I am running around Green Lake in Seattle with one of my best friends. I’ve known him and loved him for years. We are in our mid-twenties, and he is going through tough turbulence starting life after college. So, after laying out various options, he asks me, “What do you think I should do?”
“I really don’t know. But I’ve always found the way forward becomes more clear to me if I ask God for guidance.”
My gregarious friend doesn’t reply, so we run in silence. But then he lowers his voice, “I don’t believe in God anymore. I took a course on evolution at the university . . .” Although I’ve known my dear friend for a long time, I don’t know him as well as I should.
But I do know that my friend’s class in evolutionary biology was not with Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. The author of more than 500 scholarly articles and six books, Nowak held professorships at the University of Oxford and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the faculty at Harvard.
It is said that, after Darwin, no one discovered evolution again. But Professor Nowak proposed a new theory of evolution that revolutionized the field. His theory involves not just mutation and selection but also cooperation as the third fundamental principle of evolution. Nowak holds that the story of evolution is not just a tale of ruthless survival of the fittest, where all fight against all. The story of evolution also involves higher and higher forms of cooperation and mutual benefit. Collaboration, not just competition, explains the evolution of life. Moreover, the discovery of evolution itself would not have been possible without the cooperation of scientists building on each other’s insights.
“The material unfolding of the universe is guided by something that is beyond time, beyond matter . . . you can call that God.”
Prof. Nowak gave a recent lecture for the McGrath Institute at the University of Notre Dame entitled, “Does Evolution Lead Us to God?” Nowak began by pointing out that both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein believed they had to explain a universe that is static and unchanging. But Fr. Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered evidence pointing to a universe that is dynamic, expanding, and beginning 13.8 billion years ago. To mock this new idea, physicist Fred Hoyle disparagingly called it a “Big Bang,” but the term stuck and became adopted by its advocates. As the evidence in favor of the big bang grew, Einstein changed his mind. He rejected the view that the universe is eternal and unchanging and came to believe in a developing and dynamic universe. Converging lines of scientific evidence point to an expanding universe that began 13.8 billion years ago.
How does evolution lead to God? Nowak argues that as human language evolved, one of the first uses of language in all cultures is the praise of the divine. Human language is used by philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians to seek the truth. Human language also facilitates expressions of love, fidelity, and virtue that we can call the good. Finally, human language is used by poets, musicians, and artists to express and create the beautiful. So, if we think of the divine (as Plato did) as the highest form of the true, the good, and the beautiful, then evolution leads us to God.
Indeed, Nowak also thinks that understanding the science of evolution leads us closer to God. Nowak pointed out, “Evolutionary dynamics—like other processes in physics, chemistry, or biology—follow mathematical laws. Those laws are part of an underlying, unchanging, eternal reality. The material unfolding of the universe is guided by something that is beyond time, beyond matter . . . you can call that God.” Nowak is expressing, in his own way, the argument put forward by St. Augustine of Hippo.
If the universe were just a chaotic cluster of random events lacking any intelligible laws, there would be no underlying order for scientists to discover. But scientists do understand the order and intelligibility of the natural world. They formulate laws of nature to describe this order and express them in mathematical formulas. In turn, the mathematical truths presupposed in all scientific work are unchanging eternal realities—beyond time, beyond matter. The mathematician and philosopher Alexander Pruss has pointed to the fascinating relationship of God, beauty, and mathematics. As Nowak put it, “The thoughts of God are the most ordered thoughts, the most beautiful thoughts (Nous noesis). Mathematics is the most ordered thinking. Mathematics is also indescribably beautiful. The world is mathematical. The world is beautiful. It all fits together.” Indeed, the fact that it all fits together points to the idea of an Author of it all who uses evolution to lead us to himself.