Religion and science do mix

Christians - at least C of E members - may agree. The Church's website assures us there is nothing in natural selection that "contradicts Christian teaching". I beg to differ: Christianity demands a rational being capable of moral choices. It can accept that such a being may take time to evolve and share ancestry with chimpanzees. It can even accept that the being might not take a human form, though I'm not sure what that does to the stuff about "made in the image of God". But unless something like us comes along eventually, and unless things are designed for us to emerge, the doctrine of redemption is meaningless. Anyone who understands natural selection knows there was nothing inevitable about the arrival of Homo sapiens, and we should not imagine evolution was always striving to this end. All organisms face extinction if they fail to adapt to environmental changes. It will almost certainly happen to us, perhaps quite soon.

The difficulty with mainstream evolutionary theory for Christians is not that it denies that humans are free moral agents, but that it denies such agents are a necessary outcome. It leaves them with a God who, after setting a universe in motion, sits twiddling his thumbs for aeons on the off-chance that beings capable of sin and of appreciating his works come along.

Actually, given the Deist view of a God who set the universe in motion and let it play out according to a defined set of initial laws, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the universe was created in such a way that the appearance of intelligence somewhere was a readily predictable (given the intelligence required to perform such a creation) outcome.

It can accept that such a being may take time to evolve and share ancestry with chimpanzees. It can even accept that the being might not take a human form, though I'm not sure what that does to the stuff about "made in the image of God". But unless something like us comes along eventually, and unless things are designed for us to emerge, the doctrine of redemption is meaningless. Anyone who understands natural selection knows there was nothing inevitable about the arrival of Homo sapiens, and we should not imagine evolution was always striving to this end. All organisms face extinction if they fail to adapt to environmental changes. It will almost certainly happen to us, perhaps quite soon.

I think this is the meat of his point, and I respect that it is an honestly held notion. But its not right. Specifically:

Anyone who understands natural selection knows there was nothing inevitable about the arrival of Homo sapiens, and we should not imagine evolution was always striving to this end.

Heck, this can be said of more than natural selection. The norm of any chain of complex events are arbitrary from a naturalist view. So if this really is a problem for Christian theology, it is hardly unique to natural selection! So why even bring bring natural selection up as a contradiction to Christianity, when pretty much everything contradicts Christianity?

The problem is, as I see it, he is thinking as a naturalist, who is unwittingly projecting that view onto his understanding of theology, creating an image of a kind of God who does not transcend time.

The underlying problem I think is that we have a generation of people with a grown up understanding of naturalism and a kindergarten understanding of Christianity, and no idea that there the latter has far more to it.

“Science says mankind is evolving (improving).
Christianity says mankind is deteriorating.”

You’re comparing different kinds of improvements.

Presumably (1) is “improvements” relative to certain environments while (2) is speaking of “moral” “improvements”.

There is no reason why mankind can’t physically evolve and at the same time not morally evolving. Much of it seems culturally based in any case ala Oswald Spengler.

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