Section 9
Having made the break that was marked by my move into the language of testimony, I can now go back, so to speak, down the continuous ladder that connects human experience through the animal and plant world to the world of molecules, atoms, protons, and electrons. Coming up the ladder, we saw that at each stage the elements of the lower level condition but do not explain the higher. Coming down now from the top, with the faith that there is a good purpose that can be known through the data of experience in the space-time world, namely, those events that are the subject of the gospel message, we can see both why the category of purpose cannot be eliminated from our total understanding of how things are, and also—I suggest—how purpose may be recognized throughout the whole range of nature and not merely at the point where homo sapiens emerges. It is well known that, as a result of the demonstration of the noninheritability of acquired characteristics, evolutionary theory rejected Lamarkian ideas of purpose and accepted the Darwinian view that natural selection operates only on the results of random mutations. Recent discussion of the way natural selection works seems to leave room for the operation of purposeful activity as a factor in evolution, a factor that was excluded when all the emphasis was on the random mutation of genes. The discovery of the DNA molecule has altered the picture by showing that the limits of possible randomness are much smaller than was thought. And biologists now think in terms of populations sharing a pool of genes rather than of individuals, so that they are not dealing with the random behavior of individual units but with the behavior of very large numbers in which the randomness of individual units loses its importance. Moreover, there is more attention paid to the role of purpose in the ways by which animals adapt to their environment, which can play a role in the evolution of the species: “Characters acquired by individuals are not inherited by their individual offspring. But characters acquired by populations are inherited by their offspring populations if they are adaptive.”
It is obvious that in the case of homo sapiens, purposeful activity plays a central part in the business of adapting to environment. And, according to many biologists, this is also true of at least the higher forms of animal life. Parent birds and animals take great pains to initiate their young into the various strategies necessary for survival. It is hard to deny the parallel between this and the way the human infant is enabled to develop the powers of perception, comprehension, and communication and the skills necessary for coping with the environment. We develop into mature human beings not by an automatic process operating from within the human person as a separate organism but as a response to the cherishing and training of our parents and teachers. The process by which a human fetus eventually becomes a mature person able to recognize and follow what is good depends on the loving and purposeful will of those who have gone before. There is no logical break between this and the way a dog is trained to understand, love, and serve its master. It is not unreasonable to suggest that, since purpose plays this role in development at the point where we have the most intimate knowledge, it may play a part in some way right down to the lowest levels.
If we look at the picture of nature as a whole that modern science gives us, one of the puzzling facts is that while biology shows us the continuing evolution of more and more complex organisms, physics shows us—in the Second Law of Thermodynamics—a picture of relentless descent into entropy, into total randomness. The fundamental law of biology thus seems to operate in the opposite direction of the fundamental law of physics. I am aware of the work on what are called “dissipative structures,” which has shown that, within a total context of increasing entropy, ordered patterns can spontaneously occur. But it is difficult to see how this removes the perplexity. It shows that biological evolution is possible in terms of the laws of physics, but it is difficult to see how it can explain the fact that the whole story of biological evolution moves in a direction exactly opposite the movement of the physical universe taken as a whole. Is it too rash to suggest that the clue could be found in the fact that is familiar to us in human life and that we now find to be operative at least in the higher levels of animal life—the fact that life moves toward its proper completion not automatically by any purely mechanical or organic process but in response to a loving purpose, which draws out and makes actual powers that were otherwise only latent and potential.
If I understand correctly, what I am saying has affinities with the proposal made recently by Daniel Hardy and David Ford, who find in the work of Prigogine on “dissipative structures” support for their view that “the fundamental state of the universe is nonequilibrial”; that a state of total entropy is not the baseline for understanding the cosmos; that since God is a superabundant and overflowing source of new being, the universe is “an abundant allowance of space time and energy through which more abundance can happen.”
Whether or not there is anything of validity in these suggestions is something that must be left to others to discuss. What must, I believe, be affirmed with confidence can be put briefly in five propositions with which I conclude this chapter.
1. While the methodological elimination of final causes from the study of nature has been immensely fruitful, the attempt to explain all that exists solely in terms of efficient cause leads to conceptual absurdity and to social tyranny.
2. To recognize the place of final causes in the understanding of the world must lead to these questions: Is anyone there? Is there a word? This is because purpose is a personal reality and can be known only if the person whose purpose it is chooses to communicate it.
3. The church exists to testify that there is someone, that he has spoken, and that we can begin to know his purpose and to direct our personal and public lives by it.
4. The church, therefore, in its missionary encounter with modern Western culture, has to be quite bold and unembarrassed in using the language of testimony, since this testimony, so far from being capable of validation by methods of modern science, provides itself with the foundation on which modern science rests, namely, the assurance that the world is both rational and contingent.
5. When the ultimate explanation of things is found in the creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming work of a personal God, then science can be the servant of humanity, not its master. It is only this testimony that can save our culture from dissolving into the irrational fanaticism that is the child of total skepticism. It will perhaps be the greatest task of the church in the twenty-first century to be the bastion of rationality in a world of unreason. But for that, Christians will have to learn that conversion is a matter not only of the heart and the will but also of the mind.