HOW OR WHY: CHANCE OR PURPOSE?

In the film The Dirty Dozen, the prisoner Maggott has killed prostitutes.  Confronted with the text ‘I will repay’, he counters that the text doesn’t specify who the Lord will use as his instruments.  And he’s right; the text doesn’t.

One answer to the statement in Exodus that the Nile turned to blood is that there was a sudden movement of red silt.  Is that an answer to ‘why’ or simply an answer to ‘how’?  A believer in miracle might respond that that was the method God used, and the question of whether or not it was a miraculous event remains more or less where it was. 

It will hopefully be already apparent to the reader as to the sort of problem I  am raising.  We can know who shot John Lennon, when, where, and with what sort of weapon, and still not understand why.

G K Chesterton observed that in the Genesis account, light is created before the sun and moon.  Genesis is about purpose, not method. 

            I remember a television interview with Bill O’Reilly that Richard Dawkins participated in when promoting The God Delusion.  O’Reilly conceded that Dawkins was brilliant at describing how life developed.  Did he know how life had started?

            Not yet, countered Dawkins, but Science is working on it; receiving the reply of when you’ve found that out, come back to me.

 

The point is, of course, an important one; but it is still a how question.  Even if Science discovers the answer to the origin of life – as well it might – the question of why might still remain more or less  where it was.   Knowing how a foetus grows inside a woman is one thing.  Knowing why she chose a particular partner to produce the foetus, or to have a child at all, is much more speculative. 

It’s the sort of issue that was immediately raised by Charles Kingsley after reading The Origin of Species.  Kingsley, impressed by Darwin’s evidence, conceded that this might have been the method God had used: a point that Darwin acknowledged in the Preface to the Second Editions.  True, with Darwin’s system there is no need for God, but it does not disprove the existence of God as such.  That issue must be decided on other grounds.

I accept that the Earth is probably old; that is a different question from the truth of Evolution.  Micro evolution is uncontroversial: Saint Augustine argued that Nature was self-developmental. Macro evolution may or may not be true; I am agnostic on the issue, pending definitive proof.  Evolution, though, as postulated, is an indifferent, even cruel, process.  If it is/was God’s method for the Earth then it raises a problem about whether the statement ‘God is Love’ can be true.  But that, again, is a different issue from God’s existence.  Animal suffering and the unfairness of natural disasters existed before Darwin and will continue if his theory should be disproved.  Much depends on whether Nature, like humanity, is ‘fallen’; and I imagine that this is not an issue for Science to decide. 

 

Bertrand Russell speculated that humans once worshipped animals.   The tribes that chose lions or crocodiles died out.  Those that chose sheep or cows prospered; although their beliefs were misguided.

            This is the sort of argument put forward by Daniel Dennett to explain the biological origins of religious belief.   To attribute events to an external animate agency favoured evolutionary survival in more primitive times.

            If God does not exist, then belief in God was a lucky evolutionary accident.  But if God does exist, and is a factor in the process of human development, then belief in God was an aid to primitive humanity because God put it there.  We are still no further forward.

 

Dawkins argues that religion must be false because there are so many conflicting ideas of God.  It is a good point, but becomes much less so if the Fall – a severing of the natural link between humanity and God – is a reality.  In that case, the conflicts would make sense:  a distorted remembrance of an original truth.  And the Fall can stand as a doctrine if Evolution is true; or if it is not. 

Ask a dozen people what date of the year you were born on and they will each have one chance in 365 of being right.  Ask them your year of birth and some answers will become much better than others.   In a sense, though, they are still just guesses.  Only you can reveal the exact answer.

Some religions are like guesses about the date: they understand the concept, but little more.  Guesses about the year are like those religions that have come much nearer to the truth of things.  Only God, however – because of the Fall – is in a position to reveal God’s own true nature.

 

Pace Dawkins, then, there are not thousands of explanations about the Universe; there are still only two: or two that matter.  Either our world is the result of chance, or it is the result of purpose.  The distinction is a vital ones, because it can lead to radically-different views about the meaning of human life and to equally-conflicting moralities.

            Chance or purpose?  That is a decision we all have to make; for it is a decision that will shape everything else.