The Soulful Eye

What does not kill me makes me stronger.  ~ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.  ~ Nietzsche, The Antichrist

Nietzsche.   I can’t believe it took me so long to put my finger on what’s been bugging me but that’s it.   As someone who came to church with evolution already installed, I’m particularly interested in how Darwin and evolution get discussed in that context.  Before I go any further let me admit that I’m open to being totally wrong, I’m open to the fact that Genesis absolutely can be read in a way that precludes the evolutionary process completely.   I also admit that pre-Fall animal pain and suffering is a problem for theists.   On the other hand, post-Fall animal pain and suffering is also a problem for theists who bother to examine it closely.   When addressed fully, that’s a huge topic that I’m not yet comfortable tackling here.  This post, then, is about one aspect of the church meets evolution relationship, and basically it comes down to telos, or ultimate aim.

The way I see it there are two ways you can go if you accept both Jesus and evolution; one looks like Jesus, the other looks like Nietzsche. Some of the efforts I’ve encountered so far seem to have a Nietzschean shadow to them,  and that’s what bugs me. In this post I’d like to address one of those encounters, with Daniel Harrell’s book, Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith. Basically, I see Harrell using arguments that embrace evolution when it works in favor of the special place of humanity in creation, when it justifies human power over animals, but then failing to acknowledge the claims that evolution makes against the special place of humanity among other animals, or how we might rightly exercise the responsibility of that position.

Let me start with where we agree. We both seem to accept biological evolution.  We both agree that humans are different from animals.  We don’t agree on how we’re different or what that difference means.  Let’s start with what we do with the ‘fact’ of biological evolution and the problem of natural evil.  Harrell’s account goes something like this. If we embrace evolution then we embrace natural selection. He draws heavily on the Darwinian problem of evil which is essentially that predation, pain, and death seem to be the instruments of creation.  Darwin himself observed, “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!”1  Harrell admits as much in saying “natural selection has no compassion … all it cares about is utility … it doesn’t allow for a merciful God.”2   His basic position toward the apparent evil of natural selection is to claim later that “Natural selection is not a bad thing by itself. There’s nothing morally wrong with hunting for food or caring for your kin or adjusting your environment. Evolutionary behaviors would not be considered evil in and of themselves, since their purpose is to benefit life and growth.” 3   First, I find it interesting that he uses these specific behaviors as representative of ‘natural selection’ and ‘evolutionary behaviors’, but we’ll come back to that.  Generally speaking, he seems to be claiming that violent merciless death, pain and suffering isn’t really bad because it benefits life and growth for whoever survives to benefit from it.  However, a few sentences later he says, via Augustine, that evil is a good gone bad.  Our survival instinct (a good) became warped through sin and can therefore be bent towards “self obsession and violence ” and that “The self-interest that serves to benefit life deforms into the self-obsession that debases life.”4

I submit that the original instinct for survival which God told us to meet a certain way (non-violent sustenance) became warped into self obsession and violence; i.e. into thinking that slaughter and bloodshed is good because it makes those who do the killing “stronger”.  This is more consistent with the Biblical data and in perfect agreement with the notion that self-interest deforms into violence and a debasement of life.  Then we see the statement that “there’s nothing inherently wrong with hunting for food”.  This is the point at which I notice much of  his argument has a not so subtle focus on defending predation because meat eating is predation.  In order to justify meat eating you must justify predation.  In order to justify predation you must normalize it.  In order to normalize predation you have to throw out both the beginning and end of the Bible story.   I find it especially odd to see Harrell making his assertions within so few sentences of an admission that sin deforms the goodness that God installed.  According to the writer of Genesis, God created herbivores.  Predation had no part in God’s good creation and, according to the prophets, it won’t have a place in the Kingdom either.  Bloodshed is a perversion.  We are told very specifically that God isn’t ok with just any old way of survival, God was so grieved by the fact that all flesh had become corrupt, violent, that he was sorry he made us.  He was grieved over what we had become.

In critiquing Harrell’s position on the rightness of predation I will enlist the help of John Berkman, and comments from his essay, “Is the Consistent Ethic of Life Consistent?”5 Berkman is arguing in this article that the Catholic impulse towards a truly consistent ethic of life will also need to include a change in attitudes towards other animals. In support of his argument he engages Pope John Paul II’s discussion of the errors he sees in contemporary humanity’s understanding of “the truth of creation” in the Christian doctrines of life and of the creation.  According to the JP II, the first error is the complete instrumentalization of nature. The second, most directly relevant to our discussion, is what the JP refers to as the divinization of nature. Included under this category are “theologies which affirm the ‘naturalness’ of predation and parasitism in nature”6. This is essentially Harrell’s position as I see it. In commenting on the JP II’s positions in the EV, Berkman points out that if nature as we currently know it is considered to be ideal, “then we would have to affirm the continuous cycles of predation, death, and decay as necessary and good … Unless we can provide an account of why this is inherently tragic, we end up affirming the world of original violence rather than that of ontological peace. Thus the importance of the Fall in the Christian metanarrative. For when one speaks of ‘nature’ as it presently exists, one is speaking of what St Paul refers to as ‘creation in bondage’.”7

It’s a significant point that post-Fall conditions are not given as prescriptions for the way things should be but as descriptions of the way things will be outside of what God desires for us. Just because we might look out into the natural world and see “nature red in tooth and claw” the orthodox Christian position can never be that it’s fine the way it is, to do so would be a denial of sin, the fallenness of the entire creation and a fully Trinitarian eschatology.  Berkman’s summary of the relevance of Christian eschatology is worth quoting in full.

“For in the same way that the world of ‘original justice’ is not our present world of ‘nature’, the kingdom of God for which Christians aim and to which the pilgrim church travels is not the same as our present world. When St Paul gives his vision of a redeemed creation, it is one which overcomes all the forms of alienation brought about by the Fall. Thus the Catechism notes that the pilgrim church of God ‘takes her place among the creatures which groan and travail yet and await the revelation of the sons of God’. Thus this ‘truth of creation’ - that the fundamental purpose of the lives of animals is not to serve the needs and desires of humans but to manifest God’s glory – is affirmed eschatologically, because humans share a common destiny of fellowship with God and with other living creatures.”8

So Harrell and I come to very different conclusions regarding ‘the natural’ world.  He says there’s nothing inherently wrong with the predation and parasitism that’s in it,  I say there is.  What about the question of how humans are different from other animals, how do we line up on that?  Harrell says “… when we speak of the human brain, we’re really talking about something that has out-evolved evolution. The human brain’s capacity for learning makes it possible for people to control their future in ways that other animals cannot.”9  He and I agree that humans are different, are special.  We don’t agree at all on what that means.  Take for example a story he tells about discussing ethics with med students.  One med student asks, “given what we know about the similarity between humans and chimps, why is it ok to experiment on them?”  Harrell’s answer is that “the reason we don’t work on people (and the reason we don’t clone them) is because people are made (evolved) in the image of God and monkeys aren’t.”10  His statement was explicitly that we don’t “work on” humans but the implicit statement is that it’s ok to “work on” monkeys.  I think it’s telling that Harrell uses the phrase “work on” in this context.  Sounds like what you do in an auto-body shop, you “work on” things.  But that’s just it.  Monkeys and apes are not “things”.  It’s very similar to the language I heard being used in an NPR story about horse racing after what we saw with Eight Belles this past year.  They were referring to what happened to her as “a breakdown”, again, notice the car shop, the mechanical analogies being used on living beings.  This is reflective of our thought still being clouded by a long ugly Cartesian hangover and we seriously need to wake up.  Anyway, back to the image of God excuse for why it’s ok to “work on” monkeys.  What is it about being made in the image of God that justifies vivisection?  Jesus is the image of God for Christians, and He was and is the healer of all things.  What God are we reflecting, image-ing with vivisection, with predation, with causing pain and suffering and violent merciless death when we have perfectly viable choices to do otherwise?

So we agree on biological evolution but don’t agree on what that means for humanity.  What then do I see when I hold the ‘evolution’ of humanity in one hand and the Bible in the other?  Whether I am what I am by way of evolution or special fiat, I agree that humans in general are differentiated, by degree, from other creatures because of our ability to perceive a right and wrong beyond our own immediate needs and that we undoubtedly occupy a unique position of agency within creation.  If I accept that Jesus is the definitive self revelation of God, and that according to the New Testament, He carries the image of God and we only do in as much as we reflect Him, then I must see that what God is doing with the evolutionary process in humanity is to create beings with morality, empathy, and an ability to appreciate all the beauty and goodness in the natural world as the beauty and goodness of its creator, a being that could not only perceive Jesus as God, but one with agency to act in creation for and with Him.   The irony is that the ability to perceive natural good requires the ability to perceive natural evil.  What happens when we eliminate half of that equation?

My concern is that Christians who accept the premises of biological evolution cannot embrace only the half that suits our conception of ourselves as special because we clawed our way to the top and use that as self-justification for glorifying our own predatory capabilities.  The Christian embrace of predation that is based on half perceptions of the natural world is neither fully Darwinian, nor, in my opinion fully Christological.  No matter how we came to have empathy and morality we have it.  No matter how sin came to be, Jesus allows us to conquer it through Him. If we look to Jesus as our model we’ll find that there is no excuse at all for making normative claims about the way things are, as if it’s the way they should be, the way they must be.  Jesus acted against both moral and natural evil, healing spiritually and physically.

So Darwin says that “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.“ Is there an alternative reading of Darwin for Christians that doesn’t necessarily lead to an embrace of antagonism, parasitism, and predation?  Of course there is, and it’s been there all along.  The alternative stance would take as normative the self revelation of God in Jesus the healer, the reconciler of all things. It seems to me that the only way to incorporate Darwin into Christianity would have to begin with the assumption that the environment into which humanity is now called to adapt, or if you prefer, is being selected for through Jesus, must be one of increased Shalom. In that way, Christological fitness would select for humility, self-sacrifice, and peacemaking.  Sound familiar?  But what would Darwin say about all that creaturely harmony?  ”In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

Darwin didn’t see only the predation and antagonism in the natural world, nor does anyone who makes an effort to fully observe the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwin does force us to take a stand on what we’ll say about natural evil though.  I don’t claim to have it all worked out, but I don’t see how a Christological answer could be to claim that natural evil doesn’t exist or that natural evil is actually good.  That’s straight up Nietzsche. It raises red flags for me when apologists appeal only to the evil in Darwin’s explanation of selection, especially when that is used as a justification of our own behaviors; i.e. animals kill each other so it’s ok if we kill them.  That’s the “we’re better than animals but only until that might make claims on how we treat them, then it’s ok for us to model the animals we’re supposedly better than” position.  I don’t believe the evolutionary evidence warrants such a biased gaze towards predation as normative anymore than I believe the self-revelation of God in Jesus warrants it.   Of course everything dies but that’s not the same as saying everything is killed mercilessly by a predator.  So, in as much as I share Daniel Harrell’s desire to rightly understand the overwhelming evidence in favor of biological evolution in light of the Biblical narrative, I don’t share his parsing of it in relationship to the ‘truth of creation’ nor to the truth of Jesus. I for one will have to keep looking for a satisfactory marriage of the two because Jesus our Predator12 just isn’t it.

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1 Darwin as quoted by Michael Murray, “Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering”, (New York: Oxford, 2009), 2.

2 Harrell, Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, 51.

3 Harrell, 115.

4 Ibid., 116.

5 John Berkman, “Is the Consistent Ethic of Life Consistent?” in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

6 Berkman, 241.

7 Ibid., 241.

8 Ibid., 243

9 Harrell, 40.

10 Ibid., 12.

11 Ibid., 35.

12 Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 114.