A Theology Foundation for Evolution? Part I

After a long hiatus on this blog (during which time our second son was born!), I hope to come back now with a bit of a bang, or at least an ambitious goal. It’s obvious that I don’t see any conflict between accepting that some version of evolution must be the way that life on our planet came to be, and that the Bible is God’s Word. In this I’m in pretty good company amongst scientists, I think, as recent books by Francis Collins and Darrell Falk make clear. But even arriving at this conclusion is a bit uneasy for me. As a scientist, I don’t just want things to be compatible, I want them to be related, to actually follow from one another in some sense. Otherwise, there is always going to be a bigger picture that eludes us. Like every scientist, I want a Theory of Everything.

Underlying the "compatibility approach" of Collins and Falk is Gould's proposal that science and religion are Non-Overlapping Magesteria (NOMA), the idea that science and religion are two distinct domains of knowledge and that the tools appropriate for teaching and research in one domain are not applicable in the other. But theologies are, in a sense, theories of everything since they concern the understanding of creation itself. So while it is true that we cannot use the tools of science in the domain of theology, we can legitimately ask the question: where might evolution fit into theology? Is there some theological gap that an evolutionary answer to life might fill? Is there a theological question that begs an evolutionary answer? I think that the answer is 'yes,' but only within a specific theological understanding of creation. I'll detail this in the next post.