One last question is whether accepting evolution rules out God's action in the world. So, prior to Darwin, theologians could point to the complexity and functionality of the natural world and say, "This looks designed, it must be due to God's action." But now that design or the appearance of design is explained by natural selection and other perfectly natural factors, we can't point that way anymore. So, is there any place for God and what does that mean about human existence? Are we a cosmic accident, or can we see purpose and design in other ways? Well, as you might expect, there are many perspectives. So, the intelligent design group, Stephen Meyer and company, want to say that there are developments in evolution that cannot be attributed to natural processes. So, the design argument is still basically in place. The only problem is that many of the examples they have used to show that the processes of evolution are not sufficient to produce these irreducibly complex elements which they argue for. For example, the bacterial flagellum, the little tail on bacteria, or the blood clotting system have been discredited. It's been shown how they could come about by natural processes. But apart from the science, I think there's another real problem with the intelligent design group's approach. It only recognizes God's action when natural factors are not enough. It looks for an intervening God and emphasizes divine action in miraculous type events where nature is not enough on its own. But this is to overlook so many other ways of thinking about divine action. Other models of divine action mean that God can be a part of the action without always just sort of adding stuff to it. So, one example of how God can be active in the world is described in Aquinas's view of secondary causation, and this goes all the way back to, again, Aristotle who pulls apart why does something happen into four different causes, and he talks about a formal cause, a material clause, an effective cause, and a final cause. So, to try and make it simple, we used this example of Michelangelo's statue of David. So, you have this lovely statue of David, and I would say that the formal cause is the idea that the artist has in his mind of what he wants to make, that sort of image of David. The material cause is the stone, the marble, out of which it was carved. The effective cause is Michelangelo's chisel, and his hammer, and his arms, it's the physical causation that we're looking for. And the final cause is what is the statue made for. Well, it's made to be beautiful. It's made to be admired. It's made to show the glories of humanity. So, we can think about these four different causes and what Aquinas argues about God's action is that God can be active in the world in formal ways and in final ways without messing with the effective causes. So, if you look at the natural process of God's acting in the world, you wouldn't ever see something that you couldn't explain. You'd be able to explain it always, but the end action is something that's more than could come about naturally. My favorite example of this is Tom Settle who uses the example of sheepdogs herding sheep. On its own, a sheepdog would never herd sheep in the careful, ordered way through the fences. It couldn't do that on its own. It wouldn't have any reason to do that. But the shepherd giving the dog the instructions allows it to do something that it couldn't do on its own or wouldn't do on its own. So, even though it's only the physical dog running around, doing all of the moving, its reason for doing that comes from somewhere else. And so we can think about the natural process of evolution in this sort of way. There's no point at which God intervenes in the process, no point at which God acts in the process to add something, but God is active in the entire shaping of the process in such a way that it comes to something like humanity, which is improbable at best, and that's a result of God's action in it. There are other examples of divine action that are used as well. So, Arthur Peacocke has a notion of sort of top-down causation, that the way that God structures the world constrains it into certain lines of development. And this is maybe best demonstrated in something like Simon Conway Morris' look at biological convergence, of evolutionary convergence. So, his famous example is the eye. If I went to an aquarium and I look an octopus in the eye, I'm going to stare at it and it will look right back to me with this same sort of camera eye that I have. This amazingly complex organ that uses light in exactly the same way that we've had to take centuries to design telescopes to use light, her eyes do that. But if you look at the common ancestor that we had with that octopus, that common ancestor didn't have an eye like that. So, it means that this same complex solution to the problem of seeing came about more than once through the random processes of evolution, constrained by natural selection and the very physics of the universe. So, you can think of God setting up the physical universe so that life will find certain solutions over and over again. And there are different examples of convergence like the body form of a saber-toothed tiger, or there's a marsupial that has the same sort of thing, or the eye or other examples. And the argument is that God, by creating the environment in the right way, can direct evolution along lines without actually ever intervening in the process. We could also talk about the question of God creating meaning to the process. So, there is an analogy to birth. When you have a baby born, you don't think that God worked apart from the natural processes of fetal development, and yet we could affirm with the psalms that the birth of a baby, you knit me together in my mother's womb. So, the way that we understand God active in a situation isn't reducible to this idea, that it has to be some sort of intervention. Another approach comes from the process theists and they would propose a divine lure, an idea that God does not drive evolution's choices from behind but rather attracts it from the front. The most colorful expression that I know of this view comes from Robert Farrar Capon. And he says this, "What God does to the world, He does subtly. His effect on creation is like what a stunning woman does to a man. She doesn't touch his freedom, and she doesn't muck about with the constitution of his being by installing some trichinosis that makes Harry love Sally. Rather, you have this sense that the whole of creation is drawn towards the beauty and the simplicity of God and that can be a type of God's action in the world, bringing evolution to its conclusion without, again, God intervening in the process." So, all of these ways are different ways to think of how God is active in the process, alongside God simply companioning it. So, I've presented here various models of how we can think about divine action. I don't want to rule out the miraculous either, not at all. But I don't think that we need to pick one of these models, the idea of secondary causation or the idea that God is luring creation. Each gives us helpful ways to think about the spectrum of divine action. Each helps us see that God is always and everywhere active. But what is certain is that evolution does not pose any threat to the idea of God's action in the world. We've looked at three sets of questions today. The question of suffering, the questions surrounding a historical Adam and Eve and the doctrines that are associated with that, and finally the question of divine action, how is God involved in the evolutionary story. In each of this, we see that evolution raises new questions, poses new challenges, but it also opens up broader theological possibilities.
