Friends:  What science reveals is “how”; what Jesus reveals is purpose. Last in a series.  Have a great week! Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #902

February 27, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

I See Smart People, Part 3

By Bob Walters

“So we are left with the fundamental question and the incapacity of science to answer that question: Does life have purpose or not?” ornithologist/essayist Reverend Professor Andrew G. Gosler of Oxford in Coming to Faith Through Dawkins

Dr. Gosler wasn’t so much an atheist as a cultural Jew, i.e., non-Christian, whose depth of study and knowledge about birds – ornithology – provided an ideal scientific seat from which to calculate and critique Dawkins’ message of atheism and evolution.

And, in the process, Gosler found Christ.

One scientist to another, Gosler was not impressed with the argument genetic biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins, author of the 2006 book The God Delusion, made for either evolution or atheism. Gosler’s essay in Coming to Faith, “Hearing God Through an Enchantment with Nature,” deftly points out not only holes in Dawkins’s science and atheistic polemics, but applies a science career’s worth of professional observations to note the overall backwardness of popular evolutionary assumptions.

If one knows nothing else of Charles Darwin’s 19^th century investigations and suppositions about Evolution and Creation, one knows “Survival of the Fittest.” Dawkins buys into Darwin, further claiming uncreated genetic preferencing leads to conflict and competition among species which led and still leads to biological development. 

Gosler’s investigations don’t reveal a God whose purpose of Creation is conflict, nor “the belief accepted within biology that exclusive and bitter self-interest underpins life.” Gosler’s study of nature revealed to him God’s “Shalom,” or peace. “Creation and sustaining of life is not of competition or conflict, but of mutual dependence. … Open-mindedness,” Gosler writes, “is the invitation to truth itself; openness to the Spirit.”

God’s Creation, you see, is meant to work together, not against the other parts.

Raw survival, if I may lean on C.S. Lewis’s rationalization of morality, implies that whatever organism is trying “to survive” has an interior intent and purpose.  That’s where Darwinism and Darwinists veer off course: they call creation a purposeless place, yet invoke the purposeful and moral quality of “survival” to explain purposeless-ness.

Gosler has a great example of biological complementarity among a species of birds, first noted by Maori tribesmen in New Zealand. The male and female huia birds mate for life and have vastly different shaped bills that allow a “knife and fork” utility as they feed each other and their nests.  “Rather than Darwin’s competition driving evolution,” Gosler writes, “they were the model of mutual dependence.”

Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath have provided a comforting service to the faithful in compiling Coming to Faith Through Dawkins. Gosler, who now is an Anglican priest (since 2018) and a third-order Franciscan, and eleven other essayists, smoothly describe their trips into and out of atheism, be it by science, experience, or philosophy.

Each essay called to my own mind specific friends and acquaintances who have rebuffed faith generally and/or Jesus specifically.  The over-arching weakness of atheism is its absence of purpose or cause, and concomitant denial of truth and reality.

Granted, not everyone thinks deeply, faithful or not. But I believe every life is enhanced by feeling purpose and knowing truth.  The created world, by God’s purpose, is gifted to be loving and relational; Jesus fixes the fallen state that clouds those gifts.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) resides squarely with those who see purpose in life.