A Helpful Explanation of Evolution: Bruce Glass on “The Reconciliation of Christianity with Biological Evolution,” Part 1

Posted on April 26, 2014 by J Richard Middleton

I’ve just finished reading Bruce Glass, Exploring Faith and Reason: The Reconciliation of Christianity with Biological Evolution (Houston: DBG Publishing, 2012). The book was recommended by various scholars whom I respect, and for the most part I agree with their recommendation.

Glass is a religious agnostic and a non-scientist who writes to explain evolutionary theory to a popular audience and also to explain why it is not antithetical to classical orthodox and evangelical theology (he writes from a knowledge of pious evangelical Christians who are evolutionists). Glass’s writing is both lucid and permeated by an irenic spirit.

The book has eleven chapters divided into four Parts.

Part 1: Christianity and Evolution
1. God’s Word
2. God’s Creation
3. God’s Providence

Part 2: The Theory of Evolution
4. Layers of Understanding
5. The Awakening of Evolutionary Science
6. “Let the Land Produce Living Creatures”

Part 3: The Evidence of Evolution
7. Clues All Around
8. The History of Life
9. The Tree of Life

Part 4: The Politics of Evolution
10. “Creation Science” and Intelligent Design Theory
11. “Darwinism”

I found the book to be helpful in explaining biological evolution in a non-technical way. I’m going to comment on this in the current blog post (part 1) and also in the one following (part 2).

But I was less enamored with the strategy Glass used to reconcile Christianity and evolution. It showed a somewhat simplistic and bookish understanding of the Bible and theology. I’ll raise my criticisms in the final part of this post.

I found the real value of Glass’s book to be Part 2: “The Theory of Evolution” and especially Part 3: “The Evidence for Evolution.”

Part 2:“The Theory of Evolution” contains three lucid chapters. Glass is at his best explaining biological evolution in ordinary language so that non-scientists can make sense of it.

Chapter 4: “Layers of Understanding.” Here Glass clarifies what a scientific theory is (including the multiple ways the word “theory” is used) and how later scientific theories often explain matters that earlier theories can’t (without totally invalidating the earlier theory). This nicely diffuses the objection that evolution is “only” a theory (where theory means something like an unsupported hunch). It also illustrates one of the meanings of the word “layers” in the title of the chapter, namely, how earlier and later scientific theories relate to each other.

But “layers” has another meaning, namely, how science relates to faith. Glass helpfully also addresses the historical problem Christians have had when they related theology to science by the strategy of a “God of the gaps” (that’s when God is introduced to explain what science—at the moment—cannot explain). That science typically fills in the gaps, over time, thus squeezing God out of the picture should warn Christians about the folly of this approach (which is the basic problem with the “Intelligent Design” movement).

Chapter 5: “The Awakening of Evolutionary Science.” In this chapter Glass recounts Darwin’s intellectual development, his collection of specimens and observation of species diversity during the Beagle voyage, and how he came to develop his theory of “natural selection” to explain the mechanism of evolution. Glass notes that biological evolution did not begin with Darwin, and he summarizes how evolutionary theory has developed since Darwin, especially with the rise of genetics. This is a fine, clear exposition.

I would, however, have liked Glass to explain more fully the difference between Darwinian “natural selection” and Lamarckian “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” which are often confused in the popular mind, and which he declares incompatible (p. 92). Thankfully, he does this in a later chapter. It should be noted that Glass treats natural selection as the only viable account of evolution, even though there are supplementary mechanisms being proposed these days (including neo-Lamarckian proposals).

Chapter 6: “Let the Land Produce Living Creatures.” In this chapter Glass focuses on the multiple ways that life has proliferated on earth, including examples of “co-evolution” (in which species evolve in tandem, adapting to each other), the quite diverse paths through which complex structures (like eyes and wings) have developed in different organisms, and convergent evolution of different species filling similar niches in different parts of the world (such as evident similarities between marsupial mammals and placental mammals, which developed separately).

Glass also helpfully explains how biological evolution with greater complexity can occur in a universe defined by entropy (which initially seems counter-intuitive). And he makes the important admission that Darwin’s evolutionary theory can explain how life evolves, but does not actually explain biogenesis or the origin of life (p. 120). Although there is much current speculation on how life began, there is no accepted scientific explanation.

In my next post I’ll discuss Glass’s superb explanation of the evidence for evolution, especially the chapter that is proverbially worth the price of the book.

What’s Dualism Got to Do with It? The Tom Wright Connection, Part 4

Posted on April 23, 2014 by J Richard Middleton

This is part 4 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar. For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here. For part 3, click here.

What’s Dualism Got to Do with It?

Although I’ve mentioned various two-way influences between Wright and Walsh-Middleton, the connection goes even deeper, and it begins back in 1983. This was when Wright was working on his first book, a commentary on Colossians and Philemon for the Tyndale series (published in 1988).

Wright was writing the Colossians material when Brian Walsh first got to know him at McGill. Based on their friendship, the two would meet regularly to discuss what Wright had written, and Brian would give feedback and critique.

As Brian tells it, he kept challenging the sacred/secular dualism with which Wright was reading Colossians. Wright kept separating salvation in Christ from life in the mundane realm (including the political realm). But according to Colossians 1:15-20, the same Christ through whom all things were created, and in whom all things hang together, is the one whom all things are reconciled. The creator and redeemer are one.

So Walsh and Wright did regular Bible study in Colossians together during the time when Walsh and I were completing our work on The Transforming Vision. And our critique of otherworldly dualism and our framing of salvation as God’s redemption of earthly life managed to impact Wright’s reading of Colossians.

Wright’s own account of how he came to shift from a dualistic worldview to a holistic vision is recounted in his autobiographical essay “My Pilgrimage in Theology,” Themelios, 18/2 (January 1993): 35. There Wright states:

In 1983 I started work on my Colossians commentary. By the time I finished it in 1985 I had undergone probably the most significant change of my theological life. Until then I had been basically, a dualist. The gospel belonged in one sphere, the world of creation and politics in another. Wrestling with Colossians 1:15-20 put paid to that. I am still working through the implications (and the resultant hostility in some quarters): my book New Tasks for a Renewed Church is a recent marker on this route.

Although this article doesn’t mention Brian’s role in the shift, Wright thanks Brian for his contribution at the start of the Tyndale commentary (p. 11).

Now, I’m not going to claim that Tom Wright got his emphasis on the redemption of creation from Walsh and Middleton in any simple or direct sense. But it looks like our early work on worldviews, dualism, and holistic salvation served as a catalyst for Wright at a formative phase of his theological development. At the very least, our work enabled Wright to see what was staring him in the face all along in the text of Colossians.

I started this four-part post with a comment about the similarity between Tom Wright and myself on the eschatological redemption of creation, a point that many have noted. I’ve tried to explain how that similarity may have come about. It is gratifying to think that the early work Brian Walsh and I did on holistic salvation may have made some small contribution to the development of Tom Wright’s powerful and illuminating eschatological vision.

In another post I explore ways in which I’m not quite on board with all of Tom Wright’s eschatology.

You can read about my 2017 visit with Tom Wright at St. Andrews in Scotland here.

A Bunch of “Shout Outs” from Wright: The Tom Wright Connection, Part 3

Posted on April 21, 2014 by J Richard Middleton

This is part 3 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar. For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here.

A Bunch of “Shout Outs” by Wright

Back in 1992, before Wright had achieved his present international stature, Brian Walsh and I were already excited by his work and quite taken with his newly-released The New Testament and the People of God, which he conceived as the first volume of a project entitled “Christian Origins and the Question of God.” We were therefore honored that Wright used our four worldview questions from The Transforming Vision as a tool for his analysis of first-century Judaism in that book (pp. 122-23). Brian is also mentioned in the preface, where Wright thanks him for his extensive feedback on the manuscript (p. xix).

We repaid the honor when we used Wright’s conception of the biblical story as a five-act drama (and added a sixth act) in the last chapter of our book Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (1995). In fact, our book is indebted to Wright’s ideas at numerous points. Wright then wrote an appreciative blurb for the cover of the British edition of the Truth is Stranger book (published by SPCK).

With the second volume in Wright’s project, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), he again thanked Brian (also p. xix). This time Wright added a fifth worldview question (p. 138, n. 41) and used the five questions to structure an entire chapter (chap. 10: “The Questions of the Kingdom,” pp. 443-74).

More recently, in the fourth and final volume (which is itself two volumes!), Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), Wright once more acknowledged his debt to the Walsh-Middleton analysis of worldviews (pp. 27-28).

I know this sounds like boasting; but I’m only just getting warmed up.

It was 1992 (or possibly 1993), soon after The New Testament and the People of God had been published. Brian Walsh and I were attending the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). It was lunchtime and we were wondering around one of the big hotels that hosted the SBL meetings. We spotted Tom Wright giving a lecture to a group of scholars seated at tables having lunch. He looked up, interrupted his lecture, and called out: “There are my friends Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton!” Then he went back to his lecture. I was stunned.

Some years later at another SBL meeting (2009, New Orleans), Wright was giving an evening lecture on his new Justification book to a group of about 700 (the hall was packed). I was sitting beside Keith Bodner, an Old Testament scholar from Crandall University in New Brunswick. I had given a paper that afternoon on the role of humanity in Psalms 8 and 104 (plus another paper the previous day in a session Bodner chaired). I was beginning to relax, now that my “duties” were over. To my surprise, near the start of the lecture Wright made mention of my Psalms paper that afternoon and said he would like to have heard it since he was sure it would have been as helpful as my analysis of the imago Dei in The Liberating Image. At that point, Bodner leaned over incredulously and said: “You got a shout out from Tom Wright!?”

But I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. I had come to know Tom Wright as a generous person, who invests his time and energy in the building up of others. This goes well beyond his prodigious writing and speaking. After all, he had accepted my invitation to have dinner with a dozen of my past and current students the previous year, at the 2008 SBL in Boston. He and Maggie graciously spent an evening with our group, eating Italian food and engaging in stimulating and heart-felt conversations about Scripture, theology, and the church.