a new problem

Some of you may have remembered my post some time ago about evolution and God’s breathing of his spirit on humans at an opportune time. You might have also remembered my good friend Tom called me on my understanding of microevolution and what turns out to be adaptation.

I had a question I meant to ask him and never did, but did get a chance to run by the good people at upsilon beta chi today. I was wondering how this complex part of microevolution or any evolution worked. Let’s say that some people move north and consequently need to develop the characteristic of hairiness in order to be warm and survive. My question was, “how is that the human body can figure out something like I’m going to need to be hairy to survive here and consequently communicate that to it’s DNA in order to change that feature in the offspring and over time change the feature of non-hairiness to hairiness?”

As the good people of from the world of biology patiently explained to me…that is not how it works. Survival of the fittest. It turns out I should have paid more attention in 7th grade biology. For the minority of you who don’t know, it works more like this. Say 100 people move north. What happens is that the 13 hairiest people survive as a consequence of already possessing the necessary feature. When the other 87 die, they must get married by default and have offspring that posses the combined trait of hairiness and hairiness to become a little more hairiness.

For those of you really educated in this stuff, I apologize for my gross oversimplification, but I need to put it a way I can understand it.

I was okay with the formula…God creates through evolution. If God created in a more “poof” and it appears fashion we tend to be o.k. with that because I think we think it matches the form of sovereignty and power we preconceive God to posses. But to say that God creates over time, through evolution seems a little more counterintuitive. Funny question arise like, “Well did God need a trial and error period to figure stuff out?” Enter my good friend Singleton who is sure to remind me about God’s relationship to time. And in the least, I must concede that the Bible communicates that 1000 years is a day to God. So maybe to God the evolution thing seems more like our preferred “poof” thing.

So here is the problem. If the new version of evolution is true, I think God seems a bit more crass. What I mean is this. The whole of the revealed salvation history throughout the Biblical narrative seems to be about grace and often about God’s identifying with the lowly, weak and poor. Take care of the Widow. Leave the extra wheat in the field. The year of Jubilee. Be like a child. The woman at the well. Blessed are the poor. Even if some of it seems impossibly idealistic to us it remains prescriptive from the almighty. So why the exception with evolution? Why if this the best way to do things, does the process champion the supreme? Those who are genetically predisposed to do well?

My wife who is always thinking in a more creative fashion suggested that it might be the mercy of God to design the process precisely the way God did. Perhaps it is mercy to the would be offspring who would be born without the necessary features for survival. I thought that was interesting.

What do you all think?