Where are We Going? A Synergistic View of Evolution

Part 1

I doubt whether biologists at the universities of Athens and Thessaloniki teach anything different from what is taught anywhere else in the world. They certainly don’t teach "Creationism", a "scientific" theory based on the early chapters. (Though I have come across an otherwise quite erudite textbook of biology written from this point of view, published in South Africa).

In this country in mid to late Victorian times people who wanted to be considered avant garde combined the biological theories of Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" with the sociological theories of Herbert Spencer’s numerous works (he first thought up the phrase "survival of the fittest", for a theory of human social evolution more brutal than anything Darwin ever thought of).

Bible fundamentalists and neo-Darwinians are both wrong, though. The Old Testament story of the Creation is an allegory; obviously an allegory I would say. Yet there is no doubt that God created the universe, and everything within it, including ourselves! Christians know this by revelation, but even without it seems to me easier to believe than any alternative explanation for the existence of the world.

As for evolution, it all depends on what you mean by "evolution" (as C.E.M. Joad would have said; for those of you who remember the Brains Trust). There is no doubt that everything - matter, living organisms, human societies evolves (develops, changes). But the Victorian rationalists and their successors assert that the processes of evolution are entirely autonomous and the result of chance. That is as absurd a belief as Creationism. How many random changes would be needed to produce anything so small and yet so complex and structured as the body of an ant?

I am an economist and theologian, and not a biologist. I would not presume to tell Greek biologists what theories they ought to hold as Orthodox Christians. I am sure it is better for scientific inquiry to follow its own rules (of inquiry, that is). And yet I think a scientist who is an active Christian (and many are) is likely to find many current theories unsatisfying even as temporary stopgaps.

There is no doubt about Creation; and there is no doubt about evolution, because creation is a continuing process (it is still going on. But of course it doesn’t happen "by chance". I am sure chance is involved, though. The Roman Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit priest and eminent geologist, who was forbidden by his order to accept the chair of geology at the Sorbonne) coined a phrase that perhaps better describes creation-evolution as viewed by the Christian. He called it "directed chance."

One could hardly question that there are a great number of random changes during the course of chemical, biological and social evolution. But the whole is clearly directed along a preordained path (by divine agency - how else?). Some contemporary biologists seem to be moving tentatively in this direction. Natural selection accounts for the refinement of species (which seems reasonable). The emergence of new species occurs in leaps, as the result of "mutations" in the genetic structure. But then they spoil it all by insisting the mutations also occur "by chance"

However, I think as Orthodox Christians we can improve on the concept of "directed chance". The process of Creation (evolution is one of its characteristics; the two should not really be considered apart) is the result of divine-earthly synergy. We are familiar with the idea of synergy as the co-operation between the grade of God and human freewill, in which divine grace plays the dominant part and which will lead to our deification.

I suggest, however, that the concept of synergy has a wider meaning than that; a meaning as wide as the Orthodox understanding of grace. In Roman Catholic theology, especially that of Thomas Aquinas (13^th century, but still very influential), applies only to human beings. It is a special divine gift offered to Christians, a sort of addition to the human personality distorted by sin, and so unable to respond to God’s offer of salvation. By grace alone we are saved.

The eastern idea of grace is much wider. Grace is not something handed over. It is the effect of God’s activities (his "energies" - wisdom, power, love, etc) on all he creates. Creation itself is an act of grace.

God’s purpose from the beginning was to create men and women as beings in his own image and likeness (that is, able to think and act for themselves. But beings with free will would be inconsistent with a world in which God directly controls everything that happens. So with each stage of development God stands further back. Before the appearance of life forms it was a combination of God’s direction and chance. But as life develops, each stage in the evolutionary chain is provided with more independence of action. The behaviour of an ant colony is almost completely controlled by instinct; but higher animals have considerable freedom of action -hunting prey, choosing a mate etc. Human beings were allowed complete freedom of choice. God took a terrific risk there, of course’ Humanity was free to disobey, and did; and the result is the word as we know it.

Chemical evolution and biological evolution, with steadily less chance and more synergy - though the co-operation with God is unconscious until we reach humanity. Men and women are the culmination of this process; no higher life form is possible (sci-fi writers take note). The next stage should have been our deification, which I think should have included social evolution on earth. But the Fall spoilt everything and we have to consider what has happened and is still happening instead. It’s nice to have something in hand for the next article.

Part 3

Material evolution, biological evolution, and then human social evolution. The concept of social evolution was very popular in the 19th century. Since then it has gone out of fashion. Modern anthropologists (who study early human societies) and sociologists who study later ones don’t like the term at all. In fact they prefer not to speak of “progress”.

This may be mainly the fault if two enthusiastic 19th century scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They not only believed in social evolution but claimed to have to discovered how it works to the extent of being able to predict the inevitable course of history. They started a world movement to help the process along, and we all know that the final result was not the perfect human society they dreamt of but some of the worst horror stories of the 20th century.

An Orthodox Christian surely cannot believe in social evolution as an inevitable process leading to a human utopia, whether the utopia be Socialism or a perfectly functioning Enterprise Economy. That kind of theory leaves out God (Marx and Engels were of course atheists), and God’s ultimate plan for human beings. Nor does it take account of the fact that human history is not going according to plan (it leaves out the Devil and the human Fall into sin). So let us remind ourselves of what God intends for us. He wants us to become like himself - so like that we can be called “gods by grace and status” (what the early Church Fathers call theosis, or deification).

This process (and according to my thesis the whole process of creation-evolution) involves “synergy” - co-operation between the Creator and what he has created. In human beings the co-operation becomes conscious, active co-operation. We are to seek to do the will of God’ So God placed the first human beings in the world with the ability to seek his guidance (or he walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden, in the figurative language of the book of Genesis).

What were these first human beings like? Very primitive is the way we would put it, although they walked with God. Stone age people who lived in caves, is all that archaeology has revealed. (Genesis seems to suggest that they were vegetarians, but make of that what you will). I cannot believe that God intended them to remain just as they were. Some of the Fathers insist that God did not create human beings “perfect”. Read, for instance, the book Against Heresies, by the second century writer Irenaeus. I think of him as a Western Father, although he was Greek and wrote in Greek. He was, after all, Bishop of Lyons, which is now in France. Interestingly, his works have survived only in Latin translation (you can download an English version of Against Heresies from the Internet).

Irenaeus insisted that God created “infants”, intended to “grow to maturity”, by living in fellowship with God and accepting his guidance (or in “synergy”, as later writers said). He says nothing about social evolution in this connection. Hardly! There hadn’t been enough of it for anyone to have thought of the concept. But human beings could grow in fellowship with God only in fellowship with one another - and that would lead to the development of technology and increasingly complex human societies. Social evolution! (To be continued).

Reader Peter Sizer

Part 4

We must, however, take into account the second major factor left out of account by social evolution theories of the 19^th century. Things are not going according to plan. Humanity rejected synergy. People, especially people who have found themselves in positions of power, preferred to act entirely on their own, ignoring God and sometimes (but not always) even denying his existence. In fact there I really only one alternative to following God’s plan, and that is to follow the devil’s counter-plan. Yet there is really no such thing! Creation is a single whole moving along paths and towards a goal that exist only in the mind of God, to which, of course, Satan does not have access. So in practice he will tempt us to do anything that he can make appealing to us, so long as it is opposed to God’s will, making it appear that we are acting independently. In the Genesis story he convinces Adam and Eve that they can become God.

Fortunately, though, things have not turned out as bad as perhaps they might have done. The world has not disintegrated, relapsing into chaos. Human beings, made in the image of God, are naturally good and many have remained basically good, despite everything. There have even been good as well as bad kings and emperors - and politicians! People, I would say, have obeyed God, even unconsciously. So God is still working his purpose out.

Then we must take into account the most important factor of all from the point of view of the Orthodox Christian. God decided to intervene in human history in the most spectacular way of all by himself becoming a human being. The incarnation of the Word of God, the third person of the Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - changed everything for the better. We can now consciously co-operate with God as followers of his Son, by becoming members of the single body of his followers, which we call the Church. Synergy - co-operation with the grace of God - involves obeying God as Spirit, and as members of the Church we are given the potential to do this consciously and consistently. As some writers have put it, the Holy Spirit now acts on Christians “from within”, whereas before he acted only on specially chosen people (like prophets) “from outside”.

However, I prefer to put this a little differently. God has always been active in human social evolution, and is responsible for all the good in it. Where else can anything good have come from? If a human being isn’t actually obeying God, he or she is imitating him (being made in his image). The only other source for motivating our actions is the devil, who is capable only of evil. Moreover, God has always acted on human motivation by, as Spirit, prompting from within; but human response has mostly been unconscious. What the Incarnation made possible was conscious co-operation with the wholly Spirit.

So what’s wrong, then? The world is not progressing towards greater and greater good. All progress consists of both and bad, and even active Christians cannot agree among themselves about which parts are good and which bad. Surely everyone knows this nowadays. Nobody believes in utopia any more. The trouble is that even the best of us are not very good at consistently obeying the Holy Spirit. Like Adam and Eve, we develop ambitions of our own; and we even completely misunderstand what the Spirit is trying to prompt us to do, because we interpret it according to our own ambitions.

Reader Peter Sizer

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