Creationists puzzle me.  I haven’t been able to understand how people who I know to be thoughtful and intelligent can reject evolution when the scientific evidence for it, even to a lay person, is overwhelming.  I’ve assumed their position comes from either an overly conservative religious background or bad information.  I thought biblical literalists set up a false choice between either believing in Genesis or in Darwin, when in fact a non-literal reading of Genesis was perfectly compatible with a view that God created life on earth through evolution.  For creationists who weren’t biblical literalists, like my high school friend’s dads who said he knew evolution was wrong because carbon dating wasn’t very accurate, it was just a matter of better science education.  But I read something today that pointed out a reason for rejecting evolution that as a believer I should have noticed a long time ago.  It’s a very compelling reason, and I can’t believe I’d never considered it before.

    The piece was a sermon by the evangelical Christian Wesley Wildman, given at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel last summer.  He says conservative evangelicals (aka creationists) “understand what is theologically at stake in evolution far better than their liberal counterparts who causally resolve the issue by declaring that God creates through evolution, without pausing to think what that means.”  Creationists believe in a personal, benevolent, attentive, active God, and see that evolution puts an enormous strain on that idea of God.

    Wildman uses C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles to illustrate what he means.  In one of the stories, the children are present when the lion Aslan creates Narnia and its creatures.  Aslan sings in a majestic voice, and the world awakens around him.  Creatures struggle up out of the soil, personally called into being by Aslan.  In the conservative evangelical mind, surely a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active God would have created the world in a way like this, in a way that “involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, fewer mindless species extinctions, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit” than creation by evolution would have.  They “instinctively grasp that their...God could not possibly have created the world as Darwin described it.  Such a God would be morally unrecognizable to them, a kind of heartless gambler over the lives and well-being of Earth’s creatures.”

    It’s a serious dilemma, one that Darwin himself grasped perfectly well.  He started out believing in special creation, and knew that evolution makes belief in a personal God more difficult.  He was a sensitive man, and said he felt his theory was “like confessing a murder.”  Conservative evangelicals grasp the dilemma too, and make a decisive move to reject a field of science that is so out of sync with their understanding of God.  They keep their personal, benevolent, attentive, and active God at any cost, “even if it means rejecting a scientific theory as thoroughly supported as evolutionary theory and their attendant migration into an anti-intellectual cultural backwater”

    But I have to admire their consistency.  It seems they’ve grasped the theological puzzle quite astutely and made a courageous choice.

    Wildman resolves the puzzle by giving up the idea of a personal God in favor of an “ultimate reality that hovers behind and beyond the symbolic Gods we create...to satisfy our personal needs and to make sense of our world.”  That’s not the kind of God I believe in, though.  So how do I resolve the puzzle?  Are there ways in which my specific religious beliefs, different from conservative evangelicalism, can help?

    In the Spring 2010 issue of Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Steven Peck (a biology professor at BYU) has an essay on whether Mormon theology is compatible with organic evolution.  He brought up some interesting points that are helping me think about this. 

    One is that Joseph Smith introduced new ideas about natural laws.  He taught that there are laws of eternal and self-existent principles.  Moral and perhaps physical laws that were not created by God, but are co-eternal with Him.  If God used evolution by natural selection as His creative method, perhaps it’s because there was no other way.  As Peck writes, “it is hard to imagine that evolution by natural selection is a reasonable choice for creation if other methods were available.”  If less cruel methods than natural selection were available and God chose not to use them, then it would be hard to reconcile that with the Godly attributes of benevolence and kindness.  So perhaps given the physical laws of the universe, by which even God is bound, organic evolution was the only way to bring life into being.  This line of reasoning makes a lot of sense to me.

    Peck’s other point I found helpful was about the importance of getting a physical body in Mormon doctrine.  A fundamental doctrine of Mormonism is that all of humankind lived with God as spirits before birth, and that this life is importance because we gain a physical body.  We believe our bodies will be resurrected after death, and that in fact God and Christ are embodied.  Humans have bodies, and we also have subjective consciousness, something that is much more than the sum of all of our brain cells.  The creation of humankind would mean the union of spirits with biological machines to make  sentient beings, capable of knowing right from wrong.  “Such a union would link a consciousness-bestowing element to the material aspects of the world.”  Further, Peck writes,

        “There seems to be something deeply important about physicality

    and spirit coming together.  Could it be that the physical world can

    be manipulated only through consciousness-mediated direct action?

    Or through this kind of body that unites spirit and physical matter?

    When I read the scriptures, I see a God who makes arrangements

    for irreplaceable records to be kept, preserved, and maintained

    through conscious effort.  He implies that, if they are not, this know-

    ledge will be lost and not brought back through His intervention.  I

    see Lamanites languishing in unbelief until the sons of Mosiah are

    inspired to go among them.  Angels bear messages to other cons-

    iousnesses but do not seem to manipulate the world in interventionist

    ways.  Almost all of the scriptures can be re-interpreted as acts of

    consciousness acting in the world.  Christ’s miracles, especially His

    resurrection, seem to be an exception, but much of how God works

    in the world seems to be that He communicates to and through

    conscious beings who then use their agency to act.  Stories of people

    inspired to stop and help a widow take on new meaning if God cannot

    help the widow without us.” 

    This view of God’s way of interacting with the world is very consistent with my experience.  I don’t see much direct intervention in the world at all, but I believe the Holy Ghost puts thoughts in our minds and feelings in our hearts - communicates consciousness to consciousness.  A God who rarely intervenes in the physical world would not create by fiat.  But he could still be personal, benevolent, attentive, and consciously active. 

   Starting in the 1950s with the publication of Joseph Fielding Smith’s book Man, His Origin and Destiny, Mormonism has been in large part aligned with the conservative evangelical way of thinking about evolution.  After Smith, Bruce R. McConkie was probably our most outspoken leader who was in favor of creationism, and he was active until the 1980s.  But I think following the conservative evangelical’s lead hasn’t done us any good.  It forces a choice between either rejecting science, or accepting a liberal protestant God whom I barely recognize.  Between choice A and choice B, I pick neither.  I think Mormon theology lets me look at the question of how God created the world in a quite different way.  It’s something I will continue to think about.  But I’m certain that however God did it, evolution was and continues to be fundamental to life on Earth.