Creation, Evolution, and Divine Agency: 

A Bonaventurian Perspective

 

John V. Apczynski

St. Bonaventure University

 

 

1.  Introduction:  What Is Intelligent Design?  A Theological Puzzle

 

 

            When notices about a movement called “intelligent design” first came to my attention, I became intrigued and resolved to examine it more carefully.  My earliest theological reflections involved using the insights developed by the scientist-philosopher, Michael Polanyi, for framing theological inquiry.  The ways in which he identified the practice of science as flowing out of a community of shared discourse and commitments resonated well with forms of theological inquiry as I had come to understand them.  So when I learned of this effort to challenge the unwarranted extensions of scientific naturalism into an all-encompassing view of the world, to expose the inadequacies in reductivist efforts to understand life, and especially to detect signs of divine agency in nature, I expected to encounter a movement that could supplement and perhaps improve my prior use of insights derived from the scientific enterprise.

            The more I came to learn of intelligent design, [1] however, the less satisfactory it appeared to my theological interests.  My preliminary reading of this movement was to take it as proposing a coherent religious and theological view of the world which would acknowledge the results of contemporary science but situate them within a context supporting a Christian frame of reference.  For example, William Dembski has described this movement as an effort to develop a doctrine of “mere creation” — in the sense of outlining the essentials of a Christian doctrine of creation. [2]   One of its aims is to propose “a sustained theological investigation that connects the intelligence inferred by intelligent design with the God of Scripture and therewith formulates a coherent theology of nature.” [3]   But I soon discovered that my understanding of what this task entailed differed dramatically from what was being proposed by the proponents of intelligent design.

 

2.  The Difference between Intelligent Design and a Theology of Creation

            My initial attempts to formulate accurately this difference proved exceedingly elusive for me, since I could never quite form a coherent sense of what was meant by “intelligent design.”  To be sure, aspects of this movement were quite clear and insightful, in particular its extensive exposure of gaps in the evidence in support of evolutionary theory.  And its use of such criticism to challenge the expansion of evolutionary theory into a materialistic and atheistic worldview is likewise impressive.  Nevertheless, the overall positive thrust of intelligent design remained puzzling and continued to elude me.  I finally adopted the strategy of examining carefully the formulations by the proponents of intelligent design, which expressed how they understood their position to differ from a theology of evolution.  My hope was that I could discern the wider theological orientation of intelligent design by disclosing the elements sustaining such a contrast.

First, I would characterize very simply a “theology of evolution” to be an attempt to understand the currently predominant scientific theory of evolution within the context of a doctrine of creation.  From the vantage point of my theological heritage, this is simply a continuation of the standard practice of dialoguing with the predominant cultural assumptions of the age, including the anthropological and cosmic ones, in light of the intelligibility of faith sustained by the Christian community.  There are many examples of such theological efforts in contemporary Christianity. [4]   How does intelligent design differ from this?  Here is one way William Dembski attempts to express the difference:

. . .  intelligent design is incompatible with what typically is meant by “theistic evolution” . . . Theistic evolution takes the Darwinian picture of the biological world and baptizes it, identifying this picture with the way God created life.  When boiled down to its scientific content, however, theistic evolution is no different from atheistic evolution, treating only undirected natural process in the origin and development of life. [5]

 

The fact that Dembski understands intelligent design to be incompatible with a theology of evolution is significant.  This means that they are not simply alternative approaches to similar goals.  In what does this incompatibility consist?  The rest of the passage provides helpful clues.

            To say that theistic evolution “baptizes” a Darwinian picture of the biological world is a fair construal, provided that one keeps in mind that baptism is a sign of a profound internal transformation, in this case of a Darwinian picture of the biological world.  But the following claim, that it “identifies this picture with the way God created life,” suggests that Dembski does not believe this to be so.  No theology of evolution of which I am aware, however, simply identifies a Darwinian view of biological origins with God’s creative activity.  On the contrary, a great deal of effort is expended attempting to explain how divine creative activity functions so that the biological processes that the theory upholds may operate with their own integrity.  What this leads me to conclude, then, is that Dembski believes that a theology of creation should be able to point to scientific evidence (such as biological processes) as God’s creative activity.  And the problem with a theology of evolution is that in identifying God’s creative activity with random or chance (that is, non-purposive or non-designed) occurrences, it gets the Christian understanding of God wrong.

            This understanding is supported if we consider Dembski’s concluding point.  He appears to believe that a theology of evolution may be “boiled down to its scientific content” while presumably remaining a theology.  This suggests a belief that the contingent order of nature explained by scientific theory must be such that it is still Christian in some way.  If that were not the case, then whatever was being described could not properly be called theistic evolution.  That is, somehow at the empirical, scientific level, a Christian element must be found in nature.  Without any theological framework within which to situate and interpret its fundamental meaning, Darwinian evolutionary theory does not provide such a view of nature.  Hence a theology of evolution is not much different from an atheistic interpretation of evolution at the level of biological processes.  Intelligent design, accordingly, seems to require that the empirical order itself, as investigated by the contemporary scientific community, must disclose evidence of divine activity before it can be properly considered Christian.  And if this analysis is correct, then Dembski’s observation that intelligent design is “incompatible” with what is normally taken to be a theology of evolution becomes intelligible.

            Granted this appraisal, one element of my perplexity becomes clearer:  the requirement for intelligent design theorists that at least certain features of design itself be acknowledged to be an empirical feature of the natural order.  That design is a feature of the natural order I have no doubt; whether it is empirical in the relevant sense of functioning as a component of scientific theory is another matter.  There is no necessity, as far as I can determine, that design be empirically established by scientific criteria in order that humans have the capability of affirming the reality of “purposes” in nature.  Indeed, many of the examples brought forth by proponents of intelligent design are not instances of natural processes that are designed, but simply artifacts or events that we typically judge to be produced by human agents. [6]   William Dembski’s statistical formulation of a criterion for specified complexity [7] appears to be an insightful formalization of the sort of mental processes human beings regularly use to make such judgments.  Understanding the contrast in this way helped to make it clearer why proponents of intelligent design insist on incorporating some features of design into contemporary scientific theorizing:  these instances of design must be, in the empirically relevant sense, detectible signs of God’s creative activity. [8]

            When proponents of intelligent design contend that this may be accomplished independently of any particular view of the divine (or even without any understanding of the divine), [9] I believe that, in principle, they are correct.  Nonetheless, this poses two distinct sorts of difficulties, one from the side of science and the other from the vantage point of theology.

2.1.  A Scientific Difficulty for Intelligent Design

            To be a scientist is to dwell in a community of inquiry that operates out of a commonly accepted set of assumptions, goals, theories, and practices, many of which are not even explicitly noted by practicing scientists. [10]   Speaking very generally, scientists seek underling laws or principles that have universal applicability.  One of their normally unacknowledged assumptions is that this requires limiting their research and theories to antecedent material causes.  The observation, for example, that the origins of life on our planet had certain physical parameters, so that only an orbit approximating that of earth’s would allow life to emerge, may have interesting philosophical or theological implications, but it is not terribly relevant to the advancement of scientific explanation. [11]   As it is currently practiced, then, insistence that design must become incorporated into scientific inquiry does not appear to have many prospects of success.  Aside from very circumscribed and localized applications, [12] acknowledging patterns of design in nature does not appear currently to advance scientific explanation. [13]   Undoubtedly, this may eventually change.  The persistence of intelligent design theorists in developing arguments supporting the irreducibility of life and of many biological mechanisms may very well lead the scientific community to reformulations of biological theories.  Nothing prevents intelligent design theorists from working toward such a goal, but they should recognize that this requires a far more fundamental and comprehensive shift in orientation for science than the mere recognition of “design” or “purpose” in natural processes by itself will accomplish. 

2.2.  A Theological Question for Intelligent Design

            However this difficulty is resolved, the second feature of my perplexity has also been clarified by this contrast:  God’s creative activity (or at least its effects) must be empirically detectible.  At this point the issue becomes properly theological:  what is an appropriate way to understand God’s creative activity?  In their insistence that design can be inferred empirically in nature [14] and that this points to a divine interaction with the world, [15] intelligent design theorists seem to postulate an interventionist sort of creative activity, since this is the way we would normally infer a human agent’s intentional activity.  Even the interesting effort to understanding a designing deity’s activity by means of conveying “information” [16] (instead of “moving particles”) still requires an intervention.  Herein lies the principal incompatibility of intelligent design with a traditional theology of divine creative action.  But the issue of whether God’s creative activity is best understood along the lines of an intervention empirically detectible in the natural order is not in the first instance a scientific one.  Rather it is fundamentally theological.  And so we must shift our reflection to a theological understanding of God’s creative activity in order to situate more carefully the meaning of intelligent design.

 

3.  Bonaventure’s Theology of Creation

             My proposal here is to explore the theology of creation developed by the medieval Franciscan theologian, Bonaventure. [17]   He stood within a long tradition of Christian speculation that transformed ancient philosophy through the biblically based reflections of the likes of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, the monastic lectio divina, the Victorines, and most recently the new learning in the universities inspired by the rediscovery in the West of the larger Aristotelian corpus.  His own creative insights, accordingly, were grounded in this tradition of Christian reflection.  Even though exploring Bonaventure’s theology of creation will require additional effort on our part to penetrate some of his medieval cosmological assumptions, we at least have the advantage exploring an understanding of divine creation which has not been affected by contemporary assumptions concerning naturalism.

            In its fullest sense, the Christian doctrine of creation establishes how we are to understand God, the world, and the relationship between them.  Within the Christian frame of reference, everything that is not God is the “world.”  The world, which we know exists, exists in such a way that it did not have to exist.  And if the world did not exist, God would still be, without any sort of diminishment to the divine goodness or perfection.  Moreover, once the world was called into existence out of nothing, nothing was added to the goodness or perfection of God.  This introduces a note of radical contingency to everything:  we and the world around us do not have to exist.  The appropriate response to the divine in such a world is not in the first instance admiration so much as it is gratitude, particularly when the Christian realizes that the nature of this creative act is sheer benevolence without a trace of self-interest for the divine. [18]

            This is the sense of divine creativity that Bonaventure’s theology attempts to understand.  The foundational starting point for Bonaventure’s theological reflections is the revelation of the divine presence in the history of Jesus, which open the Christian to the reality of the triune God.  Christian theology is grounded in Christ [19] and in the Trinity. [20]   Systematically the trinitarian dynamic shapes the pattern of his thinking, and this is the order that will shape this exposition.

            Bonaventure’s systematic vision of the created order is informed by the Christian neo-Platonic tradition mediated through the medieval appropriation of Augustine.  In his Collations on the Six Days, he provides this brief statement of his position:  “this is the sum total of our metaphysics:  it is concerned with emanation, exemplarity, and consummation, that is, illumination through spiritual radiations and return to the supreme being.” [21]   The world is an emanation from its divine ground patterned on the eternal ideal exemplars, and it is in the process of return to this Source.  Even though Bonaventure’s thought is thus framed by this neo-Platonic metaphysics of emanatio and reductio, it has been thoroughly transformed through its encounter with his Christian faith.

            This is most evident in his treatment of the divine:  Bonaventure does not develop any independent treatise on the divine nature in itself; rather his treatment of the divine regularly unfolds out of a Trinitarian context. [22]   His aim is to penetrate more deeply the metaphysical tradition’s notion of being by means of the doctrine of the trinity.  Consequently, his reflections on the trinity do not function as an afterthought, but serve as the structural framework for his entire theological vision.  He creatively develops the earlier Augustinian intellectual psychological model by means of the notion of the self-diffusion of the good from Pseudo-Dionysius and the Victorine’s mystical developments from their reflections on ecstatic love.

            Within the inner dynamic of the trinity itself, Bonaventure gives a primacy to the Father as the fecund source of all that is (plenitudo fontalis).  This representation of the Father as the fontal source of the immanent emanations of the trinity recovers an emphasis from the earlier tradition of the Greek Christian theologians and differs from a more common Western portrayal of strict equality found in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.  This “primacy” (primitas) of the Father, in its highest manifestation, is supremely perfect, self-diffusive goodness.  But this could not be actual unless there were a within the trinitarian life itself a perfectly receptive emanation, the eternal Son, which also communicates with the Father to a perfectly receptive and responsive emanation of the Spirit. [23]

The principal theological benefit from this understanding of the inner trinitarian life of God is that it situates the necessity of God acting in accordance with the divine nature in a dialectical relationship of divine freedom, so that Bonaventure is able to envision God as free with respect to anything that is not God.  Further, he establishes a fundamental theme of his theology wherein the Son is the center within the trinity, mediating between the Father and the Spirit, reflecting both the productivity of the Father and the receptivity of the Spirit.   And just as the Son is the center within the trinity, so the Word made flesh is the center of the free external emanation of creation.  This architectonic feature of Bonaventure’s thought was already being expressed in his early academic work:

The question is asked:  If the designation “Son” implies the most distinctive property, why is he here [in John’s Prologue] called “Word” rather than “Son”?  It seems that precisely the opposite should be the case.

I respond as follows.  The term “Son” expresses only the relation to the Father.  But the term “Word” expresses not only the relation to the one speaking, but to that which is expressed through the word, to the sound with which it clothes itself, and to the knowledge effected in the other through the mediation of the word.  And since here the Son of God is to be described only in terms of his relation to the Father, from whom he proceeds, but also in terms of his relation to the creatures which he has made, as well as to the flesh with which he was clothed and to the truth which he has given us, he is most nobly and fittingly described as the “Word,” for that name includes all these relations, and a more fitting name could not be found anywhere. [24]

 

From the eternal depths of the inner trinitarian life, God utters only one Word, which is expressed in the fundamental structure of creation, which is the word of revelation, and which has become incarnate in the history of the world in Jesus of Nazareth.

            Thus Bonaventure’s vision of the neo-Platonic circle of emanation, exemplarity, and consummation is thoroughly restructured by his Christian faith.  Grounded in the eternal life of the trinity, creation is the free, external emanation patterned on the eternal exemplar of the Word and called to a journey through history guided by the Spirit to a divinely intended fulfillment.  Even though salvation thus constitutes the realization of the goal of creation, our purposes in this essay will be served if we limit this exposition to Bonaventure’s understanding of creation proper.

            Keeping in mind, then, Bonaventure’s grounding of the creative act within the trinitarian life with its being patterned on the eternal exemplar and its return to a fulfillment in the divine life, we catch a glimpse his basic contentions regarding creation in this formula:  “The entire fabric of the universe was brought into existence in time and out of nothingness, by one first Principle, single and supreme, whose power, though immeasurable, has disposed all things by measure and number and weight [Wis. 11:20].” [25]   The creative act, properly speaking, is the work of the divine artist conferring existence on the contingent world out of sheer non-existence.  Since the necessity of the divine act of perfecting its self-diffusiveness is accomplished within the trinity, this external emanation is totally gratuitous.  Moreover, the “moment” of God’s free decision to call the world into existence establishes time, since temporality characterizes the mode of existence of finite reality. [26]   Indeed, for Bonaventure, time is never simply a neutral measure of duration, but rather is a measure of contingent reality’s going forth. [27]   From the first moment of creation, time unfolds as a historical process which marks creation’s return to its source.  The point of creation, as we have already observed, is its salvation.

            Further elements of Bonaventure’s understanding of creation emerge when we consider his reflections on why God creates.  Calling forth the world into being has as its purpose the manifestation of the divine glory and the ability of creatures to participate in that glory. [28]   Since the world is an expression of the inner trinitarian life, it bears the marks of its source like a work of art reflects its creator.  And the gratuitous love of God could only be manifested externally if this creation could somehow participate in this trinitarian life.  Hence, “the most basic reason for the existence of created reality is simply the goodness of God who calls forth creatures capable of participating in the divine life, and places them in a world which is capable of awakening in them an awareness of an active desire for such participation.” [29]

            Finally, we must understand that, even though the divine power is infinitely beyond our comprehension, the product of that creative power is stamped with an intelligible order.  This order is to be found in the patterns of the external, physical world [30] and in our use of this world for our purposes through our varying technologies and disciplines. [31]   In addition to their own proper relationships, all these reflect the power, wisdom, and goodness of their Source.  But since all creation is ordained to union with God, the finality of creation is manifest fully only in humanity.  Consequently the order of the universe is also hierarchical for Bonaventure.  By means of this hierarchical structure, the entire physical universe shares in the finality of creation because of its participation in the life of humanity.

            According to Bonaventure’s medieval cosmology, elemental physical nature was influenced by the heavenly spheres into conjoining and changing in a variety of ways, including the influencing of changes among plants and animals.  Building upon this Bonaventure continues:

. . . by a process of conciliation that is full equalization, they [i.e., the heavenly bodies] influence the human body, which is fitted to receive the most noble form, the soul.  All sentient bodily beings are ordained toward this object and this end:  this form fully existing, alive, and intellective, by which the sensitive bodily nature of man is to be returned, as in an intelligible circle, to its first Principle in whom it will be completed and beatified. [32]

 

All of created reality, in other words, has as its end or final goal human life. [33]   Through its hierarchically ordered participation in the reality of human existence, the entire cosmos thus may share in the final end of divine consummation.

            When we inquire further into how such changes and developments take place, we must enter into certain specific doctrines of Bonaventure’s medieval cosmology. [34]   Under the influence of Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure adopts a principle of universal hylomorphism.  This means that “matter” refers to the principle of potentiality as such, not merely to potentiality in physical entities.  Consequently, all finite realities, including angels, are a composite reality. [35]   Further, Bonaventure follows the doctrine of Robert Grosseteste and the Oxford Franciscans that the highest form of all composite reality is light (lux).  This metaphysics of light held that all bodies are informed by light to some degree, and to the degree that they are informed by light to that degree their place in the hierarchy of the cosmos is determined.  This means that every body has at least two forms, the most general form of light and some special form.  This theory of the multiplicity of forms holds that the function of form is not only to give rise to a specific being (as the Aristotelian theory of the unicity of form adopted by Aquinas would hold), but in addition to prepare or to dispose matter for new possibilities.  For Bonaventure, then, matter was not inert, but was created with an inner dynamism for new potential composite structures guided by the virtual forms (rationes seminales) present within it from the moment of creation.

            These cosmological and metaphysical speculations about the created order are confirmed, for Bonaventure, by a consideration of the first creation account in Genesis.  The creative act itself came about “in the beginning” before any day.  In order to manifest the divine power, wisdom, and goodness, the act of dividing the cosmic substances — the luminous (the heavens), translucent (the firmament), and opaque (the earth) — was accomplished over three days.  The act of providing for these cosmic realms likewise was distributed over three days:  the stars and heavenly bodies (for the luminous realm), the fish and birds (for the translucent realm of air and water), and finally mammals, reptiles, and humans (for the opaque realm of earth).  Of course, God could have accomplished all of this in an instance, but he chose to act in this way as a sign for our instruction. [36]

            This survey of Bonaventure’s theology of creation allows us to offer these general observations.  A properly Christian account of creation, for Bonaventure, flows out of a trinitarian understanding of God which underscores the sheer gratuity of the act of creation.  In calling the created world into being, the divine creative act provides the world with its own intrinsic potentialities and capacities for developing and, in the final sense, for fulfilling its divine destiny.  “Rather than posit an immediate, direct action of God for the creation of each new form in the course of the development of created beings, Bonaventure posited the presence of forms as virtual realities in the matter from which individual beings are constituted.” [37]   Since this theology was formulated in the pre-modern era, there is no question of its being involved in the contemporary debates about evolution or naturalism.  Yet it would provide a model for contemporary Christians who attempt to develop a theology of evolution, which could accept the presuppositions of neo-Darwinian theory appropriately interpreted within the context of a divine purpose expressed through the material causes explored by contemporary science.

 

4.  Conclusion:  Does a Designer God Presume Modernity?

            What I have hoped to accomplish in this essay is to provide a clarification, from a theological vantage point, of the meaning of intelligent design.  Admittedly, there is more to the intelligent design movement than its theological presuppositions.  And to a certain extent it can continue to promote its scientific agenda independently of its theological commitments.  Nevertheless, until I was able to formulate this interpretation of intelligent design, I could never quite comprehend its overall meaning.  My suspicion is that many adherents of intelligent design are not able to formulate such an overall meaning for themselves, and of those that do some would not accept this one.  If my interpretation has missed the mark somehow, perhaps it will serve as a stimulus for someone in the movement to provide an alternative and more accurate expression of its overall meaning.  In the meantime, the principal conclusion that I believe can be drawn from this interpretation of the intelligent design movement is that its scientific aims are grounded in a theological vision of the divine that is best described as modern, one that emerged out of the efforts of natural theology of the Newtonian period, but which has attempted to correct some of its flaws.  By this I mean that it presumes an understanding of knowing that requires establishing independent, scientific grounds which serve as evidence for the existence of God and an understanding of God who creates the world with this kind of foundational knowing in mind.  And, as William Dembski has correctly noted, this view of God stands in tension in significant ways to the one developed in the pre-modern era during the first 1500 years of Christian theological reflection.