Can't Darwin and God get along?

You criticize creationism's leading opponents like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould for treating evolution as religion. What's your main point of contention with them?

I think there's a reckless extrapolation from what we know about evolution to an all-encompassing materialism. Evolution has so much of its data missing in history that to look at the whole thing and say we know for sure that despite all the stuff we can't find, and have never seen, has purely naturalistic causes -- and we know this with such certainty that we insist the knowledgeable buy into this idea -- goes way too far. It overlooks the reality of human experience, overlooks that religious experiences are very common and meaningful for a lot of people.

I'm not at all uncomfortable saying that religious experiences can be genuine. A lot of them are fraudulent and some of them are epileptic seizures or whatever. But I believe in God, I believe God is personal and that God exists and cares about the created order. I think it's a very reasonable belief that God interacts with creation and that experiences people have of interacting with God are profound and deeply meaningful.

But you reject the idea that God tinkers and has his hand in day-to-day processes, so how do nature and God interact?

That's the tough question. You should rewind the tape and erase the question because I don't really have a good answer. What I would say, however, is when you know a lot about how something works, it's reasonable to rule out certain things and say, well, I don't think it could be this or that. When you know almost nothing about how something works, you need to be more humble. We don't know how we interact with the world. Somehow you got it into your head that you were going to call and talk to me about this book. Some kind of vague intention, purposeful agenda emerged in your mind, and it got translated into a whole set of actions, and now we're talking on the phone. We don't understand that.

Consciousness is a very deep mystery. All of our models say consciousness shouldn't be possible, that it should just be atoms and molecules in your brain randomly doing things. Nothing that we've developed for a model of how human intentionality works makes sense of our own experience of the world. But here we are, doing things in the world. Somehow a conscious-like starting point for human actions emerges and we are able to execute things in the world and change physical reality. Now, we know this happens, this isn't a mystical theory, you can see this happening every day.

How do we know there isn't some similar mechanism by which God interacts with the world, that God can be understood as a spirit, that God is more like consciousness than a material object? If we have an all-encompassing, pervasive personal being that has created the entire universe, and is coupled to that universe in some way, it just seems to me that the notion of God acting through the world without violating its laws is no more mysterious than us acting through that same world. So I'd say to Dawkins, until you explain to me how human beings interact with the world, don't tell me that God couldn't interact with the world in the same way we do.

But haven't scientists shown that human consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon?

Yes.

Wouldn't that suggest that if God was involved in evolution that he had to tinker and give us consciousness?

No, because, here's another mystery: Consciousness emerges in the development of an embryo. We have a fertilized egg and there's no consciousness there, and it's not that consciousness is present but is really small, it just isn't there. And then, some months later, a baby is born, and child psychologists debate about exactly when self-awareness occurs, but at some point before the age of 3, you've got a conscious human being.

Now, God doesn't have to step in to make consciousness occur, but something that we don't understand at all is occurring. I don't think it's supernatural. I think that someday we may understand this. There's something going on that when the neuronal networks reach a certain level of complexity, something appears that maybe is brand-new and that is consciousness. But that's just a guess about how we'll eventually be talking about that phenomenon.

You criticize the creationists for questioning the gaps in the fossil record and call it a "fool's errand" because over time, scientists usually find evidence that fills these gaps in. But aren't you engaging in the same sort of intellectual maneuver, by saying that because there are some aspects of nature and evolution that we don't understand, therefore God exists?

Right. That's an extremely fair criticism. And if I was debating an I.D. person, they'd get lots of applause for putting me down with that statement. You're absolutely right. But I think the difference is that we need to know more than we know to make certain claims. And I would claim that what we know historically about the closing of these gaps suggests that we are always going to be able to close them. That we have gaps now in our understanding of how the blood clotting mechanism arose doesn't puzzle me at all. I just say, OK, there's more work to do.

When we finally understand how human intentionality works, I don't think it represents a dead end. We know that all of this discussion about how God might interact with the world is driven by metaphors and extrapolating our own human experience, and trying to find analogies that are always imperfect. I think we will never have some sort of model that says, "OK, here's how God gets his agenda across in the natural order. Here's how the will of God gets realized in nature -- we won't ever have that. But we might have insights into possibilities about how we could think about that. These insights will be rich enough that they will accommodate religious experience and some of the things that have long been a part of religion.

Do you think life can only have meaning and purpose with God?

I think it's very dangerous to try and argue that. I have children and raising them has been one of the most inspiring and purpose-filled parts of my life. Yet it doesn't seem helpful to say that seems meaningful and not meaningless because God made child-rearing purposeful. I found it purposeful to learn how to do a Willie Mays basket catch when I was in high school. I got very good at it and loved doing it. But certainly, God didn't make that a part of the natural order. So I think there's loads of ways to get purpose because purpose ultimately is a psychological state of mind. And certainly people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould aren't walking around glum all the time, saying, "Oh, life has no purpose, I think I'll just kill myself." They are very energetic people who love life and do lots of fun things. I don't think Christians are wise to say we've got the corner on purpose.

You also criticize creationists because they ignore the fact that there is so much bad design in nature and so much barbarity and cruelty apparent throughout all life forms. You write that our spine was intended for a four-legged creation and yet we walk upright. So if creationists are wrong, as a Christian, how do you account for bad design and the evil in nature?

I think that we need to understand bad design and evil things in nature in the same way that we understand bad choices and evil actions on the part of humans in nature. It's been a part of the Judeo-Christian understanding of creation that when God created the world it was somehow separate from God. People debate about what that means and how great the separation is, but in articulations that I find most congenial, that entails God giving some freedom to the world. We have a free will to choose good or choose evil.

One of the points of the Garden of Eden story is that Adam and Eve got this idyllic situation and all they need to do is make a set of simple choices that are right and avoid one kind of no-brainer that is wrong. And what do they do? They choose the wrong thing. It's a mysterious, incomprehensible act. Why would you do that? Why would you screw up such a situation? If anybody today was on a marvelous Caribbean island with a beautiful woman and you're told that all you've got to do is not eat those fruits, you'd say, "OK, fine with me." It defies comprehension that Adam and Eve freely chose the wrong thing.

This is a story that I understand as mythology and not history. It's a deep truth about the significance of freedom and how irrational freedom can ultimately be. In the same way that we can choose to do things that make no sense, we can build things that are evil. We can make gas chambers or we can build hospitals. So if nature is free, what is nature going to do? Nature can create a creature with a spine like ours that walks upright. Nature can create a booby that has webbed feet. Nature can create the Ichneumonidae wasp that bothered Darwin so much. [The wasp hatches eggs inside a living caterpillar, allowing baby wasps to devour the caterpillar from the inside out.]

But nature can also create the delightful goldfinch that comes to my feeder every day and the cardinal and the deer that I see. There's so many things that nature has done that are marvelous. We have great achievements, symphonies and great art, and we have gas chambers and weapons of mass destruction. So I think nature is free in that way.

But if nature has free will, does it necessarily have a place for God?

God doesn't need to have a place within nature as one of the creatures within nature, and that's one of the objections to intelligent design. It brings God into nature as this auxiliary engineer to tweak things every once and a while. But the center of the doctrine of creation has never been that God makes stuff like an engineer or a carpenter. The central idea has been that God is responsible for the fact that creation simply exists. The words being and ontology are thrown around a lot in this context. God sustains the universe. God holds it continuously in existence. And that's the centerpiece -- not that God originated it once upon a time, either 10,000 or 10 billion years ago. Or that God tinkers in it constantly but that God holds it steadily in existence. In that sense, yes, the natural order does need God in order to continue to exist. But the events, as they unfold, don't have to have God tinkering and puttering like a weekend gardener.

But you can see why people like Dawkins and Dennett say that science seems to be functioning perfectly well on its own and we don't need to fall back on an explanation of God?

Yes, absolutely. And that has never been the way that people come to God. The number of people who embrace religious belief because they find it at the end of a long argument is very small. People come to religious faith in a variety of ways, but that's almost the last one on the list. People are far more likely to have certain experiences that overwhelm them and don't seem like conclusions of rational arguments, but seem like a kind of momentary contact with something genuinely transcendent. You say there's something more to the world than the atoms and molecules. Out of that experience comes a religious commitment. And that has characterized human experience forever.