Tackling
Richard Dawkins: Unweaving
the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998
Christiaan Mostert: God
and The Future, T & T Clark, 2002
http://www.ascm.org.au/jgOnline/2003Spring/jg2003Spring.htm
Robert
Tulip
Richard Dawkins is
justly famous for the remarkably lucid and coherent evolutionary philosophy he
has developed in his books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing
Mount Improbable. Dawkins presents
Unweaving the Rainbow further develops these evolutionary
themes, with different approaches to the rainbow providing a motif for the
cultural battles faced by scientific understanding. For Dawkins, Sir Isaac
Newton’s use of the prism to explain the structure of light has a beauty which
can only add to our subjective vision of the beauty of rainbows in nature. By contrast, John Keats’ comment that
I believe that
Christian theology should engage with ideas such as those of Richard Dawkins in
order to retain credibility and contestability in the broader intellectual
community. Dawkins is an avowed atheist, with good reason considering the lame
ideas about God he has encountered, symbolised by the religious demand that the
rainbow can only be appreciated as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts.
Theology needs to unweave such 'rainbows' as its
approach to the trinity, to creation and to the meaning of heaven and
salvation. For example, a key error of many Christians is the belief that God
is like a heavenly watchmaker, designing each creature to fit its place.
Charles Darwin showed that this theory about God is incorrect, because the only
mechanism of design is natural selection. Dawkins provides a brilliant modern
explanation of why the theory of evolution is so compelling, and why it is
simply wrong to reject
Theology should have
the capacity to engage with Dawkins’ critique, developing its own coherence by
systematic logic grounded in both an understanding of natural processes and of
the meaning of divinity. To this end, the way of thinking I would like to
explore sees God as the ultimate adaptive possibility towards which humanity
must evolve if we are to fulfill our purpose in life.
A way of putting this in terms of evolutionary biology is to say God is 'the
niche of the world'. This approach sees the infinite and eternal God as
revealed in that structure of reality (our ecological niche) that will maximise
human flourishing. By definition, if humanity lives according to the will of
this God we will prosper and grow, but if we live contrary to the will of this
God we will suffer, decline and perhaps eventually become extinct. Connection
with the divine reality promotes salvation, understood in entirely evolutionary
Darwinian terms, while disconnection from this reality promotes destruction.
There is one truth, with the big picture equated to God and revealed in science.
The divine human niche is the global, even cosmic, ecological sum of factors
that enable human life.
I like to think of
this divine niche as our telos - the Greek word for
purpose. On this basis, teleology becomes the study of how we can adapt to our
real niche, rather than the pre-Darwinian teleology which claimed that God is
somehow actively shaping us to fit nature. Operating as a whole, our niche is
largely passive, consisting of natural structures that are set in place and
mostly continue for eons. The activity is on the part of organisms, which must
find their way of living in harmony with these natural structures if they are
to prosper. Like a hermit crab that must find a suitable shell to protect it,
humanity must find our ecological niche if we are to prosper. God has created
us as complex free beings, with power to choose if we will live by faith or
not.
Can this approach
reconcile with Christianity? My own belief is that Jesus Christ provides the
model of human evolution through his claim that we can connect to God through
grace. Further, I believe that trinitarian theism is
absolutely necessary in a cosmic sense if we are to develop a vision of
salvation that builds on our scientific understanding. If the niche of human
potential may properly be identified with the Christian God, we are called to
live in the image of this gracious and glorious God, representing truth through
language and establishing the
If God is revealed in
the cosmic force of nature, the question arises how this force can be
represented in human life. This is where the Christian trinitarian
conception is so powerful. When Jesus said ‘Believe me that I am in the Father
and the Father in me’ (John
In grappling with
these ideas I have found the work of Christiaan Mostert immensely helpful, in his God and the Future, a
study of the great German thinker Wolfhardt Pannenberg. Mostert provides a
masterly presentation of an entirely coherent and compelling vision of God,
with potential to help Christian theology engage more broadly with the best of
contemporary thought. Recognising that ‘the reality, power and goodness of God
are radically debatable’ (155), he supports Pannenberg’s
contention that the doctrine of the Trinity provides the framework for
understanding creation and history. The Trinity is often misunderstood, so Mostert’s complex orthodox 'unweaving'
of this topic is refreshing - especially his focus on the relations between the
Father, Son and Spirit, and his argument that for God to be a God for humanity,
the Father needs the Son just as the Son needs the Father. Mostert
quotes Pannenberg’s statement that ‘the resurrection
of Jesus is just as constitutive for the divinity of the Father as for the
Sonship of Jesus’ (p196), a confronting idea which really helps to understand
what it can mean to say the infinite God of the universe cares passionately
about humanity. Although Mostert is critical of
process theology, I would claim my own idea of God as revealed in the niche of
the world finds support in his statement that ‘if Jesus’ message of the coming
kingdom of God is taken seriously, our view of God must include God’s power
over all finite reality, which can only be awaited from the future. This is the key point for any theology which intends to do justice
to eschatology’ (p.151). The implication is that the power of God will
provide the meeting point for theology and ecology within human history.
Biblical prophecy
claims to anticipate the future rule of God and to explain what people must do
to participate in that future. I would suggest we can get a better
understanding of the parameters of that future by combining the scientific
framework of evolution with the Biblical framework of trinitarian
eschatology. This points to three areas where I would be interested to see Mostert expand; firstly, his understanding of divine
purpose or telos, secondly, the role of the Son in
the consummation of reality (a role Mostert assigns
to the Spirit), and finally, his reading of the Book of Revelation, and whether
any of that mysterious book can be rehabilitated as we seek to understand God
and the future.
Author's Response
As part of a response
to the above review by Robert Tulip, the author of God and the Future, Christiaan Mostert wrote:
Your final three
points, briefly alluded to, are interesting. Let me say briefly:
1.
I understand
the divine purpose in term of the benevolent, kindly, loving rule of God in and
over all that is other than God - the entire cosmos - yet in such a way that
human freedom is respected. It is a 'rule' in which human and other creaturely
flourishing have a very high value. The acknowledgement of God must come
freely, or else it is worth nothing.
2.
There is
certainly a role for the Son in the consummation of all things. In traditional
language, the Son is associated with the judgement of all things and the
handing of the kingdom back to the Father.
3.
I think there
is a great deal about the book of Revelation - and apocalyptic thought
generally - that is compatible with a theology of history (all the way from
beginning to end) that might challenge our narrow views of history today. We
must learn, however, that the wood matters more than the individual trees.