Making Sense of Evolution

Here’s something creationists and evolutionary naturalists agree about:
Darwin’s theory of evolution leads inevitably to atheism. John F.
Haught disagrees. In Making Sense of Evolution, he proposes that one need not choose between God and Darwin.

Haught
is most concerned with people such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel
Dennett who define faith in narrow, ultraconservative terms. He
challenges them by suggesting that one can be faithful to a religious
tradition and also open to modern science. Haught reminds those of us
who are people of faith open to evolutionary science that coexistence
doesn’t mean living in separate homes (as Stephen J. Gould suggested).

Making Sense of Evolution
invites the reader to develop a “theology of evolution.” The key to
Haught’s argument is found in the second half of the book’s subtitle:
“the Drama of Life.” Science offers one lens on reality, but it doesn’t
tell the whole story. It doesn’t offer answers to questions of meaning
or purpose or explain why people continue to believe in God. Haught
suggests that evolution is like a set of grammatical rules that guide
the telling of the story of reality but don’t define its content. As we
seek to understand this story, we also ask what role God might play in
the drama.

The traditional answer to this question is to point
to design, and no one laid out the principles of design better than
William Paley. But as Darwin himself discovered, Paley’s principles of
design were too simple, too mechanical. Haught sees reality as
involving multiple layers, one of which can be seen from the vantage
point of science. Drama is another one of the layers. In this layer,
God is not an engineer laying out the machine called life (Darwin
effectively overthrew that image) but is coming into reality from the
future, luring and beckoning life to move forward toward God’s desired
end. Of course not all the scenes are written in this scenario, for God
must adapt to the choices that are made.

A theology of evolution
offers an “ultimate reason why things are the way they are.” “It is not
in the design, diversity, and descent,” says Haught, “but in the
transformative drama of life, that theology finally makes its deepest
contact with Darwin’s science.”

Haught's theology is
process-oriented. He makes wide use of Whitehead, Hartshorne and
Tillich. He assumes that God’s involvement in the creative process is
noncoercive and synergistic. Humans play a significant role in the
evolutionary process.
Drama allows creation the freedom to work
in relationship with the creator. The process isn’t always pretty, but
do we really want a preordained, preset world that provides no
opportunity for growth or contribution from the creation? Haught
doesn’t.

If Christians wish to join in the scientific
conversation, they need resources like this one. Evolutionary science
and theology need not be done in isolation. Instead, we can see
Darwin’s theory as a spiritual gift that will further our
understandings of God in our age.