Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World." Beginning with "Selfish Behavior of Primates and Other Animals," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Original Sin in the Bible as Read Today.")

Static (Cyclic) versus the Evolutionary Universe, and the Biblical Origins of Science

We have just reviewed our ethical history starting with a crudely Darwinian "law of the jungle" based on selfishness; progressing to more enlightened forms of self-interest in well-regulated societies (both animal and human); and finally encountering (in the Jewish tradition, culminating with Jesus) an increasingly clear divine call to transcend that same (divinely created!) selfishness which had powered our entire biological and cultural evolution. Perhaps this leaves us feeling a bit disoriented, or at least ambivalent about this whole evolution business. But we should expect the rules to change as we mature from children into adults. Maybe we remember a dramatic moment when that happened. Or maybe we just looked back one day and suddenly realized how far we had come. Our evolution is no different. We have made (or at least have been challenged to make) a radical break with a past grounded in "survival of the fittest," and have been given a new commandment: to love one another.

So here we stand, with at least one foot in the old Darwinian dispensation and the other, hopefully, on the road to the Kingdom of God. St. Paul struggled with the inner conflict this predicament entails for each of us (Romans 7:14-23), and we shall see further on that it is intimately connected with the doctrine of original sin. But first, mustn't this break with the past also have caused a parallel split in our cultural and intellectual history? Might this history shed some light on the ongoing debate and confusion over "creation versus evolution"?

Indeed, this radical shift in our conception of ethics is tied to an equally radical shift in our civilization's whole outlook on existence—from seeing the world as fundamentally unchanging, to viewing it as the product and perpetuator of a process of change on its way to an unimaginable (but hopefully better) future. It was in this context that science as we know it developed, and evolution was discovered. This context was provided by the Judeo-Christian tradition—which is to say, by the Bible. This may come as a surprise to those who see the biblical account of our origins as the very antithesis of evolution, but it goes to show how badly many readers of the Bible have missed the point.

Though "static" compared to our present concept of an evolving cosmos, the ancient worldview that colored the Genesis revelation without being an integral part of it, and which was (and still is) largely prevalent outside the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, was more complex than the word "static" implies. Cyclic events (day and night, summer and winter, birth and death, even dissolution and regeneration of the universe itself) were endlessly repeated in a cosmos devoid of what we would call "progress." This dynamic, cyclic conception was nonetheless "static" in that no net change, or only degeneration, would occur over the long haul, making history essentially futile. By contrast, the evolutionary universe exhibits real, irreversible change along the axis of time, drawing the natural cycles out, metaphorically, into a spiral that actually goes somewhere.

While the scriptures of the ancient Hebrews borrowed mythic and literary elements from the cyclic worldview of neighboring peoples, they actually represent that worldview's emphatic transcendence. It was precisely the biblical tradition that gave to human thought—and eventually to the scientific and evolutionary worldview—the notion of meaningful change through time and the valorization of history itself, springing from the idea of creation at a specific moment in time (really, the creation of time itself) and other acts of God in history (see the classic treatments of these themes by Eliade 1954 and Jaki 1974). Rather than the world being a dispiriting place in which primeval chaos spawned gods of limited power who acted for arbitrary, conflicting, and often malevolent reasons, the Hebrew scriptures portrayed the world for the first time as the free creation of a single, almighty, rational, and benevolent God. This world was law-governed, dependable, congenial, and offered us a hopeful future—because God had promised it, and God was in charge. The optimism and confidence in progress that sprang from this crucial conceptual shift, reflected in the mythical narratives of Genesis 1-3 and hammered home throughout the prophetic books, were the groundwork groundwork for the origins of all of Western science, including the discovery of evolution.

In short, while the ahistorical-cyclic and the historical-evolutionary worldviews are decidedly at odds, the biblical view bridges them. The evolutionary outlook shares with and derives from the biblical view a monumentally important trait: the emphasis on positive net change through time. Like the Bible, it reflects our belief that unique and important events have happened throughout history—whether it be salvation history or evolutionary history. How ironic that the Bible has been so often misread as opposing the very idea of evolution for which it prepared the way!

Progress in evolution. The biblical worldview holds that history is going somewhere, and God has promised that things will turn out right in the end. In other words, there is progress. Many evolutionists today, however, deny there is any "progress" in evolution at all, moral or otherwise. This is an overreaction to the discredited idea that all living things automatically, necessarily become bigger, more complex, more sociable, more intelligent, or in some absolute sense "better" with the passage of time. In fact, organisms simply do what they can to survive, each day, in each day's environment—to preserve the status quo of their own continued existence. If remaining as they are accomplishes that, then they remain much as they are, perhaps for millions of years—bacteria, coelacanths, opossums, or whatever. They may even become smaller or less complex, if natural selection so dictates.

Taking the record as a whole, however, it is fair to say that the average size, complexity, sociality, and intelligence (and other features) of organisms in general have shown a net increase, simply as a statistical result of the fact that the maximum size, complexity, sociality, and intelligence exhibited by any organism have increased. Once there existed only single-celled life forms; now there exists an entire spectrum from single-celled life through all sorts of multicelled plants, fungi, and animals, including us. Most of the single-celled creatures have not tended to become multicelled, nor have most of the vertebrates tended to become human-like (or turtle-like, or bird-like). But some have, and the whole envelope of diversity, size, complexity, sociality, and intelligence (and other traits) has been stretched as a result.

Being large, complex, social, intelligent creatures ourselves, we naturally like to define increase in these traits as progress. This is our privilege; but we should acknowledge its subjectivity. Bacteria inhabiting the hot springs of Yellowstone might prefer to equate evolutionary progress with the ability to live in near-boiling water, while tapeworms would presumably view their own elegantly simplified anatomy and freeloading lifestyle as the pinnacle of progress.

A more general criterion of progress, however, lies in the fact that selection favors efficiency in the use of energy and resources by all living things. Over geological time, this constant competition for more efficient use of resources has led to greater ecological specialization by species, hence greater diversity of species, hence more complex interactions and networks among species. Seen against this background, our own complexity and adaptive efficiency do not appear merely as the quirks of one minor branch of the evolutionary tree, but instead emerge into view as the most marked expression of a truly general trend. No other species survives in as many environments as we do; no other species interacts among its own members and with other species in as many ways as we do; and no other species adapts to change as efficiently as we do, thanks to our strategy of cultural evolution. We are biologically special not primarily because of things we do that no other organism does; we are special because of the things all others try to do (interact, adapt and survive) that we do better, more effectively, and more extravagantly than any of them.

We are therefore on firm ground in saying that evolution intrinsically shows predictable trends, ones that can be objectively defined as "progress": an increase in the energetic efficiency of individual organisms, an increase in the complexity of ecosystems (communities of living things), and a consequent expansion of the universe of realized possibilities.

Further thoughts. We have seen that the selfishness programmed into all living creatures by Darwinian natural selection produced cooperative and even incipiently ethical behavior on the part of "higher" animals, including humans. But there was a limit to how far toward "pure" altruism this Darwinian process could carry us. Truly selfless behavior—the kind that truly reflects the nature of God—was introduced to us literally as divine revelation (most of all in the incarnate example of Jesus). In no other way could we ever have taken the idea seriously as a viable strategy for living. Also revealed to us were other key lessons, including: creation at a beginning by a single, all-powerful, rational God; God's continuing concern and good will for us creatures; and God's promise of a glorious future.

Taken together, these lessons confirmed our forebears in the beliefs that the world was basically good and ruled by a trustworthy God who had a plan to do us good and not evil, and that history is not all bad but records many wonderful things that God has already done for us. That faith encouraged them to seek and discover the laws of nature and to make history on their own, confident that they could change the world for the better as long as they cooperated with God. This optimism then prepared them (however unknowingly) for the discovery of the mechanism and history of evolution.

Yet all was not rosy. Alongside the hope of progress was the fact of evil. Implicit in God's law was the ever-present possibility of sin. To explain these unpleasant realities, the Church developed the notion of "original sin," as we will see in "Original Sin in the Bible as Read Today." In "A New Interpretation of Original Sin" we shall discover what becomes of this explanation, now that Adam and Eve have been replaced by fossils and Darwin.