“Étonne-moi,” Diaghilev said to the young Jean Cocteau in 1917 when he commissioned him to write a ballet for the Ballets Russes. The result was a ballet called Parade, designed by Picasso and set to music by Eric Satie.
To be astonished by someone else’s artistic work is common enough, but it does not seem to be possible to astonish oneself. Astonishment, like tickling, apparently requires some element of surprise in order to function. Now it is hard to imagine an omnipotent and omniscient God being surprised by anything, so how would such a God, if He exists, avoid terminal boredom?
That, of course, is the kind of question Christians are not supposed to ask. All language about God is metaphorical and taking the metaphors too literally is frowned on by theologians as anthropomorphism, a way of remaking God in our image. But the Bible (especially the Book of Psalms) is filled with such anthropomorphisms and Christians believe the Bible to be the Word of God, so one would have to conclude that God is much less bothered by the risk of people misusing metaphors than some human theologians are. Furthermore Jesus specifically promised the Kingdom of Heaven to those who are childlike and poorly educated (Mt 11 v.25-26, 18 v.1-5) and they are just the sort of people who are most likely to take theological metaphors literally, bringing down upon themselves the contempt of the wise.
So let us be childish for a while and ask the question, “Would God perhaps want to create a planetary biosphere in order to experience the novel delight of being astonished by it? And, if so, how would we expect Him to go about the job?”
The scriptures give us little guidance here. The fabulous Genesis creation poem that begins the whole Bible is now generally agreed to have been written by exiles in Babylon rather than by Moses in the wilderness, and it is partly shaped by a revulsion against the Babylonian gods, who were associated with the seven planets that controlled the seven-day week. The Jews, rooted in the same Semitic cultural traditions, also had a seven-day week but referred to the days only by number and regarded any form of astrology as an abomination. Hence each of the first six sections of the poem deals with a different segment of the created world appropriate to the planet of the day, but places their own God in charge as sole creator, displacing the deity whom their captors would have identified with that planet. Thus it is God and not the Sun God who is the source of primal light, God and not the Moon Goddess who controls the movement of the waters, and so on.
Each of the symbolic days is further divided into an evening and a morning session: the evening comes first (Jewish days begin when the first stars appear in the sky) and shows the relevant act of creation from God’s point of view. “And God said ‘Let there be...’ and it was so ”. Nothing more is needed. The second or morning half shows the same creative act from inside the cosmos, the way a scientist would see it, with things having to be shaped over a period of time by hard work. “And God made...”. I like to think that this internal, more humanistic view of creation is assigned to the morning rather than the evening because, as Psalm 103 puts it, “The sun rises and man goes forth to work.” Each verse is followed by the refrain “And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the nth day.” Finally comes a kind of aftersong in which God reviews His creation while resting on the sabbath, “And behold it was very good!”
But the Genesis poet makes no attempt to fill in the details. He does not suggest how all these created things, especially the living ones, acquired the remarkable forms and properties that they now have. Later theologians were less inhibited and liked to picture God as an artist or craftsman designing each creature from scratch. This is the picture that lies behind the metaphor of Paley’s Watch. It is probably how modern young-earth creationists imagine creation taking place. But seriously, what would have been the point of this? After all, God already knew how to design an elephant or an ostrich from first principles; He had no need to actually do it. He had nothing to prove to anyone.
For human engineers, the reverse is sometimes true. They simply have no idea at all how to solve a particular problem. And one way to break through this barrier is to use what is called a genetic algorithm. Basically you make something that almost works (or at any rate gets closer to working than anything else you can currently think of), and you make a dozen or so versions of it, each with a different small random variation. Then you test them out. If none of them work any better than the original, you try another dozen until you find just one that works better, even if only marginally so. Then you make a dozen variants of that and test them out. Eventually after many cycles of random variation, testing and selection, something will often emerge that actually works. The method is based of course on Darwinian natural selection. And there is one very common emotional reaction in engineers who have successfully used it: “Wow! I’d never have thought of doing it that way!” The solutions arrived at through the use of genetic algorithms always have this weird quirky feel to them. Like an elephant maybe... or a lobster or a sloth.
Evolution is the original genetic algorithm, the one that all the others are based on and copied from. Obviously God did not copy it from any existing source; He invented it from scratch, and he certainly did not do so because He had reached a dead end in His knowledge and needed an alternative method of design. Rather the problem may be that He knows too much, and that is perhaps the very problem that evolution was designed to solve. God says to His creatures “Étonnez-moi!” and then sits back to see what they will come up with.
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