The War That Never Was: Evolution and Christian Theology

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is a partial account of the history of the relations between theology and science, two of the central projects in the intellectual history of Western civilization, from the seventeenth century until today. Such accounts sometimes meet with the objection that science, in particular, has been understood variously over the course of the centuries. The term was understood differently by Aristotelians such as St. Robert Bellarmine (and St. Albert the Great before him) and by the founders of the modern sciences (Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, who would have differed with one another). Nevertheless, we can characterize science (natural philosophy before about 1800) broadly, if somewhat vaguely, as the attempt to offer a descriptive and explanatory account of natural phenomena by reference to natural causes. Scientific inquiry is rational and empirical, or in other words it is based on the human powers of observation and inference. Theology, by contrast, is the attempt to offer an account of the existence and nature of God and of the world (both natural and spiritual) by reference to him.¹ Christian (as well as Jewish and Muslim) theological inquiry, whatever role it gives to reason and observation, gives pride of place to revelation. In this it is distinct from deistic theology, which does not recognize revealed truth as a possible source of knowledge.

This book is a partial account in having as its subject only one part of science, the part which (following nineteenth-century philosopher of science William Whewell) I will call the paleoetiological sciences,² the science of ancient causes. It will focus also on only one part of theology, the doctrines at the center of what might broadly be called the theology of nature—creation, providence, and anthropology. The history of these ideas, taken separately, and their eventual logical relations, I am leaving for another book. In this book I will focus on the historical relations between the paleoetiological sciences and the theology of nature.

One of the enduring myths of our age is that Western intellectual history includes a long-running war between science and theology (or sometimes religion generally)—a war in which the fight was once over the sphericity of the earth and its place in relation to the sun, planets, and stars; a war in which the fight is at present not over the structure of the universe but over its origin and history. It is, according to that myth, a war that has also included battles on other fronts, ranging from the obstetric use of anesthesia to the destruction of human embryos in medical research.

Its renarration is a standard weapon in the arsenal of militant atheists and is the first resort of any journalist struggling to formulate a lede. But what is it that the purveyors of the idea of a war between science and theology have on offer? Is it a thesis, an interpretive lens, or just a metaphor? Who or what is it that is at war? Are the belligerents groups of people—scientists, on the one hand, and theologians, or religious people generally, on the other? Is the idea only that there has in fact been a war, or that such warfare is inevitable? Is the war perhaps just between actual groups of people, or is it somehow between two disciplines—perhaps between two mutually inconsistent approaches to the study of the same subject matter? Or is the war a logical contradiction between the content of science and of theology? Is there something in the stories of Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, of John T. Scopes and William Jennings Bryan, that provides some insight into the nature of the relationship between science and theology? Something that will show that that relationship is essentially conflictual? Most generally, is it grounded just in the contingencies of history, or does it show us something about the essential nature of science and theology?

Colin Russell, not himself a defender of what I will call the Warfare Thesis, has suggested that we can distinguish four kinds of putative conflict—moral, institutional, methodological, and substantive.³ Grouping the latter two as variants of epistemic conflict, we can organize these possibilities as in the diagram.

Non-epistemic Conflict

For some people, the idea of a conflict (or war) between science and religion calls first to mind questions of ethics, so let us begin there. Andrew Dickson White, in his History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom, about which much more will be said in chapter 2 below, presented alleged religious objections to the obstetric use of anesthesia as evidence for his thesis.⁴ He got his facts wrong—there were no significant religious objections to this practice,⁵ but the fact that he included the matter in his History at all does show that what I will call the Warfare Thesis is sometimes extended to what are really moral controversies.

Engineers, physicians, and policymakers must, after all, address moral questions about the development of certain technologies and techniques and about the use of others already available. Questions about research into new biological weapons would be an example of the former type. Eugenics presents an example of the latter. George William Hunter’s Civic Biology, one of the most popular biology texts in early twentieth-century America and one that will figure prominently in chapter 5 below, only went as far as recommending the prevention of the marriage of the immoral and the feeble­-minded, but his contemporaries were already using putatively scientific insights to justify forced sterilization in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere.⁶

Scientists must also address questions of what might, in a narrower sense, be called research ethics. Although questions might sometimes be raised about whether certain kinds of knowledge should be sought at all, the more common kind of question is about the moral permissibility of certain research methods. A prominent recent example is, of course, the destruction of human embryos in order to obtain stem cells for medical research. Objection to this practice is sometimes cited as an example of intrusion ab extra into scientific matters.⁷ Scientists, generally responsible though they may be, have no more immunity from moral error than do the rest of us. Prominent among the moral failures of research scientists were the classical conditioning experiments of John D. Watson and Rosalie Rayner on Little Albert (at Johns Hopkins University in 1920),⁸ the US Public Health Service’s Untreated Syphilis Study (at Tuskegee Institute between 1932 and 1972),⁹ and Stanley Milgram’s experiments on the willingness to obey authority figures (at Yale in 1963).¹⁰ These sufficiently canvas the range, though they do not exhaust the list, of experiments now universally condemned.

Whether it is permissible to conduct a certain kind of experiment, however, is fundamentally a moral question, not a scientific one. It is surely possible to address these issues in a purely philosophical (i.e., in a non­religious) way, though of course many people find it more natural to bring theological resources to the resolution of such questions. Seldom, if ever, do theologians doing research ethics argue for conclusions that cannot also be defended philosophically. Nevertheless, when objections to certain lines of research come from moral theologians or bishops, those who chafe at the proposed moral constraints on their research work often complain about religious objections against the proposed research. If there is, in those cases, something to the idea that religion is one of the participants in a conflict with science, it is a conflict with science only contingently, and even then only in the institutional sense. Why a certain segment of the community seems to consider appeal to religious principles to be acceptable in the moral evaluation of immigration policy, capital punishment, and war, but not of scientific research, remains one of the mysteries of contemporary political liberalism.

The question of which is the greater problem—unjustifiable restrictions on scientific research or research outrages like those mentioned above—is an interesting one, but the proponents of the Warfare Thesis seem primarily to have in mind a problem about the relationship between scientific and theological claims about what is true—about what we know rather than about what we should do. In any case, the paleoetiological sciences that are the subject of this book seldom raise questions of research ethics and so I will say no more about these issues here.

Questions about institutional conflict are not really about science and religion at all. It may happen that conflict between religious and scientific institutions arise in the same way that they arise between competing religious institutions (between Roman and Greek Catholics in Poland and Ukraine, between Jesuits and Dominicans in the Chinese missions, or between Franciscans and the diocesan clergy over the apparitions at Međugorje), or between competing scientific institutions (as between the Institute of Geography at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Department of Geography at Moscow State University in the 1940s¹¹), or between institutions that are neither religious nor scientific (between the US Navy and the US Air Force over airpower spending priorities). Interesting questions could be asked about whether, and if so how, conflicts between scientific and religious institutions differ from intrareligious or intrascientific conflicts, but the interest of those who promote the Warfare Thesis does not seem to be in the light it might shed on, say, the Revolt of the Admirals over spending priorities (mentioned above). We will notice it only to the extent that it exacerbates, or is mistaken for, epistemic conflict.

Epistemic Conflict

Questions about the relation between Christianity and the paleoetiological sciences are in the first instance questions about epistemic conflict—questions about methodology and about content.

Questions of Method: Science, Theology and Naturalism

Some philosophers have argued that there is an inherent conflict in the methodologies of these sciences and of theology. On their view, science, and perhaps in particular the paleoetiological sciences (though critics are often not clear on this point), is inherently naturalistic in a way that is inconsistent with religion, or at least with Christianity. In discussions of the connections between science and naturalism, however, it is important to distinguish two different theses—ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism.

Ontological naturalism is an account of what exists in the world. Alan Lacey characterized it as the view that the world of nature . . . form[s] a single sphere without incursion from outside by souls or spirits, divine or human, and without having to accommodate strange entities like non-natural values or substantive abstract universals.¹² A naturalist might think this on the basis of an even stronger thesis, namely

(O1) Only natural beings exist.

or, focusing on participation in the causal nexus rather than on existence itself, he might take it just as Lacey gives it, asserting only that

(O2) Nonnatural beings (if they exist at all) have no causal influence on the natural world.

For the purposes of most of what follows, it does not much matter exactly where one draws the line between natural and nonnatural beings (e.g., whether Aristotelian forms or human souls having free will are natural or not¹³) as long as one puts chemicals, plants, and animals on one side of the line and God on the other.

Methodological naturalism is a precept about the proper way of doing science. In its strongest version, it can be put as follows:

(M1) Scientific explanations of natural events must refer exclusively to natural causes.

M1 would seem to follow from O2, but even someone who accepted the existence and causal efficacy of nonnatural beings might accept M1, thinking that such beings can play no role in scientific, as opposed to other, kinds of explanation.

O1 and O2 can be contrasted with two other ideas, each constituted by a pair of theses. These ideas must be, but often are not, distinguished from one another.

The first of those alternative ideas states that

(O3a) Nonnatural beings exist, but they only occasionally act as direct causes¹⁴ of what happens in the natural world.

(O3b) The effects of nonnatural causes will generally be identifiable as due to such causes.

If O3a is true, then the causal powers of natural objects (the object of scientific research) are sufficient to explain most, but not all, of what happens in the natural world. Appeals to other causes will require special justification, and an elaboration of O3b will tell us what such a justification should look like. There is, in other words, a strong presumption in favor of natural explanation.

Moving yet further from O1 and O2 are another pair of ideas. One might think either or both of the following:

(O4a) Nonnatural beings not only exist, but frequently act as direct causes of what happens in the natural world.

(O4b) Cases of nonnatural causality are not readily and reliably identifiable as such.

In such a world, much of what happens could not be explained as the result of the interaction of natural objects.

What logical or practical connection does science have with any of these theses? What logical or practical connection do they have with theology? Answering these questions, requires us first to address two other questions.

How Much Naturalism Does Science Require?

O1, if it does not exclude everything that could be called religion, is surely inconsistent with Christianity and indeed all forms of theism that postulate a transcendent God. The slightly weaker O2, however, is still strong enough to be inconsistent with Christianity (if not with deism) and has been a particularly popular foundation for attacks on Christianity. The argument (or at least the assertion) underlying these attacks is that the acceptance of O2 is required by science. Los Alamos physicist Marvin Mueller wrote that if appeal to supernatural agency can be made all scientific discussion and all rational discourse must perforce cease.¹⁵ Physiologist Sheldon F. Gott­lieb, in a response to a journalistic religious critique of evolution, wrote: In the world of the supernatural, anything goes, and the only limitation is the extent of one’s imagination. No evidence is required to substantiate any claims.¹⁶

Evolutionary biologist Richard C. Lewontin wrote, with a special focus on science and the religious doctrine of creation:

Either the world of phenomena is a consequence of the regular operation of repeatable causes and their repeatable effects . . . or else at every instant all physical regularities may be ruptured and a totally unforeseeable set of events may occur. One must take sides on the issue of whether the sun is sure to rise tomorrow. We cannot live simultaneously in a world of natural causation and of miracles, for if one miracle can occur, then there is no limit.¹⁷

These authors claim that the very existence (contra O1 and O2) of non-natural beings capable of acting on the natural world would make science impossible and that the practice of science, therefore, presupposes that at least O2, if not O1 itself, is true. Are they correct in making that claim?

Science is a method of coming to know about the natural world, i.e., about the natures of material objects. It is a method that begins with the attempt to identify the best explanation for the behavior of some natural object and then goes on to test the explanation by new observations (often under the artificially constructed conditions central to what have come to be called experiments). It cannot tell us whether material objects always act in accordance with their natures. C. S. Lewis once wrote:

The laws [of Nature] will tell you how a billiard ball will travel on a smooth surface if you hit it in a particular way—but only provided no one interferes. If, after it’s already in motion, someone snatches up a cue and gives it a biff on one side—why, then, you won’t get what the scientist predicted . . . In the same way, if there was anything outside nature, and if it interfered—then the events which the scientist expected wouldn’t follow. That would be what we call a miracle . . . [But] it isn’t the physicist who can tell you how likely I am to catch up a cue and spoil his experiment with the billiard ball; you’d better ask a psychologist. And it isn’t the scientist who can tell you how likely Nature is to be interfered with from outside. You must go to the metaphysician.¹⁸

Science does not presuppose, entail, or have any other logical connection to O2.

O4b would make it difficult to do science. If science investigates the nature of things by studying their behavior as they interact with other natural objects, then behavior too frequently under the influence of nonnatural agents, under conditions difficult to identify, would make the doing of science very difficult, if not impossible. It would be simply too hard to know when the behavior reported as scientific data was the result of natural causes and when it was not.

O4a alone would seem not to have this consequence, though it would make science a less important component of our understanding of the world than we generally take it to be.

O3, by contrast, is entirely compatible with doing science and with the idea that science makes an important contribution to our understanding of the world. Science is possible as long as most of what we observe is caused by natural interactions and the exceptions are generally either unnoticeable or identifiable. Science no more requires that all of what we observe be caused by natural interaction than it requires perfect observation on the part of scientists or the absolute impossibility of scientific fraud. To see that this is so, imagine someone objecting that (replacing Lewontin’s words, quoted above, with the underlined modifications):

Either the world of phenomena is exactly as it is reported in laboratory notebooks . . . or else all the data in all our laboratory notebooks could be completely wrong . . . We cannot simultaneously rely on science and admit that scientists can make mistakes, for if one mistake can occur, then there is no limit.

Phenomena are not exactly as reported in laboratory notebooks; scientists make imperfect measurements. The errors, however, are not common, and often we can identify the causes of those that they do make. The scientific method thus provides us with a reliable account of how the world works despite the fact of measurement error. It can also do so in a world that includes occasional, and generally identifiable, supernatural interventions.

How Much Non-Naturalism Does Religion Require?

Theistic religion is inconsistent with O1. The Christian doctrine of miracles is an elaboration (though not a logical consequence) of the doctrine of providence—that God, through his providence, protects and guides all that he has created.

The doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection are sufficient to establish that orthodox Christianity is incompatible with O2.

Does O3 provide enough space for Christianity, or does Christianity require O4? If doing science is compatible with O3, but not with O4, and religion (or at least Christianity) needed O4, then there would still be a science-religion problem for Christianity. So, the next task is to determine how much nonnaturalism Christianity needs. It is, of course, possible that different versions of Christianity would need different amounts. To keep the discussion focused, I will address the question in terms of what Catholicism needs.

What does Catholicism require? How much causal relation is there between nonnatural agents and the natural world? In one sense, the answer is, a lot. First, there are the doctrine of creation and two central principles of the theology of nature. Sufficient here are the following:

(C1) God created the world out of nothing.

(C2) Every individual soul was immediately (i.e., without the mediation of any secondary causes) created out of nothing by God.

(TN1) God keeps all things in existence.

(TN2) God cooperates immediately in every act of his creatures.

Second, there is the effect of grace on voluntary human actions. Third, and the heart of this matter for those particularly interested in science, is the doctrine of special providence (such as the occurrence of miracles and, more generally, the response to petitionary prayer). I mean, of course, miracles in the etymological sense—events whose occurrence creates amazement or wonder in those who witness them. They are signs (see John 2:11) in a way that creation, conservation, and for that matter Transubstantiation, for example, are not.

Do any of these doctrines require the kind of frequent or unidentifiable supernatural agency that make O4 rather than O3 the correct account of the world?

The doctrine of the creation of the world, insofar as it tells us how the world came into existence in the first place, is not about what happens in the world. Although it is not compatible with O1, its silence about how the world works makes it compatible with O3 and O4 (and, for that matter, with O2).

The doctrine of the creation of the human soul is a little different since the creation of human souls occurs as a correlate of (or, is occasioned by) a natural phenomenon—human zygosis. Nevertheless, if this is supernatural agency, it is clearly identifiable as such in virtue of the explicit teaching of the Church.¹⁹ Catholic doctrine does not require O4 to accommodate the direct creation of each individual human soul.

The occurrence of miracles is the doctrine that has the most relevance to this question. Miracles are not everyday occurrences and there are generally ways of recognizing them when they occur. Evidence is required. The signs of a miraculous cure, for example, were given a more or less definitive formulation by Prospero Lambertini (later Benedict XIV) in the eighteenth century:

In order for the cure of an illness or infirmity to be considered a miracle, a number of features must be present:

(

1

) that it be grave and difficult or impossible to cure;

(

2

) that it not be at a stage shortly after which improvement would be expected;

(

3

) that no medications were used, or, if any were, that it is certain that they did not help;

(

4

) that the cure be sudden and follow closely [after prayers for the cure];

(

5

) that the healing be complete, not partial or temporary;

(

6

) that it not be preceded by any noteworthy weakening of symptoms or turning point [crisis];

and finally (

7

) that the disease not return.²⁰

The recognition of miracles is part of the ordinary work of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.²¹ If miracles were not recognizable, they would not be able to fulfill their theological function; they might be providential interventions, but they would not be miracles. No scientist need worry about the provenance of the wine served at Cana; there is no theological reason for suspecting that such a transformation might occur in the laboratory or winery. It could, but it won’t.

Modest Methodological Naturalism

So, O1 and O2 would create problems for Christianity, but science neither requires them nor even suggests that they are true. O4 would create problems for science, but Christianity neither requires it nor even suggests that it is true. That leaves O3 as both sufficient for Christian theology and compatible with scientific research.

The methodological consequence of O3 for science might be called modest methodological naturalism. Such naturalism grants a strong presumption in favor of appeal to natural causes in the attempt to understand something that happens in the world but allows that presumption to be overridden for a sufficiently good (theological) reason. The resultant appeal to supernatural agency would not, because it cannot be confirmed by further scientific research, count as a scientific explanation, but it would not be considered any the worse as an explanation for that. This is, for example, the approach used by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the investigation of miracle claims.

The mere fact that God could have acted directly, by contrast, is not sufficient to make appeal to supernatural agency a good explanation. Christians have a good reason for adhering to modest methodological naturalism rather than making the more frequent appeal to supernatural agency suggested by Philip Johnson (and many other proponents of Intelligent-Design Theory). Johnson once wrote: Occasionally, a scientist . . . will suggest that perhaps supernatural creation [Johnson probably just means ‘immediate divine action’] is a tenable hypothesis in this one instance. Sophisticated naturalists instantly recoil in horror, because they know that there is no way to tell God when he has to stop.²²

The danger (and potential harm) created by following Johnson here is manifest in the fate of the eighteenth-century English tradition of physico­theology. In 1692–3, Isaac Newton suggested to Richard Bentley that intelligent design was the only possible explanation for the structure of the solar system (and hence was evidence for the existence of God).²³ In 1802, William Paley, whose Natural Theology stands as a culmination of the physicotheological tradition so important in eighteenth-century English thought, appealed to direct supernatural agency to explain the adaptedness of plants and animals to their environments. In the first instance, Pierre-Simon Laplace, in book 5 of his Exposition du système du monde, was able to offer a plausible natural account for the origin of the solar system or at least of the peculiarities of planetary orbits. In the second, Charles Darwin, in his Origin of Species, was able to show that there were other ways of explaining adaptation. The scandal that such appeals caused was well characterized by Stephen Toulmin, who wrote:

From the year

1700

on, religious-minded men in the Protestant world . . . had always hoped and expected that the new science would eventually confirm and reinforce the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; and they were correspondingly ready to see in their observations of Nature evidences of ‘wisdom,’ ‘foresight,’ and ‘design.’ . . . All the hitherto unsolved problems of geology, astronomy, physiology and natural history were presented as demonstrating that the world of Nature had been created as we now find it ‘by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent’ . . . The result of this enthusiasm for the teleological argument from design was to give a hundred hostages to fortune; and as the physical and biological sciences succeeded in explaining the supposedly supernatural inexplicabilia, all of these hostages in turn had to be ransomed, one after another.²⁴

Questions of Substantive Content: Nondescriptivist Irenicism

With respect to the substantive content of science and theology, there are, to be sure, scientists, theologians, and philosophers who have argued that a war (indeed even a contradiction) between science and theology is, if not absolutely impossible, at least impossible as long as both science and religion (including theology) are properly practiced.

One way of defending the thesis that contradiction between scientific and theological claims is impossible would be to claim that only one of them describes the world, the other having some other function. In 1905, the French Catholic physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem attempted to do just that. In reference to some of the particular problems of his day he wrote:

It has been fashionable for some time to oppose the great theories of physics to the fundamental doctrines