God After Darwin

One of the best books I read this year is John Haught’s God After Darwin. To me, Haught is one of the top thinkers on the intersection of faith and science working today (he’s at Georgetown). The entire book is highly insightful, but three points struck me more deeply than others.

1. Creation is incomplete, but full of God’s promise. Evolution on the cosmic and biological scale negates any idea of a past nirvanic Eden at the historical origin of creation. An ancient, evolving creation is one that is still coming into being, is not yet finished. This view is consistent with the Biblical narrative in which God is a God of promises – rather than asserting his will directly, God enters into covenants that he promises to bring to fruition over time. As Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth….eagerly waiting for our adoptions as sons.” (Romans 8:22-23). Creation is a promise – one not yet fully fulfilled.

2. A Creation fully controlled by God could not love God or be loved by God. Haught follows Tielhard de Chardin in arguing that the idea of an originally perfect creation is theologically incoherent, as is the notion of a God who controls every aspect of nature at all times. In both view, Creation would be no more than extension of God himself, perfect in every way. But if creation is merely an extension of God, if it is not something other than God, then creation will not be capable of love or of receiving love since love cannot be forced. Creation can be seen as a process of an ‘other’ coming into being, an ‘other’ whose purpose is to love and be loved by God. God himself resides in the future, at the Omega point, calling creation to himself through persuasive, self-emptying love.

3. Contingency in nature reflects God’s grace. While the idea that God is not in control of every aspect of the universe is unsettling to some, it is consistent with God’s nature as a grace-giver. The Christian God is a god who ‘lets things be’ to becoming on their own. This is reflected in the self-giving persuasive love of Jesus. A God who controls everything to reach his desired goals for nature would be inconsistent with the God Jesus reveals. Furthermore, modern science tells us that real contingency or randomness really does occur in nature, both in biological evolution as well as in quantum physics. A view of God as omni-controlling must deny the reality of this science. It seems that modern science requires an open view of God.

Of course what I love here is the synthesis of science with the Biblical narrative – how the former actually suggests the latter. But I’m afraid I cannot go all the way with Haught. For instance, Haught takes God’s removal of himself to the future to be absolute, as far as I can tell. In that case, we get a God who is nearly deistic – who does little but sit around and wait for creation to come to him. Relatedly, Haught also assumes that evil is merely a necessary consequence of the existence of true contingency in nature: if randomness exists, then the evil option will sometimes occur. That is sound reasoning, but it doesn’t go far enough: what we would actually predict with true randomness is that evil would occur just as often as good (assuming the same amount of good and evil options exist). But that doesn’t reflect the Christian experience or the facts of evolution in which evil seems to win out the vast majority of the time. There also seems to be no room here for a Satanic or demonic role in evil, something Jesus and the Biblical narrative in generally seem to take quite seriously.

Fortunately, I think it is possible to maintain Haught’s central arguments while incorporating aspects of the warfare theodicy I blogged about earlier (see the series of posts: A theological foundation for evolution, starting here.). We can imagine a God who plans to ‘let creation be,’ let it become on its own, but whose plans are interrupted by the angelic (and later human) rebellion. Recognizing creation will not progress as he planned, God sends his own angelic army from the future to do spiritual battle for the future of creation. One needn’t see this as a violation of God’s gracious nature, but rather as an effort to restore creation to its state of natural progress of becoming and being persuaded by God’s self-emptying love.