Theology
Posted Monday, October 22, 2007
A Theology of Evolution
by Bishop Borsch
“Any thoughts we may have about God after the life and work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) can hardly remain the same as before.”
With these words John F. Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University and director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Sciences and Religion, introduces his book, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. In conversation and debate with the anti-theistic evolutionary materialist (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett), fundamentalist and “conservative thinkers who deny or minimize revolutionary understandings, liberals who may too glibly say they accept evolutionary theory without thinking through its implications, and those who would keep religion and scientific thought in separate spheres,” Haught presents a theology of evolution informed by the broadly accepted claims of modern Darwinian theory.
Natural theology (especially one that leaves out the roles of novelty and oddity), and theological hierarchy that places humankind above the rest of creation, the problems of evil, and basis of morality, creation and eschatology are all issues that must be rethought. Beliefs or theories about intelligent design need to be profoundly re-examined in the light of awareness that the processes of natural selection over eons of time can explain what once was understood (e.g. the development of the eye, the brain) to be the product of “skyhooks.”
Nor, we may add, are these matters just for academic theologians. Evolutionary understandings have influenced common thinking. “Survival of the fittest” views have had their effects on morality, economics and social policy. The pastor dealing with the very human circumstances of suffering and evil does so in a world which, many would say, is controlled by impersonal physical laws in an indifferent and inherently meaningless process.
Haught continues in his preface: “Evolutionary science has changed our understanding of the world dramatically, and so any sense we may have of a God who creates and cares for this world must take into account what Darwin and his followers have told us about it. Although Darwin himself beheld a certain ‘grandeur’ in his new story of life, many of his scientific descendants, instead of taking his widening of the world’s horizons as a springboard to a more exhilarating vision of God, have seen in evolution the final defeat of theism. Meanwhile, theology has generally failed to think about God in a manner proportionate to the opulence of evolution.”
“A theology obsessed with order is ill-prepared for evolution,” Haught writes later in his work. “But it is even less ready to embrace some of the more profound and disturbing aspects of religious experience itself, thus rendering it all the less capable of meaningful contact with the messiness of evolution. What makes evolution seem incompatible with the idea of God is not so much the startling Darwinian news about nature’s struggle and strife, but theology’s own failure to reflect deeply the divine pathos. What Darwin does – and this is part of his ‘gift to theology’ – is challenge religious thought to recapture the tragic aspects of divine creativity. Evolutionary science compels theology to reclaim features of religious faith that are all too easily smothered by the deadening disguise of order and design.”
Throughout his book, Haught prods and probes as he offers insight into ways in which a theology that includes evolutionary understanding may become richer and more profound. ”...(Darwin’s) science, when not suffocated by the stale climate of a materialist metaphysics, can give considerable depth and richness to our sense of the great mystery into which our religious attempt to initiate us” (p.5).
“In any case, the notion of God as an intelligent designer is inadequate. The God of evolution is an inexhaustible and unsettling source of new modes of being, forever eluding incapsulation in orderly schemata. Looking beneath the anxious quest for intelligent design, a theology of evolution seeks to highlight the disquieting – but ultimately fulfilling – presence of a promise and power of renewal that lives, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ familiar words, ‘deep down things’” (p.9).
“God’s empathy enfolds not just the human sphere but the whole of creation, and this can mean only that the vast evolutionary odyssey, with all of its travail, enjoyment, and creativity, is also God’s own travail, enjoyment, and creativity. Nothing that occurs in evolution can appropriately be understood by faith and theology as taking place outside of God’s own experience” (p. 51).
“Nature, after Darwin, is not a design but a promise. God’s ‘plan’ if we continue to use the term, is not a blueprint but an envisagement of what the cosmos might become…Such an interpretation does not destroy the cosmic hierarchy but by its openness to new being brings special significance to every epoch of nature’s unfolding, including humanity’s unique history in a still unfinished universe.”
NOTE: A Theology of Evolution was first written as a ‘think piece’ for the clergy of the Diocese of Los Angles and collected in my book The Magic Word: Stirrings and Stories of Faith and Ministry (Cathedral Center Press, 2001). Recently John Haught came to The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia to give two lectures on evolution, theology and related topics. His God After Darwin is now available in a 2007 paperback. He has since also written Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution (2003); Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science (2006) and, more popularly, Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution (2001). Among other books dealing with these issues, I have found especially helpful Holmes Rolston III and his Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History (1999).
Then, in added reflection, I wrote:
The Play
The ordered stage we were told to watch,
with chance the outlaw actor,
while now we see in every scene
the accidental factor.
Without random’s role then stasis’ rule
would have creation frozen;
as surely it’s necessity
upholding all that’s chosen
Not only once, but at every edge,
as chaos threatens ever,
bits link, shape life, they end and eat
where strange attractors gather.
There’s tense interplay among the ways,
in the flow to entropy,
mere principles in subtle sets
gender vast complexity.
And in the joining, in the struggle,
as the smarter, stronger form,
in the suffering, in the learning,
perilous beauty is born.