Arthur Peacocke

From Freepedia

Dr Arthur Peacocke (born 1924) is the Vice President of the Science and Religion Forum and of Modern Church People's Union. He is also a Council Member of ESSSAT - The European Society for the Study of Science And Theology. In 1971, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. In 2001, he was awarded the Templeton Prize.

Peacocke is perhaps best known for his attempts to rigorously argue that Evolution and christianity need not be at odds. His most famous essay may be "Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?".

Arthur Peacocke describes a position which is referred to elsewhere as “front-loading”, after the fact that it suggests that evolution is entirely consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful God who exists throughout time, sets initial conditions and natural laws, and knows what the result will be.

According to Peacocke, Darwinism is not an enemy to religion, but a friend (thus the title of his piece, “The Disguised Friend”). Peacocke offers five basic arguments in support of his position which I refer to as the process-as-immanence argument, the chance-optimizing-initial-conditions argument, the random-process-of-evolution-as-purposive argument, the natural-evil-doesn’t-count-because-God’s-not-yucking-it-up argument, and the Jesus-as-pinnacle-of-human-evolution argument.

The process-as-immanence argument is meant to deal with Johnson’s contention that naturalism reduces God to a distant entity. According to Peacoke, God continuously creates the world and sustains it in its general order and structure; He makes things make themselves. Biological evolution is an example of this and should be taken as a reminder of God’s immanence. It shows us that “God is the Immanent Creator creating in and through the processes of natural order.” (473, original italics) Evolution is the continuous action of God in the world. All “the processes revealed by the sciences, especially evolutionary biology, are in themselves God-acting-as-Creator”. (474)

The chance-optimizing-initial-conditions argument runs as follows: we can reconcile the role of chance in biological evolution with a purposive creator because “there is a creative interplay of “chance” and law apparent in the evolution of living matter by natural selection.” (475) There is no metaphysical implication of the physical fact of “chance”; randomness in mutation of DNA “does not, in itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trends of manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms, populations and eco-systems.” (476) Chance is to be seen as “eliciting the potentialities that the physical cosmos possessed ab initio.” (477)

The random-process-of-evolution-as-purposive argument is perhaps best considered an adjunct to the process-as-immanence argument, and a direct response to Johnson’s continued references to evolution as “purposeless.” Peacocke suggests “that the evolutionary process is characterized by propensities towards increase in complexity, information-processing and –storage, consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness… the actual physical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actualized and instantiated is contingent on the history of the confluence of disparate chains of events, including the survival of the mass extinctions that have occurred.” (478) In other words, purpose doesn’t require a single plan, but a reliable process which will achieve a desired end given the proper initial conditions. Evolution could have turned out big-brained dinosaurs, or something even more bizarre, say, jellyfishes with a spiritual tendency—anything would fulfill God’s purpose so long as the resulting creature was capable of a relationship with God.

The natural-evil-doesn’t-count-because-God’s-not-yucking-it-up argument is meant to be a response to the classic philosophical argument of the Problem of Evil, which contends that an all-powerful, all-knowing and beneficent God cannot exist as such because natural evil (mudslides which crush the legs of innocent children, for instance) occurs. Peacocke contends that the capacities necessary for consciousness and thus a relationship with God also enable their possessors to experience pain, as necessary for identifying injury and disease. Preventing the experience of pain would prevent the possibility of consciousness. Moreover, that which is made must be unmade for a new making to occur; there is no creation without destruction. It is necessary that organisms go out of existence for others to come into it. Thus, pain, suffering and death are necessary evils in a universe which will result in beings capable of having a relationship with God. But God’s not sitting up there satisfied that the process proceeds apace; he suffers with creation because he loves creation. This makes the world-as-it-is consistent with a Christian God.

The Jesus-as-pinnacle-of-human-evolution argument is exactly what it sounds like: Jesus showed us what sorts of relationships and perceptive capacities are possible for humanity. “The actualization of this potentiality can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity…. The paradigm of what God intends for all human beings, now revealed as having the potentiality of responding to, of being open to, of becoming united with, God.” (484-5)

An implication of Peacocke’s particular stance is that all scientific analyses of physical processes reveal God’s actions. All scientific propositions are thus necessarily coherent with religious ones.

This framework, and particular aspects of Peacocke’s argument, are at work in a number of positions actually taken by various Christian denominations. The mainstream Evangelical Lutheran Church in America makes the following statement: “The ELCA doesn't have an official position on creation vs. evolution, but we subscribe to the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation, so we believe God created the universe and all that is therein, only not necessarily in six 24-hour days, and that he may actually have used evolution in the process of creation.” This is a clear correlation with Peacocke’s process-as-immanence and random-process-of-evolution-as-purposive arguments. Similarly, the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., in a 2002 resolution by the 214th assembly of the church, has this to say, in remarkable accord with Peacocke's framework: “…the universe, as God’s free creation, has a genuine autonomy given to it, within the providence of God, so that the structure and the history of the universe can only be known by means of an empirical inquiry of nature itself…. Therefore, for Christians the affirmation of God as Creator can be understood as compatible with a fully natural explanation of the history of nature.”

It should be noted that there are many who disagree with Peacocke's argument, primarily on grounds that his premises are untrue. Philip Johnson (noted defender of Intelligent Design Creationism) has critiqued this sort of argument on the grounds that it misrepresents both evolution (which Johnson claims requires a completely random process that is by definition undirected and purposeless) and christianity (which Johson interprets as requiring a god who made man deliberately and in His image, as a fulfillment of His purpose).