We move on now to the central Christian drama. God, seeing us in a state of sin, became incarnate in the human form of Jesus Christ, lived and preached and then was crucified for our benefit, rising again on the third day. Darwinian evolutionary theory is simply irrelevant to much of this story. How we should interpret God's death, for instance: as a sacrifice, as a substitute, as a ransom, or what? But Darwinism does impinge on the story in very important respects. Most obviously, there is the problem of miracles. The Christian story tells of Jesus born of a virgin, turning water into wine and feeding the five thousand and raising the dead (and of some of his disciples being able to do some of these things also), and most significantly coming back from the dead himself just a short while after he had been taken down from the Cross and buried. Darwinism is a theory committed to the ubiquity of law. In the language of the philosophers, it is a “naturalistic” theory. How can it be reconciled with a world picture so obviously committed to the breaking of law?

Miracles

As always in philosophical discussions, a lot depends on the meaning of terms. By “law” in this context we mean scientific law, and this means a universal statement referring to a regularity of the empirical world, which in some sense is both true and necessary (Nagel 1961; Hempel 1966).