Making Sense of Evolution -- Review

MAKING SENSE OF EVOLUTION:  Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life.  By John F. Haught.  Louisville:  WJK Press, 2010.  144 pp.

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.

This review was originally posted at Theolog, the blog of the Christian Century

Ultimate Explanations of Design

Yesterday, I raised the possibility of seeing creation as a drama -- something that John Haught suggests.  Haught is a Catholic theologian who has a good grasp of the relationship of science and theology.  He suggests in his book Making Sense of Evolution that Charles Darwin's  Origin of the Species raises three subtexts with theological implications -- design, diversity, and descent.  He adds into that conversation other elements, the key being drama.  For a moment, however, I need to go back to the question of design.  One of the things that Haught suggests is that both the Evolutionary Naturalists and the Creationist/ID folks are arguing on the same plane -- dealing with the question of design.  Both sides seem to have the same definition of design -- that is, if God is the designer then everything should work perfectly (whatever that means).  Haught believes that if what requires is that divine design means "without flaws," then the theological proposal falls flat.  But, there are other ways of looking at this issue.  

What is important to note about Darwin is that he started his explorations with William Paley ideas of design in mind, ideas he came to reject as unworkable in practice, but there is no evidence that Darwin rejected the idea of a divine hand -- he just didn't know how it might work, which is the way it should be, at least from a scientific perspective.

The problem we face today is that there are some in the religious community that wish to answer scientific questions with religious answers.  At the same time, there are those, like Dawkins, who want to answer theological questions with science.  Haught suggests that when evolutionists want to use evolution as "an alternative to traditional theological understanding, they are not yet doing pure science." (Making Sense of Evolution, p. 17).  Evolution isn't an alternative to a theological explanation, it is a different kind of explanation all together.  He writes:

Even if they reject classic theological answers to the question of design, as they almost invariably do, they are still imprisoned by a kind of concern that is more theological than scientific.  The evidence for this confusion emerges clearly whenever evolutionists insist that it is natural selection rather than divine action that provides the ultimate explanation of design.  If they would stick to arguing that natural selection is an alternative to other proposed scientific explanations of design, biologists would remain outside the theological circle. (pp. 17-18).

Unfortunately they don't stick with scientific explanatioins -- they want to offer theological answers with natural selection serving as a theological answer.  And, as Haught notes, this simply doesn't work, because these are two different kinds of answers.  Thus, as Haught notes, even in their rejection of theology, the "evolutionary naturalists" such as Dawkins and Dennett end up talking theology, because they seem to want to offer an "ultimate" explanation that is found only in biology. 

So, the question I'd like to raise is this -- can we have a conversation in which both theology and science participate without one or the other trying to have the last word?