CRITIQUE OF DR DENIS ALEXANDER'S BOOK
“EVOLUTION OR CREATION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE?”
By Roderick Hudsmith
Dr Alexander seems to have chosen a strange way to win over Creationists to his way of thinking by spending so much time trying to expound Darwinian Evolution. It is not surprising he appears to have achieved the opposite of what he was hoping for, in fact it seems to have stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest. The Evangelical Times carried a long, critical and well-informed review of every chapter by a certain David Anderson which was subsequently turned into a book which is being highly recommended by the main Creationist organisations. There also seems to have been an argument between Dr Alexander and Professor McIntosh with a subsequent letter from David Anderson commenting on the correspondence and again carried by the E.T.
No creationist could disagree with statements like the following:- “The complete created order, in all its breadth and diversity, goes on consisting by the same divine Word, the Lord Jesus who brought everything into being in the first place.” “God creates and sustains the smallest details of biology.” “We are living in God’s world. These are God’s chemicals and God’s molecules that we are talking about, God’s liposomes and God’s RNA world.” As I got into the main exposition of evolutionary theory and especially when reading pages 86ff an anecdote came to mind.
I too am a creator – the father of two boys – who, together with a loving wife, brought them into being and then provided a secure and loving home where they have been protected, nurtured, educated and guided into their several occupations. Without boasting I like to think I can count myself among the multitude of fathers who may claim to be typical of those whom Jesus called “evil” yet still give good gifts to their children and would never deceive or want to harm them. To the natural benevolence of such earthly fathers he contrasted the far greater generosity of his loving Father God.
Now imagine that I had suddenly behaved entirely out of character, murdered my wife and children and burned our house down. Such behaviour would be shocking and wholly untypical yet this is exactly what God is alleged to have done as depicted by Figure 8, page 105. To pray to the God who was culpable for and deliberately planned such death and destruction would be like expecting sympathy and assistance from a pyrotechnic who has just burned my house down! This kind of deity is well described in these words taken from the poem “Anactoria” by A.C.Swinburne:
“His hidden face and iron feet,
Hath not man known and felt them in their way If my feet trod upon the stars and sun,
Threaten and trample all things every day? And souls of men as his have always trod
Hath He not sent us hunger? Who hath cursed God knows I might be crueller than God.
Spirit and flesh with longing? For who shall change with prayers or thanksgivings
Filled with thirst their lips that cried to Him The mystery of the cruelty of things?
These words bring us to the heart of the matter which is the very nature of the God who is revealed in the pages of the Bible and supremely in the life and teaching of his incarnate son who taught his disciples to address God using the most intimate of Jewish terms – Abba. He also gave us that classic statement of the gospel, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son………John 3.16 How then does Dr Alexander expect a creationist to react to the following quotations which represent the authentic voice of Darwinian evolution? Crucially for creationists, what kind of a creator does it depict?
“The evolutionary doctrine portrays human suffering not as an evil to be fought against but as an indubitable good for ‘the war of nations, famine and death’ as Darwin put it in “The Origin” are the agents of evolutionary change. Or this, “The never-ceasing struggle is not useless. It constantly clears away the malformed, the weak and the inferior among the generations and thus secures the future for the fit.” Thus only through the inexorable extermination of the negative variants does it provide living space for the strong and its strong offspring, and it keeps the species healthy, strong and able to live (Max Gruber). Quoted by Dr James Le Fanu in his hook, “Why Us?” page 158
From the sentiments of those spine-chilling comments creationists recoil in horror and therefore from the assertion that “evolutionary history is perfectly consistent with the creator God revealed in the Bible who has intentions and purposes for the world, including us….” To equate the God who deliberately chooses Darwinian evolution with the God revealed in Holy Scripture is for me completely impossible because it is in direct conflict with the biblical revelation of a loving God and an initially good creation which has been cursed through man’s disobedience. A Darwinist must concede that nature, red in tooth and claw with all its death, pain and suffering conforms to the deliberate intention of the “Word,” who brought all things into being and sustained them thereafter. I am using simple logic here although I know Christian evolutionists would quarrel with such a blunt and personal way of speaking and I only do so because I want to present the consequences of the evolutionist's argument as strongly as possible.
There is a cruel dilemma for a scientist who is both a Christian and committed to Darwinian evolution. The modern, non-teleological method of scientific enquiry, which you describe very clearly, must be accepted yet it is plainly at odds with the presuppositions and milieu in which the biblical revelation was given. In fact it’s rather like trying to mix oil and water. This results in the writer sounding briefly like a Conservative Evangelical but then proceeding to adopt a thorough-going liberal exegesis when trying to reconcile scripture with evolution. The reaction has been fierce and no wonder for the detailed description of evolution in all its gory and destructive detail cannot help but convince the creationist that Darwinism strikes at the very heart of the biblical revelation and most importantly, at the very nature of God and of his Son who Dr Alexander agrees brought all things into being and upholds them by the word of his power.
One of the fundamental principles laid down by Darwin, the survival of the fittest, could not be more contrary to what one might expect of a God of love. The malformed, the weak and the inferior which Darwinian evolution seeks to “clear away” are just those categories of persons which the Christian gospel enjoins on us to protect and assist. This is because Christians worship a God who is love who calls us to love our neighbour as ourselves. It is instructive that Richard Dawkins, the greatest living exponent of Darwin, is so insistent on the fact that Darwinism is fundamentally a selfish process, without plan or purpose save that of passing on genes. He has taken Darwinism to its logical conclusion, rejected religion completely and made it what it indubitably is, the midwife to atheism.
The next problem I identify concerns how the biblical story of salvation, what German scholars have called “The Heilsgeschichte,” contradicts the story presented by evolutionary theory. In Romans 1:19,20 St. Paul, states that “what can be known of God is revealed from heaven…ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature …..has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” That sums up the outlook of the biblical writers of which Psalm 8 is a good example. However, I am in no doubt that neither the Psalmist nor Paul could have written in the way they did if by “creation” and “things that have been made” they were obliged to accept the Darwinian account. I suggest that Isaiah’s vision of the Messianic kingdom to come provides a good description of the authentic biblical view about how things were at the beginning and will be again at the end. How utterly un-Darwinian are these words of prophesy where the verbs could easily be put into the past tense:
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed: their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox……”
The trajectory of the biblical “Heilsgeschichte” could well be represented by a line graph which would be entirely different to that described by evolution as it traces development from the earliest life-forms, then zigzags like figure No. 8 in the book. The biblical graph would describe a U shape,beginning with Eden, plummeting and then rising steadily to end in the heavenly city where there is no death, physical or spiritual, thus restoring the original situation in Eden. Dr Alexander purports to believe in this biblical vision of the future, pages 35, 36, but it surely has no basis in evolutionary theory. Perhaps he really does anticipate a divine and very un-Darwinian intervention on a dramatic scale.
Classic evolutionary theory would claim life on earth is ultimately doomed by the effect on this planet of the death throes of our sun if it has not destroyed itself long before through the eruption of a super-volcano or perhaps as the result of an asteroid strike.
To conclude this point I would maintain that neither the Old nor New Testament writers could possibly have accepted that this world is naturally and by God’s deliberate and own design, purpose and plan, specifically intended to provide the hostile environment required for the outworking of Darwinian evolution and for weeding out the weakest to allow the survival of the fittest. A deity who presided over that process could only have been some kind of Platonic, impassive prime mover, the God of Deism or worse. By making the biblical narrative palatable to the scientific mind I firmly believe the biblical baby has been thrown out with the bath water.
If the foregoing is not bad enough the creationist will note that it is virtually impossible to reconcile Dawinism with what informs key elements in Jesus’ teaching e.g. his doctrine of marriage and his warning of judgement to come, which he compares to the Flood using impressively detailed language and rooted in an acceptance of specific historical events. He may have been a child of his times scientifically but his way of using the Old Testament was vital to how he interpreted his ministry and to his teaching. This is equally the case with Pauline doctrine and although Dr Alexander does his best to reconcile with evolution the apostle’s important teaching about the first Adam and Abraham I really do not think it is possible and still remain true to the gospel. The genealogy of Jesus in Luke’s gospel, tracing his ancestry right back through king David, the patriarch Abraham to Adam, is a good example of just how important historicity was to the New Testament writers and I suspect it was strongly influenced by St. Paul, with whom the doctor often travelled.He would soon learn that the historical Adam was essential to his friend’s theology as was the historical figure, Abraham.
Paul’s key doctrine of justification by faith depended on the patriarch Abraham’s absolute obedience whereby he was accounted righteous by virtue of his faith in God’s promises, pre-eminently a land and a son in his old age. Some kind of “homo divinus” species, either a group or a couple of Neolithic farmers, does not really work in the context of the biblical revelation and its salvation history. I note that Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a highly developed civilisation which had long superseded the Neolithic period.
A further crucial difference between Creation and Evolution is the latter’s acceptance of physical death as perfectly natural. This obliges Dr Alexander to distinguish between physical and spiritual death and argue strongly that physical death was perfectly natural before “Eden” Creationists will contend that this runs counter to the plain meaning of the text and significantly to the way Christ’s resurrection was interpreted in the New Testament and throughout the Church’s history. Jesus Christ, the second Adam, resists the tempter and by his resurrection conquers physical death which was the immediate consequence of Adam’s disobedience, followed by banishment which ensured Adam and Eve did not eat the fruit of the tree of life and live for ever.
Dr William Barclay makes a very important observation when commenting on Romans 5: 12ff in his Daily Study Bible: “Death is the direct consequence of sin. It was the Jewish belief that if Adam had not sinned man would have been immortal. Death came into the world as a consequence of sin…The Book of Wisdom has it, “God created man for immortality and made him the image of his own proper nature; but by the envy of the devil death entered into the world.” In complete contrast to this Dr Alexander accepts that physical death, pain and suffering were all present before homo divinus arrived and asserts that this should not undermine the Genesis and Pauline narrative. Honestly, I don’t see how it can avoid doing that and it only emphasises how far apart Evolution and Creation really are.
Something which is entirely absent from the book, surprising if the author believes in the Bible’s inspiration from cover to cover as he claims to do, is the existence of a conscious, intelligent source of evil determined to destroy God’s good creation almost from its inception.
The serpent who beguiles Eve is mentioned in passing but little is made of it because it surely cannot be reconciled with Darwinian theory yet it cannot be disentangled from salvation history without doing grave damage to it. Adam and Eve fall to the blandishments of the serpent, lose Eden and attract the curse and physical death. Immediately the divine plan to deal with the damage is announced and the ultimate doom of the tempter forecast - the seed of the man will bruise Satan’s head and the theme is set for the story of salvation for both mankind and the earth. When the consequences of the curse resulting from the initial temptation and act of disobedience are abolished the Devil and all his angels will also be destroyed. Revelation 20: 1-3 is highly significant because we get a vivid description of the tempter. He is “that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan” who has been “deceiving the nations.” He is also the “Accuser” of men who is a member of the court of heaven and is given freedom to test Job. Jesus meets the Devil in the wilderness and resists falling to his blandishments which would have destroyed his mission. Paul warns of the same Devil who is like a lion seeking prey.
What could be more foreign to modern scientific thinking than such teaching which plays a major part in the Bible in which there is no place for a demiurge, a rival to God common in other cultures, but accepts the existence of a personal power of evil. Ever since I first began to consider Darwinian evolution and its impact on Christian faith I have recognised the huge tension between religion and modern science which now fiercely protects its freedom from the trammels of religious dogma. It rejects teleology and divine involvement and this, as Dr Alexander points out, has freed science to make huge progress. However, it makes the situation difficult if not impossible for anyone trying to reconcile the two because the world of the Bible is fundamentally different and in many respects alien to the scientific mentality.
A review of Andrew Marr’s TV series “Darwin’s dangerous idea, says “Marr opines that many of the world’s religions have embraced or accepted Darwin, but realises that those with traditional biblical and Christian moorings have put up a resistance.” The reviewer continues, “One must wonder how Christians compromising with Darwin's big idea cannot see that “theistic evolution” is an oxymoron because it tries to embrace two systems of thought that provide competing and diametrically opposing world views.”
Thomas Huxley recognised and wrote about the problem evolutionary time scales would create for Christianity. Douglas Futuyama wrote, “Darwin made theological and spiritual explanation of life superfluous. Together with Marx’s theory of history and Freud’s attribution of human behaviour to influences over which we have little control, the theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of materialist science.” I know prominent Christians like the Pope, Dr Rowan Williams, Prof. John Polkinghorne seem manage to reconcile the biblical revelation with Darwinism but for many Christians it makes impossible demands on their faith.