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The Material Image reconciles the Christian faith and contemporary science by embracing, rather than evading, its naturalistic implications. The sciences are our best way to know ourselves and the world we inhabit, but this does not make belief in miracles unreasonable. The sciences reveal that we are fully material beings, the product of unguided natural selection. God created human persons for the vocation of sharing in the everlasting Triune life and work, but this creation does not involve design. The mind is the embodied, socially situated brain. There is no immaterial soul; we are the material image of our transcendent Creator. This materialist conception does not preclude the resurrection of the body. The freedom that matters for the human creature is compatible with our being governed by the laws of nature. Morality and religion are natural, merely human, legacies of our evolutionary history, which God employs in pursuit of fellowship with us. Christians can faithfully and enthusiastically welcome the image of human beings in contemporary science.

“This book is a must-read for all who wonder about the future of vital, classical Christian faith in the face of challenges from contemporary science, especially concerning the nature of human beings. Donald H. Wacome’s welcome approach to reconciling science and Christian faith combines humility and forthrightness, and is imbued with the sort of practical wisdom urgently needed, and too often lacking, in these discussions.” — Joel B. Green, Fuller Theological Seminary

“Many partisans of science are convinced that any alliance with religion will amount to a blot on the family escutcheon. Friends of religion, on the other hand, may worry that theology is being asked to make too many concessions to her aggressive partner. Readers of Wacome’s book will inevitably be caught up in these quarrels, and will learn a lot in the process. Recommended for all who are concerned about the religion-science interface.” — William Hasker, Huntington University

Chapter Synopses

Chapter 1, Christianity, Naturalism, and Science sets out the book’s underlying methodological assumption: fruitful dialogue between religion and science requires that we pay heed not to religiosity in general, or to a generic theism, but to the particularities of a specific faith. And it calls us to focus on the implications of current scientific theory. For Christians, this means that we focus on the Triune nature of God, who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. And it means that we reject the vain attempt to separate science from its naturalistic implications. What I will call scientific naturalism is the conjunction of three views: science is our most reliable means to know ourselves and the world we inhabit, human beings are fully material beings, and we are the result of unguided biological evolution. These naturalistic views have long been regarded as inimical to the Christian faith, but this is merely a matter of historical association, not rational inference. We must reject the simple assumption that we must choose between scientific naturalism and the belief in a creator God who acts miraculously in this world. The third, ignored possibility the Material Image makes salient and defends is that both are correct. We have good reasons to accept scientific naturalism once we take seriously God’s aim in creation, which is to create persons truly distinct from their creator who can be called to love and trust him and to share in his great work of creation.

In Chapter Two, Knowledge, I refine and defend the first principle of scientific naturalism, which is that science is our preeminent way of knowing and as such constrains all other ways of knowing. I sketch a naturalistic account of human knowledge, one shaped by the fact that our minds are merely our brains, the products of mindless natural selection. Here, as in the later chapters, I set out not the only possible naturalistic account, but the one that seems to me the most emphatically naturalistic. In contrast to earlier conceptions of knowledge, naturalism regards knowledge as the product of reliable causal mechanisms. The most reliable way for us to acquire knowledge of the world and of ourselves is by using our senses. The methods of the sciences, embodying the most critical and careful use of our senses, constitute our most reliable way of knowing. Beliefs that conflict with the well-confirmed theories of science are unreasonable. However, science is not our only way to know. Nor is it an adequate way to know many things that matter to us. We know much by less reliable means. Naturalism’s claim for the status of scientific knowledge does not preclude the possibility of knowing the God who transcends the natural world accessible to scientific inquiry.

The naturalistic view of knowledge abandons the ancient quest for certitude. We cannot prove that the neural machinery that produces belief in us is reliable. Science, relying ultimately on the senses, cannot prove its reliability. There is no first philosophy, no place to stand to establish the reliability of science. There is no foundation for knowledge of ourselves and the universe more secure than the reliable yet fallible practices of the sciences. As disconcerting as this might be for our traditional self-image, it is consonant with our being creatures called not to strive for certitude, but to live by faith in our Creator.

Christian faith depends crucially on the belief that God has intervened in the creation, bringing about events that would not have occurred in the natural course of events. Belief in miracles is generally regarded as blatantly incompatible with a naturalistic point of view. However, in Chapter Three, Miracles, I argue that a belief in the miraculous is entirely consistent with a robust naturalism. I will show that the reasoning that can justify belief in divine intervention is analogous to a type of reasoning crucial to progress in science: the reasoning that leads us to suspect that a hitherto well-confirmed theory is, after all, false. Belief in the miraculous is compatible with scientific naturalism, but only so long as we make a principled distinction between God’s action in nature and in history. Christian theology offers good reasons to make this distinction, and to believe that God intervenes in human affairs. The constraints naturalism imposes on what human beings can know leave open the possibility of justifying Christian belief, although they make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to construct a decisive defense that compels all reasonable persons to agree. The humility this calls for is entirely appropriate for those whose faith is in the God so humble as to become one of us.

Chapter Four, Origins, turns to the fact that human beings are the product of biological evolution in contrast to the still widely held belief that God miraculously intervened in the creation to bring human beings into existence. Evolutionary biology’s explanation of human origins challenges entrenched convictions about how God created the human species, as well as cherished ideas about human uniqueness and what it means to be created in the image of God. On reasonable assumptions, Darwinian evolution implies that God did not specifically intend the existence of the human species. It is incompatible with our Creator having designed us. Divine design is relegated to the most primal initial conditions and most fundamental laws of the creation, not to its specific contents, not to the persons who inhabit it. This separation of creation from design, though unfamiliar, is all but inevitable in light of crucial Christian claims about God’s creative aims. God did not design the human species, but our existence answers to the purposes, revealed in Scripture, for which God created the world. Indeed, given those purposes, it is reasonable to expect that God would create by means of the sort Darwinism describes.

Chapter Five, Mind, sketches the naturalized understanding of the human mind as the functioning, embodied, socially situated brain. My aim here is to undermine the dualist conception of human beings still closely associated with the Christian faith and to show the reasonableness of a materialist theory of the human person. Despite its association with the idea that we are spiritual beings, there is little in the metaphysical theory that our minds are immaterial to recommend it to Christians. Attempts to defend belief in immaterial minds or souls draw upon a conception of what it means to be made in the image of God that we should reject on theological grounds. Scientific exploration of human cognition and consciousness deflates the pretension that we are godlike, transcendent beings, and it coheres with the confession that we are the material image of the immaterial God.

I criticize the hope that some concept of emergence can mitigate the impact of current science on traditional conceptions of the human person. Some thinkers concerned with faith’s relation to science make much of the fact that the human mind is not reducible to the brain, but no safety for the traditional human self-image is to be found in this irreducibility. It points instead to the ontological superficiality of the human person. We are not found among the fundamental constituents of the world but exist only when contingent, indeed chancy, processes assemble the right components in certain ways. This is not to denigrate human beings, but to see our special place in creation not as a matter of how we are made, but of who made us and why.

The sixth chapter, Freedom, pursues the implications of our being material beings for freedom and responsibility. Whatever freedom and responsibility we possess must be consistent with our being completely embedded in the natural world and governed by its causal laws. The compatibilist approach, which supposes that our choices can be both free and caused, allows us to save much of what matters in our image of ourselves as free and responsible agents. However, compatibilism cannot fully reconcile our being material beings with common conceptions of responsibility. Indeed, no created thing, material or otherwise, could be responsible in the way the traditional notion envisages, for it requires that we be agent causes, something no material thing can be. However, naturalism together with a compatibilist conception of freedom affords a kind of freedom and responsibility appropriate to creatures insofar as it leaves open the possibility that we are, or can become, material simulations of agent causes. This modified conception is, I argue, consonant with the Christian faith’s confession that God addresses humans as responsible persons yet assumes final responsibility for creation.

Some theorists look to the quantum domain, or to downward causation, as a ground for a more radical freedom, but I suggest that these strategies hold little promise. The indeterminism of nature’s fundamental quantum mechanical laws is of no use in salvaging traditional conceptions of freedom and responsibility, but this is a matter of crucial significance for understanding God’s action in the world by way of natural, secondary causes. Authoring indeterministic laws, the Creator makes possible creatures who are not mere extensions of their maker, but distinct persons, capable of responsibly responding to and interacting with God.

Chapter Seven, Morality, outlines the scientific explanation of morality as originating in evolutionary adaptations to social life. Again, we see scientific naturalism at odds with views long associated with Christianity. Here it challenges the idea that in our moral experience we hear divine commands, or make contact with a transcendent realm of values, exercise some sort of pure, disembodied rationality, or at least encounter a realm of moral fact ultimately independent of human beings. I consider the question of whether science threatens to debunk morality, denying its objectivity and authority, and contend that while this scientific explanation humbles our conception of ourselves as moral agents, it does not abolish it. There are good theological reasons to accept this chastened conception of human morality. Current science gives us no reason to see the moral truth as relative to the individual or to society, but it implies it is less objective than most Christians assume it must be. Science puts morality in its place, characterizing it ultimately as human, not divine, and this the Christian should endorse. The implied conception of morality, as something merely human to which God condescends, and makes critical use of, is to be recommended on theological grounds.

This chapter also addresses the biblical idea of the Fall, and the correlative idea of original sin, which have long been understood in moralistic terms. I speculate on better ways to construe these doctrines and I argue that an understanding of them consistent with a naturalistic account of human origins is reasonable from the point of view of a Christian faith which rejects popular, but biblically and theologically untenable, conceptions of sin as moral wrongdoing.

Chapter Eight, Religion, describes the current attempt to explain human religiosity as a by-product of the mind’s evolved cognitive architecture. In contrast to the naturalistic explanation of morality as an adaptation to social life, the explanation of religion on offer here is a debunking explanation, one that threatens to undermine the beliefs it explains. Can Christians consistently accept this general explanation without claiming an unjustifiable exception on behalf of our own beliefs? I suggest that we can, but only if we see the Christian faith’s relation to religion as analogous to its relation to morality. God condescends to our natural religiosity, shaping it for redemptive purposes, but also subjecting it to critical scrutiny and finally putting it, along with morality, in its proper, merely human place.

The ninth, and final, chapter, Resurrection, enters into eschatological matters, both personal and cosmic. The principal objection to the materialist view of the human being, put on hold in Chapter Five, is that the Christian belief in life after death requires that we have immaterial souls that survive the destruction of our bodies. I present ways to understand the identity through time of material persons that make reasonable the Christian hope for their miraculous resurrection for an everlasting future with God. There is no need to resort to an immaterial soul and its theologically problematic natural immortality to defend the possibility of resurrection. The Christian hope is not, I point out, threatened by the alleged tedium of immortality or the finitude of resurrected persons. Turning to cosmic considerations, I speculate on the vocation of God’s material image as the created co-creator.