Sacramental Christians need to have an understanding of this world which is compatible with sacramental Christian beliefs. You can’t believe the Creator is present, let alone Present on the altar, when you have an understanding of the physical world which is inconsistent with such a Presence.
A particularly important part of the physical world is life, which evolves and develops. Christian understandings, theological and philosophical and empirical, should be not just vaguely (and falsely) “not in conflict” with science—empirical knowledge in general. Empirical knowledge concerns matter and the various relationships of raw forms of matter and complexly organized matter. Matter, that is objective stuff which can engage in relationships of a creaturely sort, is one of the necessary components of Sacraments as we know them, as well as the sheer stuff of a sacramental world, the world created by a God all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving and the world glowing with His presence.
Christian understandings of a sacramental world and of Sacraments should encapsulate evolutionary and developmental understandings of life including human being as well as relativistic understandings of time and space, quantum physical understandings of matter; Christian understandings should encapsulate all relevant understandings of being, concrete and abstract.
Peter Frost, the Canadian anthropologist, has written an essay, The Fellowship Instinct, in which he discusses the emergence of human religions within a general Darwinian framework. As a believing Christian, I think his analysis is spot-on so far as present knowledge goes and, yet, I also think he comes to the wrong conclusion:
In short, Man has made religion in his own image, but religion has returned the favor. In a very real sense, it has made us who we are.
Frost is apparently an ex-Christian and perhaps was never a sacramental Christian, a believer in the fundamental sacramental presence, that of God in His Creation, including the processes and results of evolution and development. But few Christians are such believers; I guess Frost can at least claim a consistency between his (non-?) beliefs and empirical reality as (naively?) described by well-established facts and plausible theories about physical phenomena. Do phenomenological understandings of facts exhaust the possibilities? I guess they can if one accepts a simple and positivistic version of Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Butcher-knife? In joking a little, I don’t mean to show disrespect since I strongly believe, as a flesh-and-blood man and as a sacramental Christian, that physical reality has to be fully accepted as a part of God’s Creation. I part there with Frost and some other empirical thinkers but I part in many ways and at many places from others who claim to be Christians, even within a sacramental tradition.
Where is it that I part with Frost? He accepts empirical reality and so do I, but I consider it part of a greater Creation, a greater Creation which shows even in the possibilities of richer narratives making sense of this empirical reality. My reasons for this viewpoint are as much shaped by my understanding of abstractions, mathematical and philosophical and other, as by my understanding—and acceptance—of Christian revelation.
Anthropology would perhaps incline a thinker to see religion in terms of what it does for men, as a way of understanding the world so to increase one’s chances of survival and of successful reproduction. I agree that these are deep and valid truths, but I fail to see how such truths tell us there are no other truths and no greater truths; I fail to see how survival and successful reproduction are in conflict with the God of the Hebrew patriarchs. In particular, the possibility of truth-bearing and truth-revealing narratives arise from an honest effort to deal with reality in its pleasing and cruel aspects alike. I could even propose the insight that men began to tell stories in his image and those stories shape us.
Things exist and one thing is here and another is over there, but those simple factual truths don’t argue against the higher truths of geometry and other forms of abstract reasoning and that raises the question: What is an abstraction? I’ve argued in various ways against the separation of concreteness and abstraction, considering such a separation to be a more general form of the dualism between brain and mind, body and soul, city and human being of a communal sort. A brain makes its own mind, but in an odd way—by creating mind-like relationships within itself and with its greater body and with all that exists in its environment; thus it is that I would say a mind shapes its own brain. A mind is the evolving and developing relationships which bring the brain into order; a mind is the story of that brain and is as real as the brain-cells themselves. Relationships create stuff (almost straightforward restatement of quantum field theory) and that stuff creates new relationships which… Evolution and development are aspects of a greater narrative of reality which we see as through a glass darkly.
So it is that I can accept the fullness of evolutionary biology in my understanding of human being while keeping my sacramental Christian beliefs. I don’t see a conflict. If Christ is more fully and more perfectly present in the bread and wine on the altar after they are consecrated by a validly ordained priest, why should He not be present in His brothers and sisters, in their genetic and somatic stuff as shaped by evolution and development? Why would we expect religious belief to somehow be brought about as truths descend from another realm of being and enter a human being of some generic stuff barren of religious inclinations? Or should we expect flesh-and-blood human beings to have brains which function in the way of machines finding truths of a logical sort? It be doubtful that God be an idea discoverable, computable?, by a Boolean machine.
Why should we expect that God can exist and some form of higher religion can be true only if Creation reflects dualities originally proposed by those who, as one example, thought matter was inert? It was those dualities which needed to be eliminated in the interest of a greater unity of created being, one which can—if only very speculatively for now—be produced by a simple acceptance of the principle of modern physics that relationships are primary and generate stuff.
Now the punchline: such an insight is hinted at even in the Old Testament and stated clearly from one particular perspective in the writings of the school of St John the Evangelist. Creation exists because of the active love which God has for it. God didn’t create the world and then choose to love; the world came to be because God first loved it. And once creation existed as a result of divine love, it began to form all sorts of relationships with itself and with its parts and with its Maker. Once the brain exists as a result of the love of self which needs to identify what is not self, it begins to form all sorts of relationships with itself and with the other parts of the greater organism and with all the things around it and with its Maker. Spirit is to be explained (not explained away) by an understanding of the dynamic nature of matter and the relationships which had created stars and the planets which orbit stars. Soul is to be explained by the dynamic nature of the stuff of a human individual. Mind is to be explained by the dynamic nature of the stuff of a human brain.
Relationships are primary to stuff and create and shape stuff. That stuff forms relationships and new things can come to be. The inclination to worship the gods or the God is the result of evolutionary and developmental processes working to produce individual and communal human beings adapted to a world in which the relationships are such as to imply, strongly in my opinion, the existence of divinity of some sort, quite plausibly a Creator who is a different sort of relationship, one which is a supreme act-of-being in Thomistic terms, the ground of other acts-of-being, of all other relationships as well as created stuff.
Why do we Christians try to see what is `pure’ and `perfect’ in our relationships with God and in our thoughts about God or even about mathematical truths? Is this any different than an evolutionary biologist rejecting God because evolutionary processes have shaped the human being who speculates about God or longs for God? What can be better, ultimately more pure and perfect, than what God has created for His purpose of providing companions for His Son? If God were to create a world of evolution and development, why wouldn’t we expect the inclination to be religious, the inclination to see the divine, to be the result of evolutionary and developmental processes? In a sense, nothing has really changed from the theological and philosophical arguments in ancient Greece or Medieval Paris, but we do have far better knowledge of empirical reality, knowledge which allows us to make some greater and better sense of it all, whether we choose to make atheistic sense or pantheistic sense or Jewish sense or Christian sense of it. I would argue that sacramental Christians with the courage to be open to empirical knowledge and the reasoning power to make sense of it have perhaps gained an advantage in a world of evolutionary biology and quantum physics.
Christians should, and easily can, accept what is impure and imperfect in this world in light of evolution and development. It’s not a world of devolution from a pair of ancestors living in a state of grace but rather a world of evolution from a confusion of ancestors climbing down from trees and then rising from their knuckles. It would seem to me that a sacramental Christian is bound to see empirical reality in this light; after all, don’t we sacramental Christians claim to see Christ as truly present in the consecrated bread we chew and the consecrated wine we swallow? We are rising above our evolved animal nature, not in the sense of becoming something different but rather in becoming what is potential in the animal life of this world—a creature sharing the life of its Creator, a Creator who has created us and sustains us.
We claim to see wheat and grapes as becoming the Body and the Blood of the Son of God. Why can’t we more readily see body and blood, including genes, as being part of the fundamental stuff, the “only” stuff of a Christian believer? It’s really not the stuff that matters but rather the relationship of God to the stuff, though that relationship probably requires certain types of stuff. Still, the stuff can be seen as a focus of that relationship and not as something existing independently of its most important relationship. God can raise sons of Abraham from the rocks of the field. He can make bread and wine the stuff of the human body and the human blood of His own Son. He can create true believers, friends of God, by evolutionary processes working through our DNA and RNA shaped from the strange matter described by quantum physics and inhabiting the strange spacetime described by general relativity.