How does creation reveal God?

‘For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse’ (Romans 1.20).

But how does creation reveal God? Richard Dawkins is insistent that the only things that the universe can reveal come from scientific observation. He ridicules Christians as mad, stupid or worse for their stubborn belief in God, despite what he insists is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Many Christians, it seems, consciously or unconsciously accept Dawkins’s claim that scientific observation should be able to demonstrate the existence of God, and have been enormously energetic in seeking scientific evidence for the existence of a Creator.

Seeing God?

However, it is far from clear that Scripture expects scientific endeavour to unambiguously reveal God. John Calvin observed that Scripture in several places describes creation’s witness to its Creator as available to all people and all cultures. For instance, Psalm 19 declares:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
(Psalm 19.1-4)

Calvin writes: ‘The Psalmist attributes language to celestial objects, a language which all nations understand, the manifestation of the Godhead being too clear to escape the notice of any people, however obtuse.’¹

Calvin notes that Scripture affirms children as important witnesses to God in Psalm 8.4. He goes on, ‘Accordingly, he hesitates not to bring them forward as fully instructed to refute the madness of those who, from devilish pride, would fain extinguish the name of God.’²

From these observations Calvin concluded that human beings have what is sometimes called a sensus divinitatis.³ We have a universal instinct planted within us which is not irrational, but bears witness to God at a deeper level than mere rationality.

Scripture also affirms that our knowledge of God through his creation is dulled by sin, not ignorance. It was mankind’s rebellion that caused God to ‘give them over to a depraved mind’.⁴ When Paul speaks to pagan philosophers in Athens, he points to their knowledge of (to misquote Donald Rumsfeld) ‘known unknowns’ about God. They have an altar inscribed ‘To an unknown God’.⁵ This both points to their instinct that there is a God beyond their standard pantheon, but also to the fact that they know that they do not know him. God is a known unknown.

Thus in Scripture there is an ambiguity about how the creation points to God. In and of itself it ‘pours forth speech’ about God, but because of our fallenness human beings are cursed with depraved minds that cannot see clearly. We need the gospel to be proclaimed to us, and the regenerating work of the Spirit before we can see and delight in the true God of Jesus Christ.

Calvin was by no means the only Christian theologian who spoke of this universal instinctive knowledge of God through his creation. It is found in Augustine,⁶ and Anselm, who described his intellectual endeavours as ‘faith seeking understanding’,⁷ and numerous others. All of them believed that empirical observation and rational argument could support belief in God, and in particular, show that Christian faith was reasonable, but they stopped short of claiming that such methods would prove God’s existence.

Paley and Darwin

However, in the 17th and 18th centuries a noticeable shift in emphasis began to appear. Enlightenment thinkers began to insist that the only truth worth speaking of is truth which is verifiable by the senses.⁸ Christian theologians tended to move away from what has been called a ‘theology of nature’, in which nature is understood to support and illustrate a pre-existent belief in God, to a much stronger ‘natural theology’, in which it was believed that nature demonstrated the existence of God.

In 1802, a devout clergyman named William Paley (1743-1805) wrote a book entitled Natural Theology which systematised much of the wisdom of the day. In this book Paley famously developed his ‘watchmaker argument’. This suggests that the very complexity and evident purpose, particularly of biological life, points to the existence of a Creator, in the same way that the discovery of a watch bears witness to a watchmaker.⁹

Victorian Christians loved this argument and widely adopted it. It is a deeply attractive argument, but, in one crucial sense, deeply flawed. Paley’s argument falls to the ground if biological life could be shown to have developed as a result of simple laws of nature. Or, as Dawkins put it, if the watchmaker is blind.¹⁰

The young Charles Darwin read Paley’s Natural Theology and was initially persuaded by it. However, Darwin began to have doubts. When he published his Origin of Species it presented just such a blind mechanism for the origin of complex biological systems — the process of natural selection. For Darwin himself this was part of a long process in which he moved away from belief in the God of the Bible. Many others have since followed him.

But did Darwin’s theory necessarily lead away from biblical faith? It is my conviction that the natural theologians seriously misunderstood the manner and clarity of creation’s testimony to God. Older theologians had been clear that their faith did not rest on their observations of nature, and they were not threatened by new discoveries. Indeed, Darwin’s theory of natural selection was broadly adopted by many evangelical theologians, including the great evangelical B.B. Warfield. It was, in part at least, those who had pinned their theology to Paley’s idea that the irreducible complexity of the world demonstrated the existence of God who found themselves in trouble. Darwin had suggested a mechanism that just might explain the origin of biological systems in simple terms.

A way forward

Since that time there has been the writing of many books. Darwin’s theory still has many gaps and challenges associated with it, but is generally agreed to be an extremely powerful explanatory model. Many Christians who doubt Darwin have worked hard to disprove him, and in part have done the world a great service in pointing out Darwin’s limitations. However, they have not persuaded most biologically trained Christians that Darwinian evolution is completely in error.

As an evangelical Christian I am bound to the Scriptures. If Darwinian evolution was found to contradict the Scriptures, in particular Genesis 1-3, I would reject it in an instant. History is full of ‘assured results’ becoming yesterday’s errors, and I am personally quite open to Darwin’s theory being one of these. However, as Melvin Tinker has pointed out in his article,¹¹ there are many respectable evangelical scholars who have not thought that Darwin’s theory necessarily contradicts Scripture. Even if we agree with John Benton¹² that Genesis 2.7 requires that Adam was made de novo, there is no necessary implication that all other biological life was made in the same way.

So which way forward? It seems to me that we would do well to recover John Calvin’s understanding of how the creation witnesses to its creator. It seems that Scripture doubts the value of clever theories in pointing to God. God has hidden his truth from the wise and learned and revealed it to little children.¹³

It may be that those who doubt Darwin eventually prove their case. I will applaud them as valiant seekers after truth, but they will not have demonstrated the existence of God. They will simply have shown that we don’t understand as much as we sometimes think we do. On the other hand, the evidence for evolution by natural selection as a general process may become undeniable to all. This will not have cast doubt on God’s existence, nor, I am persuaded, the reliability of the Bible.

According to Scripture, God displays his glory through the beauty of sunshine and the magnificence of the sky, through billowing clouds and raging winds.¹⁴ He speaks to all people by implanting joy in their hearts.¹⁵ I see the glory of God in his creation, not because a scientific theory demonstrates it, but because the Lord has opened the eyes of my heart.

Notes
1 Jean Calvin and Henry Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989) (I.v.1)
2 Calvin and Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion (I.v.3.)
3 See Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.209ff
4 Romans 1.28
5 Acts 17.23
6 Augustine, Confessions (Book VII, Chapter 10), in Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series (14 vols.; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994)
7 Anselm, ‘On Truth’ in Anselm and Thomas Williams, Three Philosophical Dialogues (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge: Hackett Pub., 2002)
8 For a devastating critique of modern science’s — and particularly Richard Dawkins’s — adherence to an extreme form of this thesis see Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion : Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (rev. edn.; London: Routledge, 2002) or Science and Poetry (Routledge Classics; London: Routledge, 2006)
9 The modern intelligent design movement is essentially a restatement of Paley. See, for instance, William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design : The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999). For an evangelical philosopher’s critique of intelligent design see Paul Helm, Design Arguments and Apologetics, accessed December 10 2008, available from http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/ 2008/08/design-arguments-and-apologetics.html
10 See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1991)
11 See Melvin Tinker, ‘No Conflict’, Evangelicals Now, February 2009
12 John Benton, ‘Why I am not an evolutionist’, Evangelicals Now, March 2009
13 Matthew 11.25
14 Psalm 104.1-4
15 Acts 14.17

How does creation reveal God?

Seeing God?

Paley and Darwin

A way forward

Peter Comont

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