Craig L. Nessan, Christian Faith in Dialogue with Darwin: Evolutionary Biology and the Meaning of the Fall, in outline Currents in Theology and Mission 29:2 (April 2002)
Review by Paul S. Chung
Prof. Craig L. Nessan tries here to demythologize the fall in order to reconceptualize as grounded in the human condition between our evolutionary inheritance of the reptilian brain and the capacity for transcendence belonging to reflective self-consciousness. He intentionally do so apart from reference to Pannenberg.
Filling the Gap, with a Critical Construction
Craig L. Nessan makes a critical attempt to bring Christian faith into dialogue with Darwinism, as it were, a critical comparative study of Eden and Darwin. There is no historical evidence of the fall in Eden, according to modern evolutionary biology. Biologists argue that there is no place called Eden, nor is there historical Adam; there is no Eve, no tree in the midst of the garden, with forbidden fruit.
On the other hand, theologians discard the modem synthesis of evolutionary conclusions, building the sinful nature of human existence upon “the fall,” which is accepted as a matter of fact taking place in the distant past. This theological legacy is attributed to St. Augustine, who conceptualized a story of the fall in the biological sense of inheritance through sexual propagation.
An original sin had entered the world with all its destructive consequences. Therefore, Nessan poses a sharp question about Karl Barth, interrogating whether Barth comes full circle to the point where his theology of theodicy would be based on the presupposition of a historical fall. In fact, Barth appropriates a narrative form of saga in his dialectical understanding of Urgeschichte against myth (Bultmann) as well as prepositional literalism or biblical inerrancy. The word of God is in becoming along with a novelty of emergence.
Subsequently, Barth grounds his theodicy upon God’s “good” to creation, not with an eternal “yes,” but recognizing limitation and contingency within an ecological theatre. Barth’s position is rather of aesthetical ecological character, following in the footsteps of W. A. Mozart. Nonetheless, there is no question of Job’s theodicy in St. Paul, who differs from Augustine’s idea of original sin.
Coming from the school of Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Hans Schwarz, Nessan is quite ambitious in mediating the discrepancy between the evolutionary account of human origins and biblical narrative of a historical fall. Humans created in the image of God become a regime of interrogation or even incredibility to the camp of evolutionary biology.
Should public theology of science lose its explanatory power in the public sphere where sciences and religion are at war, even in the controversy between creationism and evolutionists? Nessan says no, paving an alternative to consonance between theological anthropology and evolutionary biology in a critical constructive manner.
An Argument from Evolution
Prof. Craig Nessan has an audacious mind instilled with intentionality of closing the gap between Eden and the emergence of homo sapiens in Africa, but with continual questioning. If Darwin is correct about the origin of the human species, in the beginning were “the replicators,” inorganic molecules with the capability of duplicating themselves and in so doing, extend evolutionary progress.
Over the course of the last 4 billion years, the arduous but inexorable process of mutation and natural selection occurred, followed by successful adaptation to a world of vigorous competition, where only the strongest and fittest survive. The long and serendipitous march of the gene within the cell had progressed toward the evolution of human beings, “survival machines.”
Nessan follows in the grand narrative of a neo-Darwinian view of gene selectionism, according to Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson. But Nessan still holds another narrative of evolution and humans being grounded in the biblical witness. Two stories are not hostile to each other, but in complementarity. This complementarity characterizes Nessan’s integrative skill of unifying “distinction, but non-separation” in dealing with the hiatus between creation and evolution.
Evolutionary Research Programs in Competition
Nessan outlines the transition from Australopithecus to Homo according to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a father of modern synthesis of Darwinism, while an ardent reader of Teilhard de Chardin. Dobzhansky, a pious Christian with a Russian Orthodox background, stands as a pioneer for initiating to fill the discrepancy between evolution and religion, in whose footsteps most important biologists follow—such as Richard Lewontin, Stephen J. Gould, and Steven Rose among others.
This biologist group forms a different research program centered on organisms as the subject and object of biology, away from a genetically determinist view of evolution as progress and survival of the fittest. The former’s understanding of structure of evolutionary theory elaborates on a dialectics of punctuated equilibrium according to structure of conservation and innovation of novelty, as empirically deciphered and evidenced in fossils of Burges Shale (Gould’s Wonderful Life).
This structural theory of evolution emphasizes the emergence of novelty and diversification, reacting against Darwin’s functional theory based on natural selection and progress. Furthermore, it is refined in the study of conserved core processes (structure of conservation) and facilitated variation (innovative of emergent novelty) at the cellular level by recent biologists such as Marc Kirschner at Harvard Medical School and John Gerhart at UC Berkeley (see The Plausibility of Life).They seek to resolve Darwin’s dilemma of natural selection and progress (undermining variation and innovation of novelty) through a structure of conserved core processes and facilitated variation underlying emergence and diversification.
According to Imre Lakatos, there is a competition between research programs in the community of science, and the core program in that competition still remains until a final rupture occurs in the sense of a paradigm shift. This paradigm shift implies science as a cultural construct rather than representing objective value according to observation, experimentation, and tests in the laboratory. An observed objectified world is actually based on how scientists perceive the world within the spectrum of their own research program. Scientific validity is program-ridden, dependent upon social cultural contexts.
Given this, Nessan takes a genetically reductionist biology to be his interrogator for the implication of theological anthropology. This is a thought-provoking and creative attempt, beginning to ask “how does one account for the qualitative difference between the capability of animal minds and that of human minds?”
This sharp question is concerned with the relationship between the complex functioning of the brain and the experience of conscious thought. The anatomical change coincides with the transition from animal to human, since there is a significant increase in brain size and complexity, enabling humans to undertake greater learning ability and intelligence. In the successful response to the challenge, via natural selection, there occurs adaptability or evolvability, accelerating the tempo of the evolutionary change on the part of the organism.
A Theory of Hiatus
In human behavior, Nessan focuses on a theory of hiatus that modifies how humans may act upon their instincts. The structure of the human brain makes possible a level of learning unprecedented among other animals. Examination of the structure of the human brain gives evidence of its evolutionary history (sharing with reptiles and birds, for instance, the cardiovascular system, and instinctual behavior).
What features stand out in human beings, however, exist in the neocortex (outer layer), as it is a decisively different structure in higher mammals and human beings. The functioning of the neocortex accounts for the more complex forms of perception, cognition, communication, and consciousness, which are characteristic of human beings.
In fact, this mechanism can be seen in light of the structure of conservation, facilitated variation and evolvability, serving as a starting point in the evolutionary process for understanding an organismic view of structure and development of the human brain. This structural view goes beyond natural selection, but implies exaptation (Stephen Gould) and the emergence of dissipative structures as stated far from equilibrium (Ilya Prigogine).
As Nessan is aware, the most compelling theories hypothesize a gradual process of development. The observable anatomical changes include not only an increased brain size but a dramatic increase within the network of linkage, resulting in the complexity of neural circuits and functioning. The highly complex functioning of the human brain accords with the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen’s theory of a “hiatus” between instinct and action in human behavior.