Tolle Lege

     Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent defense of the idea that nature embodies the intelligence of God (“Finding Design in Nature” Op-Ed July 7, 2005; “Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution” by Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, July 9, 2005), reveals the powerful attraction, especially to Christians, of the notion that the universe is a divine artifact.  But the theory of intelligent design generates constant unnecessary conflict between Christianity and modern science: every time scientists prove that a particular kind of natural order can be explained without reference to divine causality, science seems to thereby disprove the existence, or at least the causal efficacy, of God.  Every advance of scientific knowledge becomes a retreat of religious conviction.  What generates this zero-sum contest is that both Christians and their neo-Darwinian opponents share the assumption that God must relate to nature as artisan to artifact.  Yet the view that God made the universe is more Platonic than Christian. 

            Plato, especially in his dialogue Timaeus, relates what he calls “a likely story” about God making the cosmos by using the science of geometry to shape formless matter into the order of nature.  In Plato’s story, God is a divine craftsman who, like a human craftsman, is severely limited in his creative power.  According to Plato, a craftsman, whether divine or human, creates neither the form nor the matter of what he makes: he merely shapes a pre-given matter into an already existing form. God thus looks to the eternal ideas or “forms” and uses them to “inform” the eternal matter, just as a craftsman takes an existing design to shape some existing matter.  

            Plato’s theology has long had a profound influence upon Christian thought, especially his view that nature embodies the intelligent design of its maker.  Indeed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously described Christianity as “Platonism for the masses.”  But is Plato’s view of God as a divine craftsman compatible with biblical, and in particular Christian, religion?  Although the Bible contains many casual references to God as our “maker,” the Bible also clearly distinguishes divine creation from human making.  Biblical scholars tell us that the Hebrew word used repeatedly in Genesis to describe God’s creation of the universe (bârâ’) is used only of God’s creative activity and never of human making.  Unfortunately, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, used by the early Christian Church, deploys the ordinary Greek verb for making (poiein) to describe divine creation. Nonetheless, some Christians, from Augustine in the fourth century to Michael B. Foster in the twentieth, have doubted whether the God of the Bible should be thought of as the maker of the cosmos. 

     Despite his ignorance of the original Hebrew language of the creation story, Augustine clearly saw the immense chasm between divine creation and human making. “By what means did you make heaven and earth?  What tool did you use for this vast work? You did not work as a human craftsman does, making one thing out of something else as his mind directs….Nor did you have in your hand any matter from which you could make heaven and earth, for where could you have obtained matter which you had not yet created, in order to use it as material for making something else?  It must therefore be that you spoke and they were made.  In your Word you created them.”

     We must be careful of our metaphors: they shape us as much as we shape them. Far too many Christians have been trapped by the false analogies embodied in the metaphor of God as the maker of the universe.  The ancient Christian dogma that God created the world out of nothing, should have alerted Christians to the dangers of thinking that God is a craftsman who fashioned the world according to some pre-existent design. The whole notion of a “design” presupposes the Platonic dichotomy between form and matter: a design is an ordered form or algorithm that can be realized in various kinds of matter.  The design of a house or a computer can be realized in any number of different kinds of matter. Yet in divine creation, form and matter arise together spontaneously, unpredictably, mysteriously.

     In this sense, God is more like an artist than like an artisan.  An artisan knows in advance exactly what he or she intends to make and then executes the design; a creative artist, by contrast, does not know in advance exactly what he or she hopes to make.  Rather, through some unfathomable interaction of form and matter, something new and largely unpredictable emerges.  There are elements of craft in every fine art, but the emergent novelty of a fine art distinguishes it from the making of an artifact according to an existing design.  Even Plato ascribed the mystery of creative art, not to intelligent design, but to divine inspiration and artists ever since Michelangelo have compared their activity to God’s.  We don’t know much about how Michelangelo or Beethoven created their masterworks, but we do know that they didn’t know in advance what they would create.  The closest human analogue to divine creation may be human “procreation,” in which a unique being is the product, not of design, but of love.  Perhaps this is why so many Christians and others recoil at the notion of “designer” babies: these reproductive technologies reduce procreation to production.

      Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is an attempt to show that order can emerge without any orderer.  Indeed, we are all familiar with kinds of order, such as that found in language, in markets, and in common law, that are the by-products of human action but are not designed by anyone.  Rather than attack Darwin for undermining the Platonic myth of God’s craftsmanship and  divine “design,” Christian theologians would do better to see Darwin’s bold ideas about the creative power of evolution as an invitation to develop a new and authentically biblical understanding of God’s relation to nature.  That new account would begin by acknowledging that there are many ways for the evolving and unpredictable order of the universe to reflect divine activity without being the product of God’s design.