Mohan wrote a very interesting blogpost, in which he argues that Obama's belief that his "belief in evolution" is compatible with faith is "an utterly false platitude". Mohan writes "Whether or not science is literally "incompatible" with religion, it seems to me obvious that belief in evolution should decrease one's faith inasmuch as it takes away one main reason for believing in God. Certainly, I can't see how knowledge of evolution could possibly strengthen anybody's rationally based faith." I disagree with this view, and would like to put forward some of the reasons for why I think this.
The more general question behind Mohan's question is: in how far is religious faith dependent on natural theology? I take natural theology not only in the narrow sense, as in e.g., the cosmological argument, design argument, moral argument, but also in a broader sense of theology that is not based on personal experience or revelation, but on a reasoned consideration of natural phenomena. One of the strands of natural theology, for instance, espoused by Swinburne, is that God provides a good explanation to explain some natural phenomena (e.g., the existence of the universe, fine-tuning etc). Now, there seems to be a tendency in American philosophers, even among those whose position towards natural theology is ambivalent (Plantinga is a good example) that natural theology in this sense provides more warrant for faith. If natural science can't explain it, we can appeal to God, so the idea goes, and this easily gives rise to the view that science and natural theology are somehow in competition. However, this view is strongly tied to a very specific perspective on natural theology, which has not been endorsed in much of the history of theology, namely natural theology is somehow prior to faith, a view also endorsed by some recent atheists on the topic (e.g., Philipse). Let me stress that this is not in line with the way that the relationship between faith and science has been regarded throughout history.
I'm not just thinking about fideism and related positions. For instance, Augustine in several volumes on how to interpret genesis ("On the literal interpretation of Genesis") explicitly rejected a literalist interpretation of Genesis 1. This is especially interesting, since Augustine did not have any access to evolutionary theory, obviously. He did not think that the 6 days symbolized several longer periods (as Obama seems to do), but rather, thought the world was created simultaneously, in one creative act, by a God who was outside of time, and that the 6 days symbolize (if I remember well) the stages in which the angels received knowledge about creation - a very distant sort of interpretation indeed! To Augustine, faith came first, and understanding would come only later. He also thought that interpretations of the bible not in line with natural philosophical views must be mistaken. This view of the priority of faith can also be found in authors like Anselm and Aquinas, both also prominent natural theologians. They believed that the articles of faith and knowledge of nature would converge upon a single truth. The view that one should take the bible literally, or indeed that literal interpretations are to be preferred is actually quite recent in history.
Importantly, this does not mean earlier thinkers never took the bible literally. For instance, Augustine believed Adam was a historical person. And there was no compelling reason for him not to believe that, given the evidence he had. But Augustine thought he had good reasons to think the staged creation account in Genesis was false.
According to Peter Bowler's study on this topic, biblical literalism, which lies at the basis of creationism etc. only came to full bloom in the 1950s, although fundamentalist arguments against evolutionary theory were already outlined in the 1920s. He writes, however that "contrary to the mythology that has built up around the Monkey trial--there is no evidence that the early fundamentalists were united in taking up a literal interpretation of the bible in general and of Genesis in particular. They were deeply concerned by higher criticism [i.e., biblical criticism that disputed the special status of scripture]‚… But to hold that it was divinely inspired did not entail taking every word literally, given that there are many areas where it is clearly speaking in metaphorical terms" (179-180).
Early evolutionists like Asa Gray and Charles Kingsley thought evolution was a very plausible way of God to create things through secondary causation. Because of the whole creationist debacle, this seems to have become rather a minority position (e.g., Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins are contemporary defenders), but it did not seem strange to an early proponent of the modern synthesis like Dobzhansky to write " organic diversity becomes […] reasonable and un- derstandable if the Creator has created the living world not by caprice but by evolution propelled by natural selection […] Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s, method of Creation". This is from p. 127 of Dobzhansky's well-known paper (Nothing in biology makes sense except in thelight of evolution.) Indeed, the view that creation takes place through several acts of special action (i.e., intervention in the world, directly) is not in line with a large body of theological thinking about the topic, at least in Christian theology, which reserves special action more for things like miracles, divine revelation and other exceptional events.
It has always struck me as strange that creationists, intelligent design proponents etc. have this rather different position. Mongrain has an excellent paper on the topic, showing how IDC etc have a view of a relation between faith and science that is anomalous to most Christian theology. Rather than faith seeking understanding, creationism and other such programs seek to prove a literalist interpretation, or rather, preserve a literalist interpretation as far as possible, of the Bible.
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