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Book Review — Summary Critique
The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith
Jim Stump
HarperOne, 2024
Perhaps the most challenging question at the interface of Science and Christianity today is how to relate Darwinism to the Old Testament creation account in Genesis. To the many perspectives and publications on this issue, Jim Stump adds his personal journey and reflections in The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith (HarperOne, 2024). Stump is a vice president of BioLogos, an organization dedicated to convincing conservative evangelical Christians that they can fully embrace macroevolution without damaging their faith commitments. He co-edited with Kathryn Applegate How I Changed My Mind About Evolution (IVP Academic, 2016), a collection of 25 contributors who espouse this position. Stump’s own perspective in The Sacred Chain is refreshing in that it is not overly bitter against or demeaning to the young-Earth creationist (YEC) community from which he came (compare Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin [HarperOne, 2008]); yet his story undermines BioLogos’ goal by illustrating significant doctrinal drift that should concern conservatives.
For being a HarperOne imprint, the format of the book is disappointing: it is printed on almost newsprint-quality paper, lacks an index and glossary (both of which would be extremely helpful), and could have been better fact-checked: hieroglyphics were never written on clay (p. 182), cuneiform was, and quartz clock crystals oscillate at 32,768 Hz, not 60 Hz (70), which is AC line frequency and used by older, plug-in synchronous clock motors.
Stump represents those who were raised in a strong YEC environment, but while pursuing further academics (he holds a PhD in philosophy from Boston University) find issues with that position and come to believe that the evidence for evolution is convincing. Thankfully, this potential “either the Bible or science” dilemma does not lead him to walk away from Christianity, but as the subtitle suggests, he concludes that “a better understanding of evolution could actually lead to a deeper and more authentic faith” (4). Stump writes to the layperson, telling engaging travel stories, giving helpful illustrations, and presenting his migration to evolution in five logical steps relating to the topics of Bible, time, species, soul, and pain.
Demoting the Bible. Stump resolves his concerns about the Bible by adopting C. S. Lewis’s “bottom up” view on the inspiration and authority of Scripture, concluding:
So God didn’t drop the exact words of the Bible down from heaven. People in an ancient culture wrote what they experienced and believed, and their stories were taken up by God to be used in their religious communities to communicate important truths. That helped me see biblical texts as emerging out of a specific culture and leads to a different understanding of the Bible: rather than a universal answer book, it is an ancient library full of wisdom from the perspective of the ancient cultures in which it was written. (57)
Perhaps Stump was taught the dictation view of inspiration as a youth in his faith community, but his discussion ignores more nuanced conservative positions, which he could have noted. The weaknesses of this “flawed Bible” approach become self-evident later, when he dismisses some New Testament miracles as the placebo effect (162); picking what you like and scoffing at the rest is hardly fair exegesis. And as great an apologist and writer as Lewis was, many have noted that he was not an exemplar in all areas of theology.1
Lost in the Cosmos. After demoting the Bible, Stump moves on in the “Time” section to demote humans by noting that we have only been on the scene for perhaps 300,000 years in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, commenting (not entirely tongue-in-cheek) that “God seems to place a pretty high value on watching fusion in the stars produce heavier elements!” (78), since this is one of the main events occurring over billions of years in the ongoing life of the universe. While appreciating God’s artistry and creativity in the process, he summarizes God’s activity in creation as “a leisurely stroll” (101). But instead of standing in awe of the precise fine-tuning seen in the timing, engineering, and craftsmanship God exhibited in creating an environment exquisitely suited for us, and seeing us as God’s intended outcome, as Hugh Ross does in Improbable Planet (Baker Books, 2016), Stump’s main conclusion is that if God took so long to make the Earth, what’s the problem with Him taking a long time to make us through a gradual process (83)?2
Gradualism All the Way to Body, Soul… and Image. In the “Species” section, Stump presents the standard model of gradual human evolution from our hypothetical common ancestor with chimpanzees, which existed approximately 6–7 million years ago (129). He correctly notes that “A smooth transition from beasts to humans is difficult to understand in theological terms,” but he assures us that “a lot of time” and hundreds of thousands of generations between us and them helps (122, 129). Although he agrees with G. K. Chesterton that we differ in kind from other creatures, he’s not entirely comfortable with that: “the capacities that so clearly set us apart (art, language, morality, culture, and so on) didn’t spring from nowhere. They are dependent on other components of behavior and on our brain structures, and those things do have evolutionary stories and did develop by degrees” (137, emphasis in original).
Stump continues his gradualistic thinking in the final two sections on “Soul” and “Pain,” where he again tells the standard Darwinian “just so” stories to explain the imperceptible evolution of the human soul (although he mentions Cartesian dualism, he views the soul as purely physical),3 starting with bipedalism freeing the hands, leading to bigger brains, then to “a sense of agency and self” (176–77). Upright walking also required cooperation between individuals, leading to culture and eventually language “that gives us a soul” (182). Pain and suffering are difficult for any Christian model to wrestle with, but Stump views these as part of the process that God used to create morally mature beings, which was a prerequisite to being image bearers. “The capacities needed to properly fulfill the vocation of image bearers had to have been in place as a first step, and then God was revealed in a new way to them” (230). But he quickly adds, “I’m not persuaded that conferring the image of God and our taking on that responsibility had to be an instantaneous or punctiliar event” (230).
Stump concludes the book by reflecting on the future eternal state, noting that it does not appear to be possible within the context of this physical created order, but he proposes it may come as an emergence of spirit from “consciousness and soul” (246).
Chain Reaction. Stump overemphasizes chimp/hominid/human similarities and brushes aside any differences, assuming that differences are not reflective of any discontinuities that cannot be bridged by seamless, gradual transitions over many generations. This is an exceptionally naive and optimistic view of Darwinism (akin to his “Bible dropped from heaven” parody of inspiration) and ignores the challenges evolutionists face when explaining the origin of phyla and other macro-evolutionary changes. Even in human origins, the coordinated skeletal, muscular, and neurological changes necessary to get that first bipedal creature are beyond gradualism’s power.4 But for Stump to explain away even the image of God via gradual processes with no distinct transitions is more startling for a Christian to propose, as some secular evolutionists like Ian Tattersall think that modern human behavior is a distinct jump (Stump mentions him on p. 121).5
Stump seems fully committed to telling a completely physical origins story that explains all of human nature without God needing to do anything. I found this approach unexpected because Stump is a smart philosopher and is aware of reductionism and the limits of science, remarking at one point, “Science has shed light on a lot of things, but if we think its light is the only way to know anything, we’re making some pretty big and unfounded claims about reality” (154). While he does speak on occasion about different levels of meaning (“Why is the tea pot boiling?” comes up several times), he never seems satisfied with transcendent explanations and instead seeks to ground everything in natural processes that he grants might give the impression of “a kind of intentionality” (215). I suggest that had he spent some time researching the lack of mechanisms to explain macro-evolutionary differences elsewhere in the biosphere and fossil record, his “just so” human-origin stories — which gloss over the significant physiological and vast behavioral differences between humans and primates by assuming that enough time and thousands of generations can do the job — would, I think, have been presented far more tentatively.
Moreover, treating humans as totally physical and reducing the spiritual soul to a self-consciousness that gradually emerges within the physical brain is hardly a conservative or traditional Christian anthropology. It’s nice for him to hope that perhaps in the future eternal state, we will have a spiritual nature, but why can’t we have one now? The Bible seems to say that we do (John 4:24; Matthew 10:28; 1 Thessalonians 5:23, etc.).
It is certainly good that Stump retains the core of the gospel, but the theological shift in faith commitments that he requires to make peace with Darwin take him outside of the conservative evangelical fold: one needs to accept a low (evolving?) view of Scripture, adopt an emergent physical view of the soul and image of God that gradually develop through seamless transitions over thousands of generations, and never have God do anything in biology that science can detect. This model seems to imply that God’s ability to communicate with us, or to do much of anything for that matter, is rather limited. If we imagine this approach as a “sacred chain,” then it is a chain disconnected from its anchor (Scripture) that is not securing a boat which is adrift in whatever “just so” current that naturalism can brew up to explain away our exceptional human nature. It indeed seems like it takes a “deeper faith” to sail on such a ship, but to me, this leap isn’t necessary. Rather than accepting evolution without question (I found no qualifications or hesitations in the book) and molding theology to fit its current models, why can’t the relationship between science and theology be more than this one-way street? Why can’t theologians and philosophers question the naturalism that dictates these purely physical “scientific” narratives, instead of intentionally blinding ourselves to the things that God has done in the universe that science can detect? If BioLogos allows us to marvel at God’s handiwork in fine-tuning the physics and chemistry of the universe (which sure looks like a setup), why must it slap God’s hand out of biology?
For all of these criticisms, this book can be helpful to those who do not or cannot question consensus science and are feeling that they cannot consider, or may have to give up, the Christian faith as a result (45–46). Stump’s synthesis is certainly preferable to rejecting Jesus and God to shift over to a merely “spiritual” or, worse, naturalistic/atheistic worldview. I wish that Stump had spent time exploring middle ground positions, such as old-Earth creationism, as there are other solutions to the “either the Bible or science” dilemma, and that he was more cautious about such a simplistic, total assimilation of evolution. Although I have concerns about what anchors his faith to keep it from capsizing, at least he shows that one can fully embrace Darwin and the gospel, albeit not with a traditional or conservative theological result.
— John A. Bloom
John A. Bloom, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Biola University. He is the founding director of the MA program in Science and Religion, where he continues to teach. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between science and faith.
NOTES
- Philip Ryken, “Inerrancy and the Patron Saint of Evangelicalism: C. S. Lewis on Holy Scripture,” Desiring God, September 28, 2013, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/inerrancy-and-the-patron-saint-of-evangelicalism-c-s-lewis-on-holy-scripture.
- Curiously, Stump argues that God probably only worked through natural causes and did not do anything miraculous to make the universe or us, because he defines miracles as “signs and wonders that testify to the Kingdom of God” and is skeptical that “God would produce signs and wonders when there weren’t any people around to appreciate them” (84). But past evidence of God’s intervention can be preserved and then discovered and appreciated by us in, say, the cosmic microwave background radiation and other artifacts from natural history, such as the sudden appearance of advanced fossils in the Cambrian explosion.
- Although Stump finds Francis Crick’s reductionist views of the mind unsatisfying, he also distances himself from dualism and seeks an “integrated view of ourselves” (155). Since he concludes his evolutionary story with “God has also taken up the ordinary products of evolution into the divine service of giving us souls” (188), I can only conclude that he takes a purely physicalist view of the soul.
- The fixation or waiting time problem is but one example: the length of time it takes for a DNA mutation in one individual to become dominant in a population of organisms that have generation times longer than a few minutes becomes exorbitant. See J. Sanford, W. Brewer, F. Smith et al., “The Waiting Time Problem in a Model Hominin Population,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling 12, no. 18 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12976-015-0016-z; and M. J. Behe and D. W. Snoke, “Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Features That Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues,” Protein Science 13, no. 10 (2004): 2651–64, https://doi.org/10.1110/ps.04802904.
- See, e.g., Ian Tattersall, “What Happened in the Origin of Human Consciousness,” The Anatomical Record 276B, no. 1 (2004): 19–26, https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.b.10041.
