Digging for fossils

Recently, I spent several hours digging for fossils in New Mexico with a group of students from Western New Mexico University (WNMU). We found numerous Paleolithic invertebrate fossils such as brachiopods. The Paleolithic era ended about two hundred and fifty million years ago.

Our group’s leader was an Assistant Professor of biology at WMNU who had done her doctoral work at Harvard, spending a couple of years working part-time with Stephen Jay Gould. Gould, now deceased, famously articulated the concept of religion and science as two non-overlapping magisteria, a topic to which the conversation turned at one point during the day.

Science and religion are not completely separate magisteria. Science should inform religious thought and expression, even as it did for the authors of the Bible. The author of John’s gospel obviously reformulated Greek ideas about the cosmos into the Christological hymn found in John 1. The authors and redactors of Genesis had set the stage for that by reformulating Babylonian science to fit both their monotheism and conviction that creation was good.

As the WNMU professor observed, one only has to read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 to discover that scientific accuracy was not part of the agenda for the Bible’s authors. In Genesis 1, animals then humans appear on the earth. In Genesis 2, a male human appears, then the animals, and finally a female human. Christian fundamentalist apologists vainly attempt to preserve belief in the literal inerrancy of Scripture by contending that Genesis 2 expands upon Genesis 1, an effort at reconciliation that I find it difficult to summarize without laughing.

Nor, as well-intentioned but ignorant Christians suggested to me, is the fossil record God’s effort to make faith more difficult or to test the faith of true believers. Living toward God is sufficiently difficult that God has no need to add more obstacles. Christians universally attribute the tactic of deception to the other “team,” not to God.

Revising theology or scriptural interpretations to incorporate the latest scientific knowledge and theories both renders religion more intelligible and credible to people today.

Conversely, religion should inform the practice of science. I am not suggesting that religion should in any way modify or attempt to influence the practice of the scientific method. Instead, religion can helpfully remind science that life is not reducible to materialism and that much which is not material may enrich life.

For example, self-awareness or consciousness emerges from the brain. This emergent property certainly confers an evolutionary advantage on humans or it would not have developed and persisted. However, consciousness is not directly a physical process and at times exerts a top-down causality the brain.

Similarly, science can neither prove nor disprove God’s existence. Science can helpfully explain that some previously identified phenomena are the result of natural processes rather than divine action. However, proving a negative – and proving God does not exist is but one example of the broader generalization – is a logical impossibility. Science that oversteps it legitimate boundaries becomes scientism, a form of dogma that compromises the power of science to advance knowledge.

Digging for fossils gave me a fresh appreciation of the wonder of the natural world, its complexity and its diversity. The story of life evolving over hundreds of millions of years, bounded by relationships (aka natural laws), with an unknown future, is an endeavor worthy of an intelligent creative force (aka God). Concepts of God that postulate God’s omniscience (knowing all about the past, present, and future) transform God from a living force into an all-knowing machine. The marvel of evolution reminded me of the ultimate marvel and mystery, the living God.

Theologians reflecting about evolution have suggested three possible ways in which God, integrally present through the cosmos with no need or ability for supernatural intervention, could create through evolution while shaping that process. First, God created the principles, laws, and relationships through which evolution occurs. A weak version of this approach argues that it necessarily leads to the formation of carbon based life; a strong version argues that it necessarily leads to the emergence of human life.

Second, God might act at the level of quantum physics, one of the forces that operate in the uncertain and, from a human perspective, indeterminate world of sub-atomic particles. Third, God might act in some manner completely unknown to humans. These latter two options are not surprising as God (or ultimate reality by whatever label one uses) by definition is infinite, transcending the finite human mind, understanding, and worldview.

Fossils rather than challenging religion can, in fact, enrich and renew commitment to journey in God’s direction.