Genesis meets the Big Bang and evolution, absent design.

In terms of the history of the human species, our discoveries of the natural origins of life and the universe as we know it have occurred relatively recently. Regardless of one's religious belief system, the discoveries of our origins have arguably been dramatic. Humanity has observed and collected data of our world to form a meta-narrative of the history of the organization of matter, a history that has eventually allowed for the evolution of humans over tens of thousands of generations (1) and the emergence in our species of a brain with the capacity to conceptualize moments billions of years before or after our own. How can religion respond to the continuously expanding scientific encyclopedia of our universe?

Science and religion both address human curiosity about our origins and involve a form of faith in the intelligibility of the universe. (2) Alfred North Whitehead has suggested that science and religion both involve an adventure of the spirit--"a flight after the unattainable." (3) Yet, recognition of the substantive differences between science and religion allows both science to advance, and religion to continue to speak to the spiritual and immeasurable dimensions of existence.

Perhaps one of the most significant discoveries of the past 400 years of humanity's scientific meta-narrative of the universe occurred in 1951, when Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, two young physicists studying the Big Bang theory, published their calculations that in the first moments following a cosmic explosion, the universe must have been filled with an intense radiation similar to a fireball that forms upon the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. They posited that such a fireball radiation would dissipate as the universe cooled and expanded, but would never entirely disappear, and its remnants should be omnipresent in the universe today. (4) Initially, despite Alpher and Herman's confidence that their calculations were of scientific interest, they found a weak reception among their contemporaries.

In 1965, however, in a project unrelated to the origins of the universe, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected the cosmic microwave background radiation, a radiation coming from every direction in the sky, as though the entire universe was the source. The radiation not only matched the hypothesis of Alpher and Herman; its wavelengths and frequencies, or spectrum, also matched the spectrum pattern of radiation produced by a cosmic explosion. (5) As technology has advanced, many groups of scientists have confirmed this data with increased precision.

The significance of the discovery of the Big Bang has perhaps been on par with that of the discovery of evolution. In 1831, the then theologian-in-training, Charles Darwin, joined a team of British global surveyors aboard Her Majesty's Ship, Beagle, as the expedition's naturalist. Darwin's excursion was an adventurous five-year circumnavigation around the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth during which he carefully observed the life and geology of various global regions.

Upon his return to England, in the three years from 1837 to 1839, Darwin produced in his spare time the entire theory of evolution in roughly 900 pages of private notes. However, his apprehension about the implications of the theory kept him from publishing it until 1858, when he received a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace in Borneo to which Wallace had appended a short essay which outlined succinctly the whole of Darwin's thesis. Perhaps in order to claim the discovery of evolution by natural selection, Darwin gave in to the urgings of his friends to share his work in the 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. At once, the public and the scientific community reacted. (7)

Darwin's theory expressed two commonly known, simple biological life processes: transformation over time and diversification in space. (8) First, over time, individual organisms of a species are born with random variations in their physical traits. For example, one giraffe may be born with a longer neck than her cousins, a neck that can be stretched to enable her to reach higher leaves on a tree. Perhaps in a time of drought, her high reach enables her to consume more food than her relatives, some of whom die, while she mates and reproduces another giraffe with a longer than average neck that allows him to reap the same benefits as his mother, thus mating and producing more offspring that inherit this random mutation that proved environmentally useful. But, the environment is not static. As traits emerge and are selected, the shape of the environment inevitably changes over time. Predators, for example, that are adapted to kill other animals of the ecosystem through mechanisms that exploit a specific trait of other animals can hence change their own population and the population of other species, as well as interspecies environmental dynamics over time. Different random mutations may prove beneficial in terms of survivability, thus leading to the formation of groups of creatures with different environmentally adapted physical attributes. In other words, central to evolutionary biology is the idea that the organization of the world is constantly in a state of flux. (9) Darwin suggested that speciation (10) occurs when organisms with increasingly specialized selected mutations are no longer able to mate with the members of their group, branching off into a new species, resulting in the increasingly diversified tree of life over time. (11)

While one could argue that the premises of On the Origin of Species sustain themselves independent of further research, like the Big Bang Theory, over time, scientific evidence has accrued in favor of Darwinian natural selection so that it is less and less disputable. The genetic research of the twentieth century explained the specific nature of the random mutation of physical traits by exposing that on a strand of DNA, the structure of the order of base pairs of proteins are susceptible to random error in the fusion of the X and Y chromosomes of two parents in the embryogenesis of a new organism. From these random errors, novel mutations emerge. (12)

Further evidence for natural selection has been discovered quite recently. On August 31, 2005, scientists reported that they had determined the precise order of the three billion pieces of genetic materials that encode the genome of the chimpanzee, humankind's closest cousin. The results were used in a gene-to-gene comparison with the human genome, which had been mapped in 2001, and, as had been predicted, it was found that human and chimpanzee codes are 99 percent identical, demonstrating the high probability of both species having had a common ancestor. (13)

And, a few months later, a study demonstrated a specific mechanism for the evolution of a complex molecular system--the functional interaction of the hormone aldosterone and its partner receptor (the mineralocorticoid receptor). (14) The lynchpin of the recent Intelligent Design movement, under the leadership of figures such as Michael Behe, has been that Darwin was unable to explain the evolution of complex systems because evolution relies upon selection of substances that are already present in an organism, and if an arbitrary intermediary step is required but has no naturally selective value in itself, it would be logically unlikely that the arbitrary intermediary step would evolve in order to facilitate the development of a more complex system. The Intelligent Design advocates, by using the notion of a "God of the Gaps," have believed that the lack of explanation of the development of complex systems indicated that some sort of supernatural Designer was responsible. Alas, the scientific evidence has arrived in time to demonstrate the evolution by natural selection of these complex systems. By procuring and examining ancestral genes to the hormone aldosterone, scientists showed that long before the hormone itself had evolved, the receptor's affinity for the hormone was the by-product of the receptor's partnership with ancient, now gone, chemically similar substances, thus explaining the allegedly arbitrary intermediary step. (15)

Most of the data that explains the origin of life as we know it on Earth is quite contrary to a literal reading of the Biblical book of Genesis by which a Divine guiding hand, less than six thousand years ago, created the universe in seven days and created all currently living creatures simultaneously. Numerous additional discrepancies exist between modern cosmology and the cosmology of Genesis 1-2. Genesis 1 describes the creation of Earth before the creation of light, but modern physics explains that the sun, like the stars of other solar systems, existed before Earth, and spinning around the sun was a disc of its cosmic sub-cloud, which slowly and eventually coalesced to form Earth. A further discrepancy lies in the Genesis account of the creation of the sun and moon simultaneously with the stars, as astronomy tells us that stars are born and die within billions of light years of each other, and in our solar system, the sun vastly predates the moon. (16)

Interestingly, one can find discrepancies not only between Genesis and modern science, but also within Genesis itself. For example, in Genesis 1, God creates vegetation first, then people. In Genesis 2, the order is reversed as God creates people first, then vegetation in the form of the Garden in the East. In Genesis 1, the beasts are created in advance of Adam and Eve, but in Genesis 2, the first two people are made before beasts. Genesis 1 describes the creation of Earth and the heavens as occurring over two days, but Genesis 2 describes their creation as having occurred in a single day: "in the day God made the earth and heavens ..." (17)

That Genesis 1 conflicts with Genesis 2, while both were canonized, can perhaps be interpreted not as a reason to reject the value of the Bible, but instead perhaps as an inspiring invitation for openness to multiple new scientific cosmologies on the part of religious people.

A number of cogent arguments have been presented by Western theists throughout history to advocate a non-literal reading of the creation narrative of Genesis, varying according to the contemporaneous science. Augustine, for example, exclaimed:

    What concern is it of mine whether heaven is like a sphere and the
    earth is enclosed by it and suspended in the middle of the universe,
    or whether heaven like a disk above the earth and covers it over on
    one side?... Hence, I must say briefly that in the matter of the
    shape of the heavens the sacred writers knew the truth, but the
    Spirit of God, who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men
    these facts that would be of no avail for their salvation. (18)

In approaching Genesis 1 and 2, one can take into consideration the incredible distance, a gap of nearly three millennia, between modernity and the period in which the text's cosmology originated. Today, in addition to our scientific records of natural history, many other things have changed--culture, theology, and even ethical demands, as we live with an unprecedented scale of human-created global environmental crises that did not exist for the people of ancient Israel, but are difficult to ignore as we ask ourselves how to live ethically in our time here.

One could argue that the unsettling aspect of an evolution-conscious religious awareness has less to do with Biblical discrepancies with modern science, and rather with the science itself held in tandem with certain theological beliefs. For example, evolution does not privilege human beings above other species, rather, at some point humans, too, will probably become extinct. (19) However, that we are not provably a special creation, but the result of random selection of mutated DNA over time, and that our mutations are integrally connected to those of an increasingly complex ecosystem, need not be daunting. Robert Pollack addresses the challenge that the information of evolution poses as he writes, "our species--with all our appreciation of ourselves as unique individuals--is not the creation of design but the result of accumulated errors." (20) This information often falls hard on ears of our population that may privilege our species as an aspect of social culture. Yet, Philip and Patricia Kitcher have suggested that we could consider ourselves one of many species that God loves.

Intelligent Design, and the concept of the "God of the gaps" is problematic in that as discoveries are made, God is pushed farther away from humanity and could, perhaps, ultimately be denied. By placing God specifically in the gaps of science and not allowing mystery for the location and nature of God, we might become closed to the possibility of mystical experiences of God's revelation in modern life. (21)

A further distinction between science and religion is that while good science must survive a test of falsifiability, religion involves faith, which, by nature, does not require the passage of a falsifiability test, but instead is a commitment to beliefs and a harkening to the concept that we have souls, even though we cannot prove this through science.

Several aspects of religion are also difficult to even measure, because they are inextricably bound to the irreproducible lives of those who partake in them. For example, ethics, feelings, transformation, and thoughts derive from the experiences of the people who bring their own histories into situations. Because no two people have exactly the same experience of existence, and our criteria for measuring these personal issues vary according to our personal priorities, a methodical measurement system of falsifiability for religious experience cannot be constructed. To attempt to further measure these phenomena is an exercise in the futility of regularizing human behavior. At best, perhaps one can seek to understand the circumstances that have surrounded certain religious experiences, practices, revelatory moments, and beliefs in history. Otherwise, a science of religion cannot reasonably be constructed.

Conclusion

The existential location of humanity in a world that has a vast and random natural history, paradox, and what seems to be natural evil is not an easy one. Periodically, individuals or groups have chosen to claim that God is knowable through logic or science. Yet, we have seen that this boldness has often caused social rifts and theological confusion. Some have suggested that it is theologically problematic in that when we claim to know and personalize God, we disrespect the power of God as being beyond our own intellectual abilities and become idolatrous of our own imaginative capacities. And, it seems that such claims of knowing God are unnecessary when we understand the independence of theology from the scientific realm of measurability. When theology need not and cannot pass a test of falsifiability, we can perhaps truly appreciate the meaning of faith. Our situation allows us to be uniquely religious beings. That God is not scientifically provable means that we can choose to have faith, to join one another in religious communities that share this hope and this vulnerability of theism, and to live ethically within an ethically challenging world.

Notes

1. E. O. Wilson, The Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 9.

2. Bernard Lonergan, as cited by John F. Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (New York: Paulist Press, 1995). 22-4.

3. He further boldly proclaimed, "The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure." Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures of 1925 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927). 276.

4. Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, "Neutron-Capture Theory of Element Formation in an Expanding Universe," Physical Review 84, no. 1 (1951). 60-80. And Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Norton, 1978). 68-9.

5. Leszek Roszkowski, "On the Cobe Discovery-for Pedestrians," in XXXII Cracow School on Theoretical Physics (Zakopane, Poland: 1992). 6-7. And Jastrow, God and the Astronomers. 70-2.

6. For example, NASA launched a satellite to measure the cosmic fireball over a span of months without the interfering effect of the earth's atmosphere, and they found near perfect agreement between the satellite measurements and the spectrum of a cosmic explosion. Jastrow, God and the Astronomers. 72.

7. Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, and George Gaylord Simpson, Charles Darwin's Autobiography: With His Notes and Letters Depicting the Growth of the Origin of Species (New York: Schuman, 1950), 44-6; and Jonathan Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6-8.

8. Bron R. Taylor, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, vol. 1 (New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005). 452.

9. Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction. 19.

10. Species are commonly defined as irreducible types that are continuous within themselves and discontinuous with other types. Ibid. 13.

11. On the Origin of Species in Edward O. Wilson and Charles Darwin, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006). 612-14.

12. Kitcher, Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 27-30.

13. Rick Weiss, "Scientists Complete Genetic Map of the Chimpanzee; Differences from Human DNA Pinpointed," The Washington Post, September 1, 2005.

14. Sean M. Carroll Jamie T. Bridgham, Joseph W. Thornton, "Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation," Science 312. 97

15. Ibid. 97.

16. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992). 17, 81-3.

17. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Edition, (New York: The World Publishing Company). Gen. 2:4.

18. Saint Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, as quoted in Blackwell, Science, Religion and Authority: Lessons from the Galileo Affair. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998). 15.

19. Robert Pollack, The Faith of Biology & the Biology of Faith: Order, Meaning, and Free Will in Modern Medical Science. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 20.

20. Ibid. 21.

21. For more on the experience of divine mystery in daily life, see the discussion of Karl Rahner by Peter C. Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004).