The Fundamental Problem

As a professor and author on the subject of evolution, living in Oklahoma, I sometimes come in contact with creationism. Not as often as you might think—my students seem to either like what I teach or internalize their anger. They do so because I tell them that I used to be a creationist—that I was wrong, but not stupid. And I provide evidence. I used to let them write papers to express their viewpoints, but so many of them plagiarized that I quit doing this. (The only openly creationist paper was one that the student bought from a website for $15.) The biggest problem with creationism in Oklahoma will probably be from the state legislature which, now totally in Republican hands, promises a crop of nationally notorious creationist bills.

In my writings and classes, we deal with a lot of evidences for evolution. But the most important concept in evolution is that Darwin did for biology what Newton did for physics: just as the planets move by natural laws, not because God pushes them (a belief for which Leibniz condemned Newton), so species have originated not because God made them but by natural laws. This is why Darwin said “…this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity…” in the final paragraph of the Origin of Species.

The reason that this is so important is that all the aspects of the world, from the stars and planets to the weather to biological life to the experiences in our human lives, the world runs by natural laws exactly as if there is no God. That is the fundamental problem in the comparison of the scientific and religious views of the world. Evolution is just a scientific admission of what we have always known: the world runs by itself, with no divine presence or influence.

The absence of God, or at least of any miraculous action on God’s part, is most noticeable in the abundance of evil and suffering in the world. If you saw a child dying in utter misery and pain, and you had the opportunity to do just one little thing to rescue that child, would you be able to ignore her cries and walk away? God can. Are you more loving than God? He has been able to stop His ears from hearing the desperate cries of billions of people throughout history, most of them innocent, or else has the self-control to block all loving response. Indeed, the innocent suffer much more than the guilty, if only because there are so many of them. This situation is consistent with godless evolution, but not with an all-powerful and loving God. If there is a God, it is not in this physical universe or in any other with which this universe or its inhabitants can have any contact.

The writer of Ecclesiastes (the book of the Bible that preachers like to pretend is not there) identified this problem 3000 years ago: the absence of God in everything from the endless cycles of the oceans to the injustices of daily life. It is a problem that Judaism has had for 3000 years, Christianity for 2000 years. Where is God? This is not something that began with Darwin.

This essay appeared on my website on March 29, 2009.