God after Darwin : a theology of evolution

  One might expect from this title a book that gave the history or sociology of religion's leaders and their responses to Darwin and the subsequent theory of evolution. This is not a book like that. An excellent book of that sort is: Summer for the Gods, by Edward Larson.

  Instead, this book is a work that lays out a theology which is compatible with and informed by a version of the theory of evolution, and a Roman Catholic theology at that. Haught argues that theologies that reject evolution are themselves intrinsically bad theologies, and the fact that they conflict with evolution is a signal that they have problems that go deeper than that conflict with science.

  Haught rejects as invalid a philosophical position that one might consider reasonable: that of dualism (115). With dualism, reconciling evolution and an all-loving just God are fairly easy. The temporal world is a place of suffering. The hereafter is a place of love and justice. If life was unfair to you due to misfortune or evil, a just God can judge and make things fair in the end. As Haught points out, that line of reasoning argues that the tangible world is not always a nice place, and it is hard to reconcile the creator of this world with the just God who sorts things out in an afterlife. This line of reasoning could be summed up as: God is all-loving, but in this world, he is ineffectual. So you have to wait for an afterlife to get justice mixed with mercy and forgiveness, etc.

  Haught's solution is that this world is in continual creation, and it is evolving toward perfection. So the temporal world itself will eventually be 'saved,' though there is a lot of nastiness on the way there. He references Teilhard and Whitehead's process theology. Haught presents the idea of an infinitely loving God as being 'self-emptying' (53).

  The problem with this line of theology is that one has to soft-pedal evil. Sure there is evil in the world, but if you just take a step back, the panorama of beauty balances out the evil (136). This has the absurd conclusion that Auswitz isn't so bad as long as you can only see it from a great distance. Dualism starts to look better when you work through the implications of this position.

  What I find especially noteworthy is how this theology is not out of step with certain strands of Catholic theology going back to the Renaissance. I happened to be reading a book called *The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino*, by Kristeller. Ficino was a philosopher and physician in the 1400's. There in the text, I ran across a theological position that could have been included in this book without seeming out of place. For example, "The perfection of the world corresponds to the perfection of God" (63). "Consequently, the perfection of a thing is not given at once along with its mere existence, but in so far as each thing tends toward the fullness of being as its natural goal, it is destined from the outset for perfection and must at some time actually reach it" (64). Ficino was also focused on beauty and downplayed the existence of evil.

  So this book about post-Darwinian God is a fairly traditional Catholic theology. It is a possible, viable way to reconcile a belief in God with the results of modern science. That doesn't mean that it is the only possible theology or that it is necessarily the Right One, but it works. One just has to stomach the beautification of evil.