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September 2007, Page 4.
Index of articles:
by subject,
by date.
In this issue:
(September 2007)
Prosperity,
Question,
Venite,
Harmony?
In our "Questions to the clergy" slot, John will try to answer any query you throw at him, without hesitation, deviation or repetition...
Special or just by chance?
Q. Seeing as you are a Christian who believes in evolution, and you also believe people are “made in God’s image”, do you believe this simply happened by chance, as part of the evolutionary process? In which case, how is our species “special”? Or was God active in some special way when it came to the emergence of homo sapiens?
A. The "either/or" choice in your question is the problem. Very briefly, I believe God used evolution to achieve his purposes, and that "by chance" and "special" aren't opposites, they're part of the same process.
Evolution (or “natural selection”) hinges on two processes: there are “random” changes from one generation to the next, and then nature selects which of these changed creatures survives and which of them dies without reproducing. I don’t know anyone who disputes the second part of this, and most of the debate focusses on how the random changes happen and whether they really are random or whether God directs them in some way.
And about the phrase “the image of God”, there are quite a lot of people (again including Christians) who think that our intelligence, self-awareness and sense of the numinous is only different in degree from that possessed by animals, not different in kind.
My own view is that there comes a point where a difference in degree is big enough to be a difference in kind. I think we do have the "image of God" in a way in which other animals don't. However that doesn't mean I feel we can find a point in the evolutionary timeline when on the day before x none of our ancestors had it, and on day x one of our ancestors did, and God acted in a special way on that day.
My own view is that God did guide evolution by making the "by chance" bit work towards us. I think there is ample unpredictability in quantum mechanics for God to have made small changes to the progress of the universe, and I think there is ample room in chaos theory for these small changes to magnify to big ones. I also think God reserves the right to interfere directly with the progress of the universe by "miracle" without using quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and I believe that the resurrection was an instance of this interference. In fact, *the* interference which proves the existence of the interferer.
John Hartley