AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion

Does Evolution Rule Out God's Existence?
JOHN F. HAUGHT, Ph.D.
Georgetown University

THE FOLLOWING IS TAKEN IN ADAPTED AND ABBREVIATED FORM FROM JOHN F. HAUGHT, SCIENCE AND RELIGION: FROM CONFLICT TO CONVERSATION (MAHWAH AND NEW YORK: PAULIST PRESS, 1995), PP. 47-71.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his famous treatise on "evolution." It is one of the most important books of science ever written, and experts today still consider it to be largely accurate. Theologically speaking, it caused a fierce storm of controversy, and we are still wrestling with the question of what to make of it. Does Darwin's theory perhaps put the final nail in religion's coffin? Or can there be a fruitful encounter of religion with evolutionary thought?

For many scientists evolution means that the universe is fundamentally impersonal. In fact, the physicist Steven Weinberg asserts that evolution refutes the idea of an "interested" God much more decisively than physics does. (1) Only a brief look at Darwin's theory will show why it disturbs the traditional religious belief in a loving and powerful God.

Darwin observed that all living species produce more offspring than ever reach maturity. Nevertheless, the number of individuals in any given species remains fairly constant, which means that there must be a very high rate of mortality. To explain why some survive and others do not, Darwin noted that the individuals of any species are not all identical: some are better "adapted" to their environment than others. It appears that the most "fit" are the ones that survive to produce offspring. Most individuals and species lose out in the struggle for existence, but during the long journey of evolution there emerge the staggering diversity of life, millions of new species, and eventually the human race.

What, then, is so theologically disturbing about the theory? What is there about evolution that places in question even the very existence of God? It can be summarized in three propositions:

1. The variations that lead to differentiation of species are purely random, thus suggesting that the workings of nature are "accidental" and irrational. Today the source of these variations has been identified as genetic mutations. Most biologists today follow Darwin in attributing them to "chance."

 2. The fact that individuals have to struggle for survival, and that most of them suffer and lose out in this contest, points to the basic cruelty of the universe, particularly toward the weak.

3. The mindless process of natural selection by which only the better adapted organisms survive suggests that the universe is essentially blind and indifferent to life and humanity.

These three ingredients--randomness, struggle, and blind natural selection--seem to confirm the strong impression of many scientific skeptics today that the universe is impersonal, utterly unrelated to any "interested" God. Darwin himself, reflecting on the "cruelty," randomness, and impersonality in evolution, could never again return to the benign theism of his ancestral Anglicanism. Though he did not casually forsake his religious faith, many of his scientific heirs have been much less hesitant to equate evolution with atheism.

From the middle of the last century up until today prominent thinkers have welcomed Darwinian ideas as the final victory of skepticism over religion. T. H. Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog" as he was known, thought evolution was antithetical to traditional theism. Ernst Haeckel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud all found Darwin's thought congenial to their atheism. And numerous others in our own time closely associate evolution with unbelief. Given this coalition of evolution and hostility to theism it is hardly surprising that the idea has encountered so much resistance from some religious groups.

 Is the Darwinian--or now the "neo-Darwinian"--picture of evolution compatible with religion, and if it is, in what sense? Answers to this question fall into four distinct groups.

I. The "Conflict" Position

Both scientific skeptics and biblically literalist "creationists" maintain that Darwinian evolution inevitably conflicts with religion. Skeptics find in evolution a most compelling basis for rejecting theism in particular. The three features of chance, struggle and blind natural selection seem so antithetical to any conceivable notion of divine providence or design that it is hard for them to understand how any scientifically educated person could still believe in God.

Richard Dawkins, the renowned British zoologist, presents this "conflict" position handily. (2) His thesis is that chance and natural selection, aided by immensely long periods of time, are enough to account for all the diverse species of life, including ourselves. Why would we need to invoke the idea of God if chance and natural selection alone can account for all of the creativity in the story of life? Before Darwin it may have been difficult to find definitive reasons for atheism. The order or patterning in nature seemed to beg for a supernatural explanation, and so the design argument for God's existence may have been plausible then. But this, Dawkins claims, is no longer the case. Evolutionary theory, brought up to date by the discoveries of molecular biology, has demolished the divine designer that most educated people believed in before the middle of the last century. Evolution has once and for all purged any remaining intellectual respectability from the idea of God. (3)

 In his book Natural Theology which set forth the standard academic and theological wisdom of the early nineteenth century, William Paley had compared nature to a watch. If you chanced upon a watch lying alone on the ground, he wrote, and then examined its intricate structure, you could not help concluding that it had been made by an intelligent designer. It couldn't possibly be the product of mere chance. And yet, the natural world exhibits much more complex order than any watch. Thus, Paley concluded, there has to be an intelligent designer responsible for nature's fine arrangement. This designer, of course, would be none other than the Creator God of biblical religion.

 But Dawkins argues that the divine designer is no longer needed:

Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between . . . watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in the mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. (4)

Even though David Hume and other philosophers had already severely battered the design argument for God's existence, Dawkins thinks that only Darwin's theory of natural selection provided a fully convincing refutation of natural theology. "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."(5)

 The order and design in nature may seem on the surface to point to a divine "watchmaker" who devised its intricate parts. But evolution, the skeptic will insist, has allowed us to look beneath the deceptive surface of nature's orderly arrangements. The pattern and design that seem so wonderfully miraculous to the scientifically illiterate can now be fully accounted for by Darwin's impersonal theory of evolution. The theory rules out any proper appeal to the God-hypothesis. If there is a watchmaker at all, it is not divine intelligence but blind natural selection that has put the parts of nature so wonderfully together over the course of billions of years of trial and error. The aimless forces of evolution are sufficient to explain all the marvels of life and mind.

Clearly it is this reading of evolution that leads so many religious opponents of Darwin to adopt the "creationist" position. Creationists agree with skeptics that evolution is incompatible with the idea of a Creator. One version of creationism known as "scientific creationism" or "creation science," rejects evolutionary theory as scientifically unsound, and offers the Bible as an alternative "scientific" theory.(6) On the surface scientific creationists seem to embrace scientific method. And they argue on the basis of the paucity of intermediary forms in the fossil record that the biblical account provides a "scientific" hypothesis more suited to the actual data of geology, biology and paleontology than does Darwinian science.

Most scientists reply, however, that "creation science" is really not science at all. It does not seriously accept the self-revising method required by true science, nor does it acknowledge that the gaps in the fossil record might be compatible with other, revised versions of evolutionary theory, such as that of "punctuated equilibrium" proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge.(7) Creation science, they argue, would not even be worth discussing were it not for the fact that its devotees stir up so much public controversy in their attempts to keep evolutionary theory out of schools and textbooks.

II. The "Contrast" Response

A second response to the question of whether theology is possible after Darwin, argues that since science and religion are such disparate or "contrasting" ways of looking at the world that they cannot meaningfully compete with each other. This means that evolution, which may be quite accurate as a scientific theory, bears not the slightest threat toward religion. This position rejects both "scientific creationism" and scientific skepticism, both of which posit a conflict between evolution and religion. It would argue as follows:

So-called "scientific creationism" is objectionable in the first place because from the point of view of good science it refuses to look at the relevant data. The scientific evidence in favor of evolution is overwhelming. Although evolutionary theory is certainly not unrevisable, this does not mean that the world and life did not evolve, at least approximately along Darwinian lines. In the second place, scientific creationism is theologically embarrassing. It trivializes religion by artificially imposing scientific expectations on a mythic-symbolic text. It completely misses the Bible's religious point by placing the text of Genesis in the same arena with science, as an alternative "scientific" account. Creationism thus subverts the deeper meaning of the biblical account of creation, its covenantal motifs, its fundamental message that the universe is a gift and that the appropriate human response to this gift is gratitude and trust. Creationism turns a sacred text into a mundane treatise to be placed in competition with scientific attempts to explain things.

If our primary question to the Bible is one of scientific curiosity about cosmic beginnings or the origins of life, we will surely miss its real intentions. Since the text was composed in a prescientific age, its primary meaning cannot be unfolded in the idiom of twentieth century science. But that is exactly the demand put upon the Bible by scientific creationism. Needless to say, such an expectation ends up shriveling to prosaic dust a collection of deeply religious writings designed to open us to the ultimate mystery of the universe.

In the third place, scientific creationism is historically anachronistic. Creationists ironically situate the ancient biblical writings within the time-conditioned framework of modern science. They refuse to take into account the social, cultural and historical conditions in which the books of the Bible were fashioned over a period of two millennia. In doing so they close their eyes to modern historical awareness of the time-sensitive nature of all human consciousness, including that expressed in the sacred texts of religion. They are unable to discern the different types of literary genre--symbolic, mythic, devotional, poetic, legendary, historical, creedal, confessional etc.--that make up the Bible. And so they fail to read the scriptures in their proper context.

In spite of these problems, however, the contrast approach can entertain a certain empathy with the phenomenon of creationism. Creationism may be an unfortunate symptom of the much wider effort by traditionally religious people to cope with modernity. At heart creationists and other fundamentalists are sincerely and understandably troubled by the failings of the post-Enlightenment world. They deplore the breakdown of authority, the diminishment of "virtue," the absence of common purpose, the loss of a sense of absolute values, and the banishing of a sense of sacred mystery from our experience. For many creationists the notion of "evolution" sums up all the evils and emptiness of secularistic modernity. Creationism, in other words, is responding to something much more complex than the conflict between religion and science.

Moreover, according to our second approach, the phenomenon of creationism points to serious problems in the way science has been presented to the public by some of our most prominent scientific writers. These scientists also indulge in a conflation of science with belief: they unnecessarily fuse valuable scientific data with the ideology of "scientific materialism" which is antithetical to any religious perspective. Scientists of the stature of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins, just to name a few, offer the theory of evolution already snugly wrapped up in the alternative "religion" of scientism and materialism. So, in a sense, creationism is an understandable, though ineffective, reaction to an alternative conflation of science and belief.

Scientific materialists, as the contrast position contends, generally write about evolution as though it were inherently anti-theistic. In doing so they uncritically accept the assumptions of secularistic ideology and culture. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has stated that the reason so many people cannot accept Darwin's ideas is that, in his opinion, evolution is inseparable from a "philosophical" message, namely, materialism. He writes:

If one is to accept evolution, Gould implies, one must first embrace materialism. Like many other scientists today, and in spite of serious disagreements with fellow Darwinians, he clearly approves of the alliance of materialist assumptions and evolutionary theory. But this merger seems no less illustrative of the conflation of science with a belief system than is scientific creationism. In both instances it is the (con)fusion of science with ideology that paves the way to conflict.

In order to avoid this kind of confusion the "contrast" approach consistently maintains a clear distinction between science and belief systems, whether the latter are religious or materialist. A contrast approach seeks to liberate science from all ideology. Consequently it insists that evolutionary thinking is not in a position to tell us anything about God, nor can religious experience shed any significant light on evolution. Theology, moreover, should stick to its task of opening us up to religious experience, and scientists should stick to science, steering clear of the kind of ideological propaganda that Gould exemplifies. Evolution is a purely scientific theory that need not be cast in materialist terms. It is not evolution itself, but the materialist spin some scientists put on evolution, that is incompatible with religion. When it is stripped of its materialist covering evolutionary theory in no way contradicts theism.

This is how the contrast position seeks to make room for theology after Darwin. But, one might ask, can evolution really be extricated from materialist dogma? What about those theologically troubling aspects of Darwinian theory: chance, the struggle for survival and impersonal natural selection? Do they not refute theism and require a materialist interpretation? Without getting bogged down in theological conjecture here, the contrast approach is content to show that none of these three items necessarily contradicts theism.

In the first place, the "chance" character of the variations which natural selection chooses for survival may just as easily be accounted for as the product of human ignorance. The apparent randomness of what we today call genetic mutations could be a mere illusion resulting from the limitedness of our perspective. Religions claim, after all, that any purely human angle of vision is always exceedingly narrow. Hence, what appears to be absurd chance from a purely scientific perspective could be quite rational and coherent from that of an infinite Wisdom.

Second, evolutionist complaints about the struggle, suffering, waste and cruelty of natural process add absolutely nothing new to the basic problem of evil of which religion has always been quite fully apprised. The Bible, for example, has surely heard of Job and the crucifixion of Jesus, and yet it proclaims the paradoxical possibility of faith and hope in God in spite of all evil and suffering. One might even argue that faith has no intensity or depth unless it is a leap into the unknown in the face of such absurdity. Faith, according to this contrast theology--which habitually appeals to thinkers like Soren Kierkegaard--is always faith "in spite of" all the objective difficulties that defy reason and science.

Finally, there is no more theological difficulty in the remorseless law of natural selection, which is said to be impersonal and blind, than in the laws of inertia, gravity or any other impersonal aspects of science. Gravity, like natural selection, has no regard for our inherent personal dignity either. It pulls toward earth the weak and powerful alike--at times in a deadly way. But very few thinkers have ever insisted that gravity is an argument against God's existence. Perhaps natural selection should be viewed in the same way.

Moreover, the contrast approach also rejects Paley's narrowly conceived "natural theology" since it seeks to know God independently of God's self-revelation. Nature itself provides evidence neither for nor against God's existence. Something so momentous as the reality of God can hardly be decided by a superficial scientific deciphering of the natural world. Hence religion should in no way be troubled by evolutionary theory. 

III. The "Contact" Approach

A third repose to our question about the prospects for theology after Darwin is not content with the standoff endorsed by the contrast position just summarized. It allows that the contrast approach has the merit at least of shattering the facile fusion of faith and science that underlies most instances of apparent conflict. Its sharp portrayal of the ideological biases in both creationism and evolutionism is very helpful. Contrast may be an essential step in the process of thinking clearly and fruitfully about the relationship of evolution to religion.

But for many scientists and religious thinkers the contrast approach does not go nearly far enough. Evolution is more than just another innocuous scientific theory that theology can innocently ignore. Theologians need to do more than just show that evolution does not contradict theism. Evolution, according to what may be called the "contact" position, is a most appropriate framework in which to express the true meaning of theistic faith. The "contact" approach would go something like this:

Evolutionary science deepens not only our understanding of the cosmos but also of God. Unfortunately, many theologians have still not faced the fact that we live in a world after and not before Darwin, and that an evolving cosmos looks a lot different from the world-pictures in which most religious thought was born and nurtured. If it is to survive in the intellectual climate of today, therefore, our theology requires fresh expression in evolutionary terms. When we think about God in the post-Darwinian period we cannot have exactly the same thoughts that Augustine, Aquinas, or for that matter our grandparents and parents had. Today we need to recast all of theology in evolutionary terms.

In fact, evolution is an absolutely essential ingredient in our thinking about God today. As the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng puts it, evolutionary theory now makes possible: 1) a deeper understanding of God--not above or outside the world but in the midst of evolution; 2) a deeper understanding of creation--not as contrary to but as making evolution possible; and 3) a deeper understanding of humans as organically related to the entire cosmos.(9)

Skeptics, of course, will immediately ask how theology can reconcile the idea of God with the role of chance in life's evolution. This is a crucial question, and the contrast position's casual conjecture that chance may not really exist is unsatisfactory. In fact, chance is quite real. It is a concrete fact in evolution, but it is not one that contradicts the idea of God. On the contrary, an aspect of indeterminacy is just what we should expect if, as religion maintains, God is love. For love never coerces. It allows the beloved--in this case the entire created cosmos--to be or to become itself. If, as theistic religious tradition has always insisted, God really cares for the well-being of the world, then the world has to be something other than God. It has to have a certain amount of "freedom" or autonomy. If it did not somehow exist on its own it would be nothing more than an extension of God's own being, and hence it would not be a world unto itself. So there has to be room for indeterminacy in the universe, and the randomness in evolution is one instance of it.

In other words, if the world is to be something distinct from God it must have scope for meandering about, for experimenting with different ways of existing. In their relative freedom from divine coercion, some of the world's evolutionary experiments may work and others may not. But divine love does not crudely interfere. It risks allowing the cosmos to exist in relative liberty. In the unfolding of life, the world's inherent quality of being uncompelled manifests itself in the form of "contingent" occurrences in natural history (as Stephen Gould insightfully emphasizes), or in the random variations or genetic mutations that comprise the raw material of evolution. Thus a certain amount of chance is not at all opposed to the idea of God.

A God of love influences the world in a persuasive rather than coercive way, and this is why chance and evolution occur. It is because God is involved with the world in a loving rather than domineering way that the world evolves.(10) If God were a magician or a dictator, then we might expect the universe to be finished all at once and remain eternally unchanged. If God controlled the world rigidly instead of willing its independence, we might not expect the weird organisms of the Cambrian explosion, the later dinosaurs and reptiles, or the many other wild creatures that seem so alien to us. We would want our divine magician to build the world along the lines of our own narrowly human sense of clean perfection. But what a pallid and impoverished world that would be. It would lack all the drama, diversity, adventure and intense beauty that evolution has produced. It might have a listless harmony to it, but it would have none of the novelty, contrast, danger, upheavals, and grandeur that evolution has in fact brought about over billions of years.

According to the contact position, God is not a magician but a creator.(11) And this God is much more interested in promoting freedom and adventure than in preserving the status quo. Since divine creative love has the character of letting things be, we should not be too surprised at evolution's strange and erratic pathways. The long struggle of the universe to arrive at life, consciousness, and culture is consonant with faith's conviction that love never forces but always allows for the play of freedom, risk and adventure.

Love even gives the beloved a share in the creative process. Might it not be because God wants the world to partake of the divine joy of creating novelty, that it is left unfinished, and that it is invited to be, at least to some degree, self-creative? And if it is self-creative can we be too disconcerted that it has experimented with the many different, delightful, baffling and bizarre forms that we find in the fossil record and in the diversity of life that surrounds us now?

Ever since Darwin scientists have found out things about the natural world that may not be consistent with an innocent notion of divine design such as the one proposed by Paley and lampooned by Dawkins. But the new discoveries of an evolving cosmic story correspond very well with the self-giving humility of the God of religious experience, a God who wishes to share the divine creative life with all creatures, and not just humans. Such a God renounces any will to control the process of creation and gives to creatures a significant role, indeed a partnership, in the ongoing evolution of the world. Such a gracious self-giving love would be quite consistent with a world open to all the surprises that pertain to evolution.

In summary, the "hypothesis" of God, taken in consort with (and not as an alternative to) evolutionary theory, can help account for the complexity and consciousness that evolution has brought about. God may be thought of as the transcendent source not only of the order in the universe but also of the novelty and turbulence that evolution has brought with it. God creates by inviting (not forcing) the cosmos to express itself in increasingly more diverse ways. As novelty comes into the evolving world, the present order has to give way. And what we confusedly refer to as "chance" and "chaos" may be the result of the breakdown of present arrangements of order in the wake of novelty's coming into the world.

The ultimate origin of evolutionary novelty is God. God's will, in this version of the contact approach, is the maximization of novelty and diversity. And since the introduction of novelty and diversity is what turns the cosmos into a world of beauty, we may say that the God of evolution is a God who wants nothing less than the ongoing enhancement of cosmic beauty. Thus an evolutionary picture of the cosmos, with all of its craziness and serendipitous wanderings, corresponds quite well with the biblical understand of an adventurous and loving God as the One "who makes all things new."(12)

However, God's role in evolution is not only that of being the stimulus that stirs the cosmos toward deeper novelty and beauty. Religious faith claims that the same God who creates also promises to save the world from suffering and death. This would mean that the whole history of cosmic evolution, in all its detail and incredible breadth, is permanently taken into God's loving memory. The suffering of the innocent and the weak, highlighted so clearly by evolutionary thought, becomes inseparable from the divine eternity. Theology cannot tolerate a deity who merely creates and then abandons the world. God is intimately involved in the evolutionary process and struggles along with all beings, participating in both their pain and enjoyment, ultimately redeeming the world so that nothing in its long evolution is ever completely forgotten or lost.(13)

This is only a brief sampling of how some contemporary theology is now being transformed by its encounter with evolutionary science. Many varieties of evolutionary theology exist today, and the "contact" position summarized in this section is just a small fragment of the rethinking going on in theology after Darwin. According to this third response, it is regrettable that so much contemporary religious thought goes the way of creationism or contrast. Although evolutionary theology is inevitably in need of constant revision--and prudence requires that theology avoid enshrining for all time any particular version of it--a number of theologians consider evolution to be at least provisionally the most appropriate and fruitful framework within which to think about God today.

IV. Confirmation 

A fourth approach goes even further than the contact position in establishing the close connection between theism and evolution. It argues that biblical religion with its distinctive notion of God provides much of the soil in which Darwinian ideas have taken root in the first place. (14) In this sense, religion can be said to support or "confirm" the evolutionary picture of nature, not by providing any additional scientific information--which is not religion's function anyway--but by providing part of the general picture of reality which has made evolutionary science historically possible.

For example, evolutionary theory could hardly have originated and thrived outside of a cultural context shaped by the specifically biblical picture of the nature of time rooted ultimately in a very particular understanding of God. The Bible understands time in terms of God's bringing about a new and surprising future. When through biblical faith some people became aware of a promise offered by a God who appears out of the future, they began to experience time in a new way. As the promised new creation beckoned them, they no longer felt the compulsion to return to a golden age in the past. Time became directional and irreversible at a very deep level of their awareness. And even when the idea of God dropped out of the intellectual picture of the cosmos in the modern period, the feeling of time as directional and irreversible remained deeply lodged in western sensibilities, including that of secular scientists. But it was an originally biblical perception of temporality that made it possible for science to embrace an evolutionary picture of the universe.

In contrast to this linear-historical sensitivity, the argument continues, most non-biblical religions and cultures have understood time as a repeating circle. Time's destiny, in both primal and Eastern religious traditions, is not something radically new, but instead a return to the purity and simplicity of cosmic origins. The Bible's emphasis on God as the source of a radically new future, on the other hand, breaks open the ancient cycle of time. It calls the whole cosmos, through the mediation of human hope, to look forward in a more linear way for the coming of God's kingdom, either in the indefinite future or at the end of time.

According to our fourth approach, therefore, it is only on the template of this stretched out view of irreversible duration that evolutionary ideas could ever have taken shape. Even though evolution does not have to imply a vulgar notion of "progress," it still seems to have required an irreversible, future-oriented understanding of time as its matrix. This view of time, the confirmation position claims, originally came out of a religious experience of reality as promise.

However, there may be an even deeper way in which faith in God nourishes the idea of evolution. The central idea of theistic religion, as the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (among others) has clarified, is that the Infinite pours itself out in love to the finite universe. This is the fundamental meaning of "revelation." But if we think carefully about this central religious teaching it should lead us to conclude that any universe related to the inexhaustible self-giving love of God must be an evolving one. For if God is infinite love giving itself to the cosmos, then the finite world cannot possibly receive this limitless abundance of graciousness in any single instant. In response to the outpouring of God's boundless love the universe would be invited to undergo a process of self-transformation. In order to "adapt" to the divine infinity the finite cosmos would likely have to intensify its own capacity to receive such an abounding love. In other words, it might endure what we now know scientifically as an arduous, tortuous and dramatic evolution.(15)

Viewed in this light, the evolution of the cosmos is more than just "compatible" with theism. Faith in a God of self-giving love, it would not be too much to say, actually anticipates an evolving universe. It may be very difficult to reconcile the religious teaching about God's infinite love with any other kind of cosmos.

NOTES

1. Weinberg, pp. 246-49. (Return to Text)

2. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986); River Out of Eden and Climbing Mount Improbable (Return to Text)

3. Ibid., p. 6. (Return to Text)

4. Ibid., p. 5. (Return to Text)

5. Ibid., p. 6. (Return to Text)

6. Duane Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon: Creation-LIfe Publishers, 1985). (Return to Text)

7. See Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria (London: Heinemann, 1986). (Return to Text)

8. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 12-13. (Return to Text)

9. Hans Küng, Does God Exist, trans. by Edward Quinn (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 347. (Return to Text)

10. For a discussion of this approach see John F. Haught, The Promise of Nature (New York: Paulist Press, 1993.) (Return to Text)

11. See L. Charles Birch, Nature and God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), p. 103. (Return to Text)

12. For a development of these ideas, many of which are suggested by Alfred North Whitehead, see John F. Haught, The Cosmic Adventure (New York: Paulist Press, 1984). (Return to Text)

13. These ideas are elucidated especially by what is called "process theology." See John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.) (Return to Text)

14. See, for example, Ernst Benz, Evolution and Christian Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966). (Return to Text)

15. See Karl Rahner, S.J., Hominization, trans. W.J. O'Hara (New York: Herder & Herder, 1965). (Return to Text)