Nothing new under the sun

In the most recent edition of Scientific American, the article “Darwin on the Right: Why Christians and Conservatives Should Accept Evolution” (Michael Shermer, October 2006) explained that:

The watchmaker God of intelligent-design creationism is delimited to being a garage tinkerer piecing together life out of available parts. This God is just a genetic engineer slightly more advanced than we are. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such human-like constraints. As Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey wrote, “The Christian idea, far from merely representing a primitive anthropomorphic projection of human art upon the cosmos, systematically repudiates all direct analogy from human art.” Calling God a watchmaker is belittling.

Remarkably enough, I was reading Athanasius this evening and came across this.

Others take the view expressed by Plato, that giant among the Greeks. He said that God had made all things out of pre-existent and uncreated matter, just as the carpenter makes things only out of wood that already exists. But those who hold this view do not realize that to deny that God is Himself the Cause of matter is to impute limitation to Him, just as it is undoubtedly a limitation on the part of the carpenter that he can make nothing unless he has the wood. How could God be called Maker and Artificer if His ability to make depended on some other cause, namely on matter itself? If He only worked up existing matter and did not Himself bring matter into being, He would be not the Creator but only a craftsman (On the Incarnation, 1).

The question, of course, is whether intelligent-design creationists do think God is a tinkerer or carpenter. May it never be! There is an alternative to a god of the available parts, besides evolution, which Shermer did not discuss. Let me make mention of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which Athanasius used against Epicureans, Platonists, and Gnostics, and which young-earth creationists use against theistic evolutionists:

...But the impiety of their foolish talk is plainly declared by the divine teaching of the Christian faith. From it we know that, because there is Mind behind the universe, it did not originate itself; because God is infinite, not finite, it was not made from pre-existent matter, but out of nothing and out of non-existence absolute and utter God brought it into being through the Word. He says as much in Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (On the Incarnation, 1).

Nor has Shermer's so-called “Protestant theologian” read enough Tolkien. I know nothing of Langdon Gilkey, but I think he has not the mythopoetic mind. There is a direct analogy between God the maker and we the sub-makers; not that we have created a god after the Modernist image, a soulless watchmaker,* but our Maker has made us like Himself and so that we might become more like Him.

Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind (“Mythopoeia” 55-64).

It is [Athanasius'] glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away (Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation).

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate (“Mythopoeia” 81-82).

*Shermer goes too far in his contempt of watchmakers. I bet he has not read Longitude, nor ever lacked a timepiece.