Note:
This is a thought experiment. It might
be wildly mistaken. But my science
career has demonstrated that fear of failed experiments might be the only
limitation a quest for understanding can’t overcome.
So don’t take this too seriously.
But I wanted to see if it didn’t take us somewhere helpful. [1]
In his book Wonderful Life, Steven Jay Gould,
proposed a paleontological thought experiment that he called “replaying the
tape[2].” It went like this:
“Press the rewind button (on the
history of life) and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually
happened, go back to any time and place in the past . . . . Then let the tape
run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.”
Gould then
argued that it would not.
He says, “any replay of
the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road
actually taken”[3]
In other
words, he argues, not only is the human condition accidental, it is unlikely,
and non-repeatable. Human existence was
not inevitable. The history of life is
the sum of countless random events that moved the history of life in arbitrary
directions rather than towards a pinnacle with human culture and consciousness
as its inevitable glory.
So let me pose
a theological question.
What if
Gould is right?[4]
Would that
be a problem for Christian theology?
One thing
that bugs Christians about evolution is that it seems to undermine the
‘specialness’ of humans. And Gould’s
stochastic[5]
formulation amplifies the non-uniqueness of humanity.[6] If evolution itself is non-directional and
there is nothing inevitable about where it ended up, what possible refuge could
there be for human specialness?[7]
But let me
answer this question with a a question:
What is it about
a hairless bi-pedal primate that is fundamental to the ‘image of God?’
Or let me
ask the question even more bombastically:
Could Jesus have been a
lizard?
To set up my
response, here is a brief synopsis of my working hypothesis about the
integration of the Genesis narrative into early hominid evolution:[8]
Creation was
progressive along the lines of the evolutionary narrative. And at some point, God ‘ensouled’[9]
and entered into a special relationship with an early hominid[10]
couple[11][12]
in a pristine corner of a Mesopotamian floodplain. He chose hairless primates to be the care
takers of his creation and to a special relational status and spiritual reality.[13] We became a chosen species, not unlike how he
chose the Hebrews for a special purpose many many years later…
But let me
ask again…
What if our
hominid nature is arbitrary?
What if our mammalian
form is arbitrary?
What if,
when Gould’s tape ran, and Genesis described it in its particular metaphor of Hebrew
poetry, a reptile emerged? What if a
lizard developed the cognitive raw material and communication capacity that
prepared it to receive God’s gift of mathematically untenable altruism,
artistic sense, and overlapping citizenship in God’s realm?[14][15]
What if we
were ensouled lizards?[16]
Does that change
the story even a little bit?
Wouldn’t God
have still invaded his fallen creation of altruistic but selfish, creative but
devious, benevolent but violent, artistic but oppressive lizards?
Couldn’t
Jesus have been a lizard?
He would
have still been the Truth, and the Light of the world, the second Person of the
Trinity, and God made flesh…the atoning sacrifice for our leathery green brokenness.
He still
would have shed his blood…it just would have happened to run cold.
The ‘lamb
that was slain’[17],
would have been more like a gecko than a bonobo…but it wouldn’t have changed
the spiritual reality one bit. The
details of our story might be different (e.g. Pharaoh’s army would have had to
sun themselves on a rock before chasing the Hebrews to the Red Sea) but the
fundamental narrative would have been mostly unchanged.[18]
If we were
insects in-carn-ation would be in-chitin-ation…but it would still be atoning.
This little
thought experiment suggests that the answer to the assertion:
‘Humans
aren’t biologically special.’
is
‘So what?’
We could be
God’s scaly reptilian image just as easily as we could be his ridiculous
primate image. And it would be just as
astonishing for Jesus to take that form as this, just as sublime for him to eat
bugs after his bodily resurrection as it was for him to eat bread.[19]
If species
choice is functional rather than intrinsic - (say, like ‘choosing’ the children
of Israel out of the early near eastern cultures[20])
- then lack of biological specialness is a non-factor.[21]
Some of us cling
to a form of specialness…which science has eroded.[22]
But the Scriptures never attributed specialness to our phenotype. We aren’t special because of our opposable
thumbs or unique pelvic construction. We
are special because we are the only instance of God’s makings that have dual
citizenship. Everything else he made
traffics either in material or
spiritual realms.
Only we walk
both banks of that particular river.
Only we
inhabit both realities.
And that
matters more than our phylum.
This
post was written while listening to Radical Face “The Branches” (still).
[1]
Note: This is a companion piece to the talk I am
giving (see MP3 page in a couple days) on reconciling the scientific and
biblical origins narratives. But it is
also the final installment in a three part series on the overlap of theological
and physical anthropology including:
[2] An quaint artifact from a time when we actually
stored information on flimsy strips of magnetic tape.
[3] This is why he calls is book on the Burgess Shale
“Wonderful Life.” He leverages the
metaphor from the sappy Christmas special that there are no small changes in
history. A few random events set both
human and natural history on dramatically different trajectories.
[4] And he may not be.
A little reflection on the nature of convergence in evolution evokes
some dissonance.
[5] What he means is that evolution (like many many
processes –er, economics) is driven more by small random events at important
bottlenecks. Therefore minor
perturbations drive large changes in directionality.
[6] There IS something about this added layer of the
improbability to human existence (on top of the joint improbabilities of
existence in general, the conditions for life, the actual generation of life,
the collection of life into more complex forms in a relatively brief period in
the early Cambrian, the conditions for consciousness, the development of self
awareness, and the survival and eventual thriving of bipedal primates with
altruism math that doesn’t compute) that gives the whole thing a gestalt of
providence.
[7] The subtle argument is that humans aren’t special,
therefore, God doesn’t exist…which is asserted in two ways: primatology (we
aren’t distinct from animals) and the study of extra terrestrial life (we are
not the only place this all happened).
But neither of those fields of study (or in the later case, speculation)
support the syllogism when you really parse it.
[8] This has shown up in a number of footnotes and I have
referenced it parenthetically, but here I’ll just spell it out.
[9] “Formed from the earth” could be metaphor (he formed
them out of the elemental and genetic material of previous hominids through a
portfolio of direct and indirect agency) or he could have started from scratch,
fashioning that particular pair to exist in an ecosystem in which hominid
evolution had already prepared an ecological niche for something very much like
them.
[10] A pair of early homo sapiens or their ancestors that
emerged approximately around the time that Australopithecine was dominant.
[11] So, yes, I guess you could say that I believe in a
‘historical Adam,’ and that the Genesis 2 and 3 narrative played out pretty
much the way it is described. But I
don’t think you have to to claim a high view of Scripture.
[12] But they would not have had to be the only ones. The idea that God started with more than just
2 makes ecological sense and also addresses the otherwise puzzling ‘where did
Cain’s wife come from’ question. Also
moving the Genies narrative back into the early days of our species and adding
the realization that modern humans have Neanderthal DNA (from what appeared to
include a time of limited cross-breeding) could elicit a pretty non-traditional
reading of the Nephilim passages in Genesis.
[13] What John Walton describes as ‘God’s half way
creatures,’ unique in the universe because of our complete citizenship in both
the material and spiritual realities (unlike the animals OR the angels who both
hold a single ontological passport).
[14] There is no agreement about what aspect of humanity
is the ‘Imago Dei,’ the Image of God that connects our species to Yahweh in a
unique way. I feel like the context
asserts two things: language and creativity…word and art (or engineering). But there is no serious theologian that
thinks it is any part of our phenotype.
[15] The soul.
Regardless of the philosophy of mind you adhere to (I am still a
dualist…like a freaking dinosaur but I can’t seem to find anyone persuasive
enough to move me off it). The soul
doesn’t have to be the seat of personality (though, I kind of think it
is). It can simply be a
trans-dimensional existence…the brute fact that we exist in the material world
and in God’s ‘parallel and intersecting’ dimension…the part of us that has
citizenship in a non-material reality.
[16] What if Jurassic Park was about clever but non-verbal
mammals running away from us?
[17] A decidedly non-anthropomorphic image. I have another post that I’m not going to
run…but it makes the technical textual case that the Scripture is careful and
even emphatic about upholding the non-hominid nature of spiritual
realities. I can send it if you are
interestd.
[18] I actually think this is what Lewis was getting at
with both Narnia and his Space Trilogy.
He maintained (in a personal letter to an American child, which is the
only place I know of where he explains this) that neither series is
allegory. Instead they are thought
experiments about “What if there was one God but many worlds?” Essentially he is investigating the idea that
there are aspects of human life that are arbitrary, and that God is still
loving and just and self giving with his creation even if the creation is very
different and his relationship takes on a different tone.
[19] What I am really trying to do here is a little bit
Chestertonian. “Only when we realize that
the apple could have been gold are we astonished that it is red.”
[20] Not because they were fundamentally special or
intrinsically more lovable but because they were uniquely equipped to be the
agents of redemption.
[21] But if the analogy with the Children of Israel holds,
it also means that being selected as the bearer of God’s image also bears a
responsibility for the rest of creation.
[22] Gould’s original point is that there are both
spiritual and secular narratives of our specialness (the latter as the ‘pinnacle’
or ‘goal’ of evolution) that the actual stochastic nature of the process cannot
support.
