Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem
Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis. I missed BHTM back in the 1990′s when they had their major-scale success; I blame graduate school for this. But a good friend introduced them to me several years ago and to this day I am grateful to him for that. Photo credit: Anthony Scarlati
It was a good morning at church. I have been given the opportunity to lead a four-week discussion on science and religion and today was the first day. The class that invited me, the Pilgrims, is a group unlike any I have ever encountered. It is a collection of socially and intellectually engaged folks between the ages of 35 and 80. They are not all liberal in the political or theological senses — although some are — but they are all open-minded and open-hearted. It is their aliveness that makes them so special.
I began the series this morning by introducing them to Carl Sagan‘s immensely useful teaching tool, the Cosmic Calendar. This calendar compresses cosmic time — from the big bang until the present — into a single calendar year. It helps one to get a grip on the overwhelming scale of the past. Importantly for this post, I mentioned not only the arrivals of such as flowering plants and certain animal classes (birds, mammals) but the large number of mass extinctions that have taken place in the last half-billion years or so.
(This DOES relate to Big Head Todd. Just wait for it.)
I stressed that the reconciliation of the Cosmic Calendar with Christianity is in some senses easy and in some senses not easy. After the class a woman named Clara (not her real name) walked up to me and said she was interested in knowing how exactly it was not easy; she had been raised in a home where both science and faith coexisted and saw no problems herself. I told her I looked forward to that discussion.
We entered the sanctuary and worship began.
Julie’s sermon was on Job, the part wherein God finally responds and respectfully puts Job back in his place. How does God do this? By giving Job a vision of the created order: the stars, the Sun, the animals, Behemoth, Leviathan. It is precisely through creation that God manifested the divine presence to Job. Her point was emphasized by a video that showed the many faces of nature: the surf, the sky, the mountains, giraffes, pandas, enormous flocks of migrating birds, etc. It was beautiful in a certain way. Happily, this was all very much in resonance with my emphasis on nature during the Sunday School hour.
But as I sat there and watched the video my mind returned to Clara’s question about the difficult parts of the science-religion reconciliation.
The reason I thought of her is that the video, as worshipful and appropriate as it was, did not exactly give nature an unbiased treatment. If one wants to think about creation clearly, there is more to consider.
In particular, those extinction events came to mind. I sat there and visualized catastrophic global climate changes and entire species — heck, entire genera and classes — struggling for survival in new and impossible conditions, and every one of them losing a fight that was over before it began. Decidedly not beautiful. This may seem a bit silly, that I was thinking about this while I watched a video in church about rainbows and birds, but I tell you: Those prehistoric creatures were just as real as giraffes and pandas, just as alive as Fluffy and Rover.
Do animals suffer morally significant pain? I don’t know, but here’s one man’s story.
If we human beings are the intended outcome of evolution, God chose an insanely inefficient way of bringing us to be. It is a well-documented fact that over 99% of all species that have ever lived, live no longer. They were here and have gone, mostly in struggle and violence.
Will the same happen to us? Why not? One day that meteor will hit; one day a supernova will go off nearby; one day the ocean levels will change suddenly and forever. The Earth’s climate has never stayed put; it will change again (it is changing now). All manner of natural global-scale catastrophes have happened in the past and they will happen in the future. It is a mathematical certainty. Maybe we’re not all that important. Maybe it’s all just a crap shoot.
During her sermon Julie said a true thing with utter clarity: This is not a safe world.
How do we reconcile this with a God who loves? I’m not sure, but for a few brief shining moments today Big Head Todd and the Monsters suggested to me that mass extinctions (and other disasters) happen because of — not in spite of — God’s love.
This afternoon I was driving in the car and listening to songs randomly selected by my iPod. And one of my favorite BHTM songs came on. It’s a quiet little tune that rounds out the band’s 2002 record Riviera. Called Universal Mom, it’s a gentle encouragement to an exhausted mother. I have always loved its lyrics, but I thought of them differently today.
You can’t try to keep what you’ve given away
Oh, be still
Watch them, still, let them fall down
You’re wasting your life trying to rescue the day
All your steel, iron will won’t break this frozen groundHelplessness, wordlessness, why do you let yourself worry this way?
So let there be shelter to make some mistakes
I will, you will, never control what we create
When you give a gift, it’s gone. And those Alert Readers who are moms know about not controlling what you create. So do those of you who are poets or artists or musicians. Actually, all of us know a little but about what Big Head Todd is saying here: To create is to love, and to love is to let go.
So if God really created the world and loves the world, then maybe God has to stand back a little from it. Maybe if there is no real creation and no real love then we would all be an extension — and not an expression — of God. Would that matter? I don’t know. Maybe creation’s seperateness is a measure of God’s love. Maybe if the universe were a mere extension of God we would have no real integrity as creatures. Maybe it hurts God to let the universe go, but maybe that’s how a loving God had to do it: step back and release it, mass extinctions and all.
Beauty in nature is never unambiguous. It is always accompanied by brutality and randomness. But maybe this is necessarily so.
I don’t know. This may all be wishful thinking. It probably is. But for a few minutes in the car it seemed so clear. Reflecting on it now, it seems dangerously close to deism, which of course I don’t buy. I certainly do not propose this as a fix for suffering, human or otherwise. Don’t worry; I won’t be pulling it out next time I encounter a hurting brother or sister. It’s simply a thought.
Do with it what you will.
There are 7 Comments to "Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem"
I’ve been thinking along these lines in a different kind of way lately. It seems to me there is a massive problem, as you stated, with evolution as the Christian God’s chosen way of creating due to the sheer violence required for the process. But I believe the bible presents evil as an underlying, mysterious force which had a part in shaping the physical world. I see it in the presence of the snake in the genesis account of man’s first interactions with God. The snake is a very strange element in the story. If God’s creation was declared to be good, why in the world is there an evil snake? It seems to me this seeming contradiction was put in the narrative to signify that evil has influenced the formation of the physical world in such a way that it can manipulate it.
Or maybe rather it can manipulate the physical world so it influenced the world’s formation? In any case, I don’t see the bible even attempting to explain the origin of evil (except that God is not its origin) so much as establish its presence and somewhat of its methods and workings.
In any case I see in creation a reflection of redemption. We experience evil and chaotic forces which daily attempt to ruin goodness. We see it in human society, ourselves, and in the laws of the physical world. And yet the promise made by Paul is that God is working all things out to good. It is impossible to look at this mess and see how God is working out all of this into an ultimate good. It seems that Paul is not speaking of this in some sense of the scale tipping in the direction of good when we weigh history, but that even the evil things that happen to us will be “undone” (as CS Lewis says) and turned to good at the end of human history.
And God has a record of being able to accomplish this because He was able to work creation out to accomplish his goal of a good creation despite the workings of evil. So I came to the same conclusion as you – the creation must stand separate from God (but not in a desitic sense) so that evil, which is not from God, is able to work within it. But ultimately God is able to work it all out to good. And he must do this thing out of Love.
I hope that made some semblance of sense…I have to work now and can’t proof it as I should!
Matt
Nice post and interesting-sounding class! Wish I could borrow you for a class at Alpharetta. I don’t know Big Head Todd and the Monsters, except by reputation. But if they recorded at Ardent, the home studio of the legendary Big Star, they must be cool.
I wonder if ascribing “violence” and “insane inefficiency” to creation isn’t simply reflecting our modern biases. Surely God wouldn’t have created us like this, we think. Buy why? Because we wouldn’t do it that way? Our interpretations of nature seem to be a bit anthropomorphic? Regardless, life is good all the way down the line. But life isn’t entitled. It’s all a gift at every moment.
Paul, I’ve blogged about this, but I think you would love Terrence Malick’s new movie The Tree of Life. It’s at least about some of these issues.
Brent, I agree 100% that the ideas of violence and inefficiency are of my own device and reflect a contemporary bias. I have problems with those who think God should just be a big and benevolent engineer. This is part of the reason apophatic theology appeals to me so much.
But I can’t help but wonder why things have come to be in the way they have come to be.
I will definitely be checking out The Tree of Life. Read about it on your blog and elsewhere. My curiosity is officially piqued.
Paul, I think the problem of suffering, including of animals, is part and parcel of the “conservative” view of how things came to be as they are. The evolutionary view has man as a sort of “culmination” of a “tooth and claw” method of “development,” with nature itself contributing as much “horror” as the wild animals. Whereas, Apostle Paul says, “Since by man came death.” God, in assessing his creation, kept saying, “good,” “good,” and, upon reaching man, “very good.” This is quite disparate from any view of traditional evolution. Pain and suffering only entered in because sin did. Sin ‘warped” things. Like traffic originally staying “in the lanes,” but then some lunatics swerve over and mass collisions occur, with quite deleterious results. As a result, Apostle Paul tells us that the whole creation groans now, waiting until the process of us Christians becoming perfected as the sons of God is completed. So, I guess my own answer as to why God created in such a “bloody” fasion is–He didn’t.
Tom, I cannot see for the life of me how tsunamis, earth-crossing asteroids, and carnivorous behavior among non-human animals are the results of human sin. My world is just not put together that way.
Paul, you make some very good points, of course. First, let me say that even though you certainly have the substantial body of scientists behind your view of what the “evidence” shows as between a “literal six-day” creation on the one hand, as contrasted with just God being “behind” (or some other appropriate term) the “evolutionary process” that got us to “here” on the other. However, I am not bound by the “majority,” and I just don’t see things the “evolutionary way” myself (along with some chunk of scientists–who are all discounted as being “fundamentalists,” of course). I think the unbelievable amount of “order” and “complexity” and “interconnectedness” in nature is just not comprehensible from the standpoint of “random” development through evolutionary “methodologies.” I also think that “apparent age” is not a “cop-out,” but a perfectly understandable aspect of a creation which was primarily focused on reaching “the human race” as the primary focus of God’s “story.” I know we disagree–I don’t say my view of creation is essential to believing in “God as creator,” so I don’t think I am “conflating” in that sense–I just believe the “six-day” version is actually how God did it.
On your other primary point about tsunamis, etc., I readily agree that there is no “one-to-one correspondence” between acts of sin and natural disasters, and the like. But, for one thing, we must not ignore the scriptural view of sin bringing not only “decay,” but also God’s wrath. Still not a one-to-one correspondence, but certainly I think it is compatible with scripture and my view of God (which I like to think is based on scripture, albeit imperfectly) that God, generally speaking, directs the “natural order” of things, and that his “wrath” is part of what is involved in that “calculus.” Without sin, there would be no wrath. Therefore, without sin, there would be no tsunamis, etc. (Particularly in this regard, see Noah’s Flood–another biblical story rejected by “scientists”). Note that one of Jesus’ miracles was to calm the winds and the waves.
However, seeing disasters as ultimately coming from God (again, not in a one-to-one correspondence fashion) is, in fact, not a mere matter of “wrath,” but also a way of directing people’s attention towards God, which is to their ultimate benefit. When everything in this life is going well, most people don’t concern themselves overly with the “divine.” However, when peoples’ lives get “shaken to the core,” sometimes that changes. Thus, disasters may be a “double-edged sword” in that respect–a dispensation of wrath for those who will not be “educated” by it, yet an extension of love to those who will “see the light” of the infinitely more important aspect of the divine in earthly (and post-earthly) events.
Don’t know if that totally answers your points, but hopefully you can see my position as to the “effect of sin” analysis a little better.
Hi Paul,
First off I have to say how nice it is to see another BHTM fan – I don’t come across many. In fact, BHTM was one of the first concerts I ever attended. That was also way back when people actually bought CD’s so if there are any albums you need, I have them. Riviera is one of my favorites. Universal Mom takes on a whole new meaning to me now.
I really enjoyed your take on Julie’s sermon last week. These days It’s tough for me to wrap my head around alot of the stories I heard over and over as a child and never really scratched beneath the surface of. Same for the post above – how in the world could Noah have pulled that off? We’ll look forward to you and your insights returning back to class in a few weeks.