in the bodies of Earth’s living creatures, is also best explained by God rather than Darwinian evolution. God’s own life displays the hope of intimacy, and this hope in some dim way inspires the psyche of our very molecules, to try cooperation as the means to reproductive fitness, rather than, say, more competition.
This is why I call my own religion terratheism; terratheism is the belief that Earth’s community of life has a lot to tell us about the nature of God, because Earth’s living things struggle to achieve God’s hopes as the means to succeed in the struggle for life. So like I said before, science discovers the facts for religion. But religion tells science what a ‘fact’ is. When Darwinian biologists say that the fact of life and the fact of life’s story on Earth is best explained by chance, necessity, and time, I suggest to you all that a more rational way to put the point is, God and the world’s creativity, necessity, and time.