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Christianity and Evolution

“How can evolution be compatible with Christianity?” These words, quoted in a telephone call, stung me to write. For surely, both evolution and Christianity share a picture of the world in the process of growth and change that unfolds from the first word of creation to the final word of dissolution? And yet, perhaps this involvement of Christianity with history is precisely why some find there to be a conflict. A religion that ignored the material world could leave science to its separate realm of operation. Christianity, on the other hand, is involved with the physical world — that is what incarnation is all about — and so it finds itself in an encounter with physical science.

The tragedy of the scientific period has been that this encounter was rooted in misconception and confusion, from the start of modern science in the seventeenth century. At that time the range of allowed interpretations of scripture, whether Catholic or Protestant, had evolved into patterns of fixed authority. It was no longer the “living word” — a dynamic utterance rich in many layers of meaning — but a static catalogue of factual statements and moral rules. The way was open for the statements of science to come into conflict with those of religion, to the alarm of those whose power and prestige derived from the latter. The ensuing battles thrust a wedge between science and religion, so that science was left bereft of any moral standards, and religion (usually the loser in the battles) retreated into an increasingly irrelevant realm of private devotion. Until recently, almost the only significant protests against this trend have come from fundamentalists who wish to refight those battles on the same barren territory as before, in the forlorn hope that this time religion might win.

Throughout this sorry history, however, one strand of thought has held on to Christianity’s original vision, and has recently found voice in the renewal movement called Creation Spirituality. It draws fully on the Genesis account of creation, when the world was declared by God to be “Very good”; but it can read also a deeper meaning, in recognising that the time of the Genesis account is not a physical chronology. Rather, it is like what the indigenous Australian peoples call the Dream Time: that eternal order that permeates and underpins consensual reality, being its source and its end. The creation events, both physical and moral, are not separated from us in a closed chapter of prehistory, but are still being unfolded here and now.

Modern science concurs, in seeing that the act of creation was not restricted to a first moment. It could not be if, as we now speculate, those stages of the universe from which space and time spring were themselves devoid of any sense of time. Nor was creation confined to some early epoch, because, in the unpredictable world of quantum physics, new and unimagined forms are constantly arising. The potentiality for the new, like the Dream time, is always with us.

So the perspective of creation spirituality joins with the revelation of science in showing the creative fruitfulness of Genesis as still operative within the material world in the course of evolution. It shows God’s commission to Eve and Adam as our invitation to participate in that creative transformation of matter, and it revels humanity’s primary sin to be our abuse of this invitation. This constitutes the central teaching regarding evolution to twentieth century humanity: that in a few short decades we are trashing a world on which God has lavished 15 billion years of preparation.

Rev. Chris Clarke, Dean of Southampton University

Chris Clarke will be speaking on this theme on 25th January at 7:30pm in P/L001.

Last modified: 25th November 2005