Darwin, Girard, and the Problem of Theodicy

I met Rene Girard just once in 2009 at a COV&R conference in Riverside, California. We met privately, and he encouraged me to consider the relationship between evolution and theology for my doctoral work. For this reason, it hardly surprised me to learn that at Girard’s induction to the Académie française, Michel Serres called him the “new Darwin of the human sciences.” Both Darwin and Girard noticed something important that no one else had. Girard’s insight about the role of imitation in culture parallels Darwin’s insight about the role of evolution in nature. Both challenge the prevailing notion of God as destroyer. In both Darwin and Girard, God is no longer the author of evil. 

Biologist Francisco Ayala agrees with the theorist Richard Dawkins that Darwin’s The Origin of Species “…ushered in a new era in the intellectual history of humankind.” Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould specifies Darwin’s momentous innovation: “The brilliance of Darwin’s argument, and the radical nature of it, lies in changing the focus of explanation.” Molecular biologist Michael Denton agrees with Gould’s assessment because “…Darwinian theory broke man’s link to God and set him adrift in a cosmos without purpose or end.” In sum, Darwin altered the way people see (1) life itself (2) God’s relationship to life, and (3) our place within life. 

Darwin found it difficult to reconcile the claims of a good, almighty, and all-knowing God with the violence he observed in nature. Girard, through his investigation of human violence as a byproduct of mimetic desire—the idea that we want the same things as other people because they want them—uncovered the scapegoat mechanism: the human community, when faced with a mimetic crisis, chooses an innocent victim to blame. Taken together, Darwin and Girard offer intriguing perspectives on the problem of theodicy, because each in his own domain – nature for Darwin and culture for Girard – has dissociated God from evil, by proposing natural mechanisms to explain suffering and violence. Whereas this may have caused Darwin to despair of a benevolent God, in Girard’s case, it confirmed his faith. 

Inverting the traditional question about the justification of sinners before God, the problem of theodicy—from the Greek word for “god,” theos, and díkē, “a judicial verdict”—questions whether God can be justified. If God does nothing to prevent evil, then either God is not all-powerful, or not good, or both. If God is all-knowing, then why not create a universe absent of evil? 

Though Darwin’s modesty prevented him from claiming that his theory could adequately explain human beings, others such as Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have not felt so inhibited: “…our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it…” 

“Thanks to the telescope and the microscope,” Hitchens wrote, “[religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” 

“The mystery of mysteries”

How could one explain “…the origin of species—the mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers?” From antiquity, Zoologist Ludovico Galleni observes, thinkers puzzled over the diversity of species and the optimization of each organism to its environment. In Europe, two converging views from Greek philosophy and from the Bible provided the basis for the prevailing paradigm. Both held that a designer made each living organism with a purpose. This explanation enjoyed great appeal, since it explained how the variety of environmentally well-adapted living organisms appeared so quickly.

Greco-Roman thought, more than biblical doctrines, authored pre-modern biology. The Roman biologist, Galen, was among the first philosophers to criticize the biblical account of creation, because he thought that the biblical God operated outside of the laws of nature in a seemingly arbitrary and capricious manner. The triumph of Greco-Roman pre-modern biology hobbled theology, because it had to sacrifice the biblical theology of history. As with astronomy and physics, the conflict between ancient and modern scientific explanations of natural phenomena lay primarily within different philosophical conceptions of nature. The emergence of evolutionary thinking in the natural sciences, therefore, might be seen as a return to historical thinking which biblical revelation itself warrants. 

Design and the Problem of Theodicy

The widespread acceptance of the immutability of species and teleological design came under challenge in nineteenth century Britain. Just a few years before the birth of Darwin, the Anglican theologian William Paley argued for a designer in Natural Theology: Or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity; Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). Paley appealed to a profusion of elegant design in living organisms to prove the existence of a beneficent personal God. Nature should be seen as a “contrivance” implying both design and construction. Scientists and theologians alike held that God had created all living organisms complete, since it would not be fitting for the Creator to leave creation half-finished. Since a multiplicity of well-adapted organisms in such spectacular variety inhabited a young earth, the design argument seemed compelling. It explained both the diversity and optimality of life. 

As a young man studying for the Anglican ministry at Cambridge, Darwin admired Paley’s arguments. Yet the lack of goodness Darwin observed in nature and in human society troubled him. Nature’s brutality, cruelty and waste suggested a god who was neither wise nor good nor provident. 

Darwin’s human environment also mirrored nature’s struggle for survival. Famine, war, and poverty did not sing the praises of a glorious and good God. An Essay on the Principle of Population by Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) justified a new attitude toward these things. Casting aside centuries of Christian charitable practices in favor of a rationalized economic outlook, which blamed the poor for their destitution, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 imposed discipline on the poor through workhouses. While scarcity discouraged overpopulation, famine and war eliminated the less competitive and weak, leaving the path unobstructed for progress. Darwin naturalized Malthusianism, envisioning all life as a similar kind of competition. 

Darwin’s repugnance for the practice of slavery motivated his search for the common origins of the human race, by which he hoped to establish the “Christian brotherhood of man” on scientific grounds. If Darwin could demonstrate the unity of life by arguing for a common source, then there would only be one human race. Thus, disproving design and proving the transmutation of species through natural selection strengthened his claim that all life emerged from the same source. 

In a letter to Harvard biologist Asa Gray, Darwin rejects the idea that God “designedly” kills a man struck by lightning or a gnat eaten by a bird. As Darwin demonstrated that the birth or production of any living organism comes about through natural processes, he saw no reason to appeal to God as the cause of death either. In an earlier letter to Gray, Darwin expresses his anguish over suffering. Darwin rejects the argument from design because he cannot persuade himself that a good and all-powerful God would design so much evil. Yet, he does not believe that brute force alone accounts for “this wonderful universe and the nature of man,” but some combination of “designed laws” and “chance.” Darwin disassociates God from nature. Natural selection and chance, not God, are responsible for life and death. 

By contrast, the American biologist Michael Behe argues that Darwin’s moral or theological concerns—“his squeamishness”—distort his science. Since the evidence for design is ubiquitous, even in biology, Behe concedes that “maybe the designer isn’t all that beneficent or omnipotent.” If the argument from design leads inexorably to a vision of God as indifferent or even complicit in the violence and suffering of the world, then it has not yet faced the counterevidence of the paschal mystery.

Darwin’s theory of evolution discredited Paley’s natural theology. Whether he intended more than this, i.e., to destroy God altogether, appears doubtful. Darwin believed that the existence of God was a matter that could not be determined. “The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty.” Leaving the question for others to take up, Darwin’s preoccupation with suffering and the duty to relieve it furnishes further evidence for the claim that theodicy motivated him. Theodicy implies a moral framework for the universe. There is right and wrong. But why? How can we explain the moral evolution of humanity? 

The origins of morality

More than a century later, Richard Dawkins struggled to answer this question. Evolution has accidentally produced a being that can overthrow the dominion of the selfish gene. “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” Human beings are unique among all animals because we can confound natural selection and the selfish gene: “I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things evolve. I am not saying how we humans ought to behave.” Thanks to evolution, man possesses the capacity to override his genetic dispositions and rebel against them, because we possess understanding, imagination and most relevant to this discussion, repugnance.

Repugnance refers to a moral sense that revolts against “the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature” as Darwin put it his friend, the botanist J.D. Hooker, on July 13, 1856. According to Dawkins, humanity evaluates and judges natural processes, rejecting those aspects of evolution which they find repugnant. Failing to explain the reason for this repugnance, Dawkins is unable to establish any firm non-religious moral criteriology. 

Indeed, Dawkins admits in an earlier essay that science cannot furnish an ethical system because “science has no methods for determining what is ethical.” Dawkins the ethologist does believe that science can explain the motivation for some important behaviors. For example, he refers to possible reasons for altruistic behaviors favored by natural selection that conceal the pursuit of genetic self-interest: (1) genetic kin selection, (2) reciprocal exchange, (3) reputation, and (4) conspicuous generosity. Yet, this still does not explain the origins of morality, good and evil, or the duties and obligations, which these entail. It merely purports to give a selfish account of seemingly selfless behaviors.

Dawkins further argues that an evolutionary account of the human moral sense precludes and precedes religion. He does not consider the possibility that religion and morality might be co-adapted. Dawkins cites cross-cultural and comparative studies that suggest similarities in the way in which human beings reason morally. Though he adduces these for his contention that human morality is independent of God, others infer from the very same evidence the existence of a divine legislator. In the end, Dawkins not only fails to give a convincing account of the origin of human morality (“repugnance”); he undermines morality altogether. 

The inability to explain the moral nature of the universe does not detract, however, from Darwin’s contribution to the discussion of theodicy. It does, however, indicate the significance of Girard’s contribution, in which he argues that the most basic moral laws, such as the Decalogue, draw attention to and restrain mimetic desire. Through natural selection, God no longer directly causes the violence and suffering found in nature. This justification, though partial, is genuine. Correspondingly, Girard naturalizes violence:. the holy God does not authorize human violence—we do. As Darwin argues that evolution by natural selection explains the source of violence in nature, so Girard shows that unbounded mimetic desire—and its corrective response, the scapegoat mechanism—explain human culture, the city founded on violence. Within this matrix of nature and culture, God reveals the scapegoat mechanism. Jesus, true God and true man, simultaneously discloses to the human race both who God really is, and who we are. 

Literary Critics as Anthropologists

Girard contends that only literary texts have ever discovered mimetic desire and tried to explore some of its consequences. Burton Mack observes that Girard’s literary criticism—first deployed to discover the mimetic character of the novels in Deceit, Desire and The Novel—can also decode myth to expose the very foundations of social existence, namely, the scapegoat mechanism. Myths tell true stories about killing, concealed under a veil of misdirection and fantasy, while great novels tell stories about mimetic desire that sometimes leads to conversion. This experience of death and resurrection—the discovery that the myth of the autonomous self is not true—confers a new epistemic outlook that makes possible the unveiling of myth. This view not only illuminates myth but also ritual, because the mythological concealment of the victim corresponds to sacrificial substitution of a later sacrifice for the original, earlier victim. The novelistic conversion that divulges the secrets of mimesis depends on a prior revelation that sets the process of demythologization into motion. 

Consequently, Girard’s literary criticism of biblical text unexpectedly confirms Nietzsche’s key insight about Christ’s rehabilitation of the victim. “As incredible as it may seem, no one made this simple but fundamental discovery before Nietzsche—no one, not even a Christian.” The pertinent text comes from The Will to Power:

Dionysos (sic) versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilate. In the other case, suffering—“the Crucified as innocent one”—counts as an objection to life, as a formula to its condemnation.

Nietzsche views life as conflict that entails “torment, destruction and the will to annihilate.” Nietzsche sides with Dionysius because he judges the Crucified as a killjoy. Nietzsche believed that Jews and Christians resented their aristocratic, social superiors. Their false consciousness, their slave mentality, Nietzsche argues, sucks the vitality out of life through its prohibitions, which Girard contends seek to thwart mimetic rivalry. 

Nietzsche’s claim found receptive audiences after his death. Girard cites a double Nietzschean heritage. First, the German National Socialists’ attempt to destroy the modern concern for the victim through the genocide of the Jewish people, and second, the contemporary ideological agenda (with various names as they are not a coherent program, such as “political correctness,” “victimology,” “wokism,” etc.), which Girard describes as a “caricatural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for the victim in an anti-Christian manner.” This anti-Christian concern for victims sets off a new round of victimization and scapegoating.

Nietzsche recognized the structural parallel between the violence in the myth of Dionysius and the passion of the Christ, thereby highlighting their diametrically opposed interpretation of the same kind of violence. Primordially veiled by méconnasissance (misapprehension), the New Testament communicates new knowledge about human origins, destiny and morality that has unquestionably altered human existence. Nietzsche’s great discovery, Girard claims, is his recognition of the Bible’s concern for the victim. In Girard’s view, Nietzsche deliberately turned away from the truth of the victim, retreating instead into madness. Surprisingly, therefore, the most innovative anthropologists are novelists and literary critics, rather than practitioners of the scientific method; and the most critical source for these insights does not come from fieldwork or experimentation, but rather from literature, particularly the historically and critically examined biblical text, which has turned out again to be a storeroom from which new as well as old things can come (cf. Mt. 13:52).

The New Darwin 

Girard contributes to our understanding of the evolution of humanity in much the same way, commencing with his analysis of human desire as being fundamentally mimetic. From there he became interested in discovering how the first human communities found relief from mimetic rivalry. In Girard’s telling, humans restrain the unbound violence of mimetic rivalry with the limited violence of the scapegoat mechanism, which he viewed as the origin of human culture. Yet, Girard maintained that for the scapegoat mechanism to be generative—that is, to create and sustain human culture—it must be hidden from the eyes of those who benefit from its effects. Thus, it remained hidden from the foundation of the world until an intervention from beyond this world laid it bare. 

For Girard, there is no other rational way to explain the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism than to appeal to the intervention of someone who is beyond worldly mimesis. This someone is none other than the Holy Trinity: the communion of divine persons whose unity is love (as opposed to the violent unanimity—“one-spirit-ness”—of the mob), and whose salvific plan for humanity consists of the incarnation of the Word and the mission of the Paraclete. The resurrection of Jesus opened the tombs of the saints who had fallen asleep, and they were seen in the holy city (cf. Mt. 27:52-53), reminding those alive of those things which we prefer to forget. Empowered and guided by the Paraclete, this dissenting community of witnesses rejected the dominant myth of Good Friday and thereby challenged the mythology of all societies, whose myths conceal the violence upon which they were founded and maintained. 

Just as Darwin fundamentally altered the way we see (1) life itself (2) God’s relationship to life and (3) the place of human beings within life, Girard has done likewise as he placed the story of God’s revelation within the story of life itself. Assuming an evolutionary framework for life, Girard sought to understand what distinguishes human beings from other forms of life. With mimetic desire as his answer, Girard then gives an account of the cultural evolution in the containment of the stresses of mimesis through the scapegoat mechanism. Giving birth to culture through the appearance of the sacred or archaic religion (which conceals the innocence of the scapegoat, as a tomb hides the body of the victim), Girard finds traces of the uncovering of the sacred in the Old Testament, before its definitive revelation in the New. This marks a watershed for humanity. There is no going back to a pre-Christian moment, when humanity could scapegoat naively. Blaming God is also no longer an option because the responsibility is ours.